A Record of the Early Years of Waldemar Lindgren
(1878-1882) at the Freiberg Mining Academy, Germany
Contributed by Mark Hannington, Peter Herzig, Ian Jonasson and Thomas Monecke,
with details from a variety of published sources.
Special thanks to Hans Hofmann, Director of the Freiberg University Archives.
As published in the SEG Newsletter, Issue No. 43, October 2000
Circa 1878. General George Custer has just lost the battle of the Little Big Horn.
Mark Twain publishes the Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Gold is discovered in the Black
Hills of South Dakota. Waldemar Lindgren arrives at the Freiberg Mining Academy.
Waldemar Lindgren is widely recognized as one of the founders of modern economic
geology. Many of the basic theories and classifications of mineral deposits used
today were first published in his landmark textbook entitled Mineral Deposits. In
1905, he also led the group that established the journal of Economic Geology. Lindgren
eventually published more than 30 papers in the journal, beginning with volume 1.
Lindgren received his early training in geology at the Freiberg Mining Academy between
1878 and 1882. Founded in 1765, the Freiberg Academy is the world's oldest mining
school. It is situated in the heart of the Ag-Pb-Sn mining district of Erzgebirge
(Ore Mountains) in Saxony. Silver was first mined extensively in the region in 1168,
and this led to the gradual industrialization of the area and the establishment
of a mining center in the medieval city of Freiberg (from Freyen Berge, meaning
"free mining"). The Mining Academy was established, at the suggestion of the general
mining commissioner of the region, to provide practical training in geology, mining,
and metallurgy. It remains one of Germany' s most important postsecondary research
institutions.
The original buildings of the institution are enclosed by the inner walls of the
city and include the administrative center and the Institute of Mineralogy. The
institute houses a large, permanent mineral collection that is among the oldest
and best in the world. The emphasis of the early mining school was on engineering,
and many of the teaching implements are preserved in the Academy museum. These include
an amazing collection of handcrafted working models of underground mining operations
and equipment from the past 200 years (steam engines, stamp mills, pumps, etc.).
Students received training in the local mines, one of which was taken over by the
Academy in 1919 and is now maintained as teaching facility (Himmelsfahrt Fundgrube).
One of the features of the older buildings is a detention cell for unruly students.
Cited offenses included laughing aloud at the opera or hurling insults at the city's
lamplighters. There is no record of Lindgren ever having spent time in the cell.
A key figure in the founding of the Academy was Abraham Gottloeb Werner (1749-1817).
Werner was professor of mineralogy and mining engineering beginning in 1775 and
was famous for his theory of Neptunism - the idea that water was the source of most
rocks, and particularly, basalt. Application of this theory to ore genesis dominated
the thinking on mineral deposits at the time and was not seriously challenged until
James Hutton introduced the theory of Plutonism in 1788. Other well known professors
at the Academy were Carl Friedrich Mohs (1818-1826) and Johann Friedrich Breithaupt
(1826-1866). Albin Julius Weisbach succeeded Breithaupt in 1866 and taught mineralogy
and crystallography during Lindgren' s tenure.
By the time Lindgren attended Freiberg, it was already a 100-year-old institution,
attracting students from across Europe and the Americas. The Academy's graduates
included the famous natural scientist Alexander von Humboldt (1791) and the geochemist
Victor Moritz Goldschmidt (1871-1874), whom Lindgren must have just missed. The
records of its former students are housed in the extensive archives of the Mining
Academy.
The courses being offered in 1878 were similar to many of those in engineering programs
being offered in universities today. The record shows that Lindgren had a special
command of the sciences, and especially of chemistry and engineering (his performance
in law and economics seems to have been less impressive). Lindgren's strong background
in chemistry was established in courses by Hieronymous Theodor Richter, then Rector
of the Academy, and by Clemens Winkler. Richter and his colleague Ferdinand Reich
were well known for their discovery of indium in sphalerite from one of Freiberg's
silver mines in 1863. Winkler gained recognition in 1886 for the discovery of germanium,
which he separated from the mineral argyrodite collected from the nearby Himmelsfahrt
silver mine. His laboratory is still preserved as a museum across the street from
the Institute for Mineralogy.
The courses by Alfred Wilhelm Stelzner on economic geology and petrology no doubt
influenced Lindgren's career path. Stelzner emphasized the application of the petrographic
microscope to the study of rocks and minerals. He was also one of the main critics
of the then popular theory of lateral secretion in the formation of ore deposits.
Stelzner promoted the idea that hydrothermal fluids and their dissolved metals were
derived from deep-seated igneous sources - something that Lindgren later established
in his landmark paper of 1901, "Metasomatic processes in fissure veins."
Lindgren graduated from the Freiberg Academy as a mining engineer in 1882, having
completed 53 courses. Before leaving Freiberg, he published his first two scientific
papers on mineral deposits, which dealt with the mineralogy of the Langban deposits
of Sweden.
An excellent account of Lindgren's subsequent career is given by L.C. Graton (1933)
in the AIME Lindgren Volume, Ore Deposits of the Western States. Following graduation,
Lindgren remained in Freiberg for another year and undertook graduate work in metallurgy
and chemistry. In June 1883, he sailed to America and joined the North Transcontinental
Survey, which was engaged in building the Northern Pacific railway from St. Paul
to Portland, Oregon. After a brief period as a mining engineer and metallurgist
at Helena, Montana, and later at Anaconda, Lindgren joined the U.S. Geological Survey
in late 1884. For more than 25 years, he carried out extensive field studies of
the mineral deposits on the western United States, eventually becoming Chief Geologist
of the Survey. In 1912, Lindgren became professor and head of the Department of
Geology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The first edition of Mineral
Deposits appeared shortly thereafter. Four editions of the textbook were eventually
published, in 1913,1919,1928 and 1933.