Engineering and Mining Journal - Whether the market is copper, gold, nickel, iron ore, lead/zinc, PGM, diamonds or other commodities, E&MJ takes the lead in projecting trends, following development and reporting on the most efficient operating pr
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34 E&MJ; • JANUARY 2016 www.e-mj.com E & M J – 1 5 0 Y E A R S Editor's Note: In 2016, Mining Media cel- ebrates 150 Years of E&MJ; , which will culminate with a Special Collector's Edition (September 2016) to be distrib- uted at MINExpo 2016. As a lead up to this event, E&MJ; will provide monthly snapshots of its history . Serving an industry for 150 years is a milestone only a few companies have achieved. Engineering & Mining Journal ( E&MJ; ) traces its roots back to 1866, when it was originally founded as the American Journal of Mining ( AJM ). The California gold rush was at its peak and the Comstock Lode had just been discovered outside of Virginia City, Nevada. Copper mines were exploiting native copper deposits in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. The lead mines in Missouri were established as were some precious metals mines in the Carolinas. Headquartered in New York City, the AJM debuted as a weekly tabloid. In 1869, the name would eventually be changed to The Engineering and Mining Journal . The first edition was published on March 31, 1866. The mast read the 'American Journal of Mining, Milling, Oil-Boring, Geology Mineralogy, Metallurgy,' etc. The editor was George Francis Dawson. The lead story was a new rock drilling machine and a litho- graphic engraving provided a sketch of a miner operating the drill underground. AJM was published with a very consistent fashion. The type was set to a three-column format with a lithograph on the front page. The first few pages provided a collection of news stories and a summary of mining activ- ities by state and country. Most of the news was from the frontier states and territories, with consistent reports from British Columbia, Mexico, and New Grenada (the region now known as Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador and Panama). Occasionally mining engineers would file reports from other parts of the world. The news section was followed by a page or so of articles written by Dawson expressing opinions on behalf of the AJM . The journal also published the current prices for metals and mining-related stocks, and patent claims related to mining and mineral processing. The last page, which would now be known as classified advertisements, offered everything from six shooters to steam engines. Although not much is known about Dawson, he penned the following saluta- tory in the first edition, "Buoyed up by the kind assurances of many influential friends—some of them well known in their several departments of science—I assume editorial control of the Journal of Mining with a determination, so far as lies in my capacity to make it a success. Puffery is my special abhorrence, and so long as I con- duct the Journal nothing of the kind shall be seen in its editorial columns. Politics— in the popular acceptance of that term— will be utterly ignored, because incompati- ble with the spirit and scope of such a paper. Without any further promises, I pre- fer to let the Journal stand upon its own merits." Below the salutatory, he apologized for not being able to include as much infor- mation as he could due to publishing dead- lines and problems with the type setting. Subscription costs for the AJM were $0.10 per issue or $4 per year ($1 in 1866 would be worth $15 today). The journal was published every Saturday at noon and the E&MJ; Founded as the American Journal of Mining in 1866 At a time when pioneers were beginning to discover the vast natural resources of the American West, publishers launch a weekly journal dedicated to mining By Steve Fiscor, Editor-in-Chief E&MJ; originally shared its headquarters (above) with the Scientific American in what is now lower Manhattan.