Thomas Cahill was born in Round Mountain in 1914 to a long-time mining family and spent his summers mining as he got older. He attended the University of Nevada’s Mackay School of Mines and after graduation lived a common miner’s life of moving from place to place every few years. His many jobs included assassying and mill construction for mercury mining, a brief stint at the Nevada Bureau of Mines, and working for Basic Refractories in Gabbs. Cahill was interviewed by Victoria Ford in 1999. But the essential difference between metallic mining and nonmetallic is that in the metal field you have a price for the metal and you know exactly what you have to do—you have to mine and process below that price to make a profit. In the nonmetallic field you don’t have any set prices, but it’s a highly competitive industry. A lot of the non-metallics are highly competitive—and magnesium, which we were working with, is a notable one—but you have competition on a world-wide basis. A lot of companies go to foreign countries where they don’t have to pay so much in the form of wages and so forth, and then competition is always in front of you in this type of endeavor. Also, what we had happened to be a deposit in nature; it was in dolomitic host rock. (That’s dolomite.) And we had the only deposit of any size in the United States, but the competition in the United States itself came from seawater plants. Magnesia is very readily recovered from seawater, and eventually we got into the ownership of a seawater plant down in Florida. With magnesium, the ore is magnesite. And magnesite is magnesium carbonate, but, in practically all forms of use, it’s converted to magnesium oxide. When I first started with Basic [Magnesium], the main use for it was in high-temperature firebricks, principally, in the steel and copper industries and lead. But there became a wider variety of uses over the years, and, notably the wood-pulping industry used it very widely, and it was also used in insulation materials. We used to ship any number of products out of Gabbs, generally in bags but sometimes in bulk, to different industries. It’s even used in the chemical industry, and in the medical industry as milk of magnesia—and we did furnish some to the Phillips Milk of Magnesia Company—but that’s very high grade, a pure product. You have to go through a lot of processing to get that pure. |