PEOPLE KNOWN FOR: mining

Cecil Rhodes was a financier, statesman, and empire builder of British South Africa. He was prime minister of Cape Colony (1890–96) and organizer of the giant diamond-mining company De Beers Consolidated...

Mikhail Prokhorov is a Russian businessman and famed “oligarch" who made his fortune in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse by buying shares in formerly state-run corporations. He ran for the Russian...

Patrice Tlhopane Motsepe is a South African businessman and the country’s first black billionaire. Motsepe made his fortune through mining interests that eventually expanded in 2004 to form a successful...

Georgina Hope Rinehart is an Australian business executive and political activist who built a fortune as the head of her father’s privately held Western Australian mining company, Hancock Prospecting,...

Daniel Cowan Jackling was an American mining engineer and metallurgist who developed methods for profitable exploitation of low-grade porphyry copper ores and thus revolutionized copper mining. In particular,...

Clarence King was an American geologist and mining engineer who organized and directed the U.S. Geological Survey of the 40th parallel, an intensive study of the mineral resources along the site of the...

Barney Barnato was a financier, diamond magnate, and gold baron who first rivaled and then later allied with Cecil Rhodes in struggling for control in the development of the Southern African mining industry....

Alexander Agassiz was a marine zoologist, oceanographer, and mining engineer who made important contributions to systematic zoology, to the knowledge of ocean beds, and to the development of a major copper...

Meyer Guggenheim was an American industrialist and philanthropist who developed worldwide mining interests that, when merged with the American Smelting and Refining Company in 1901, dominated the industry...

James Douglas was a Canadian-born U.S. mining engineer, industrialist, and philanthropist who contributed greatly to the industrial growth and welfare of the U.S. Southwest. He attended the University...

Marcus Daly was an American mining tycoon. Known as the “Copper King,” he was the prime mover behind the Anaconda Copper Mining Co., one of the world’s largest copper producers. Emigrating from Ireland...

Sir Ernest Oppenheimer was a German-born industrialist, financier, and one of the most successful leaders in the mining industry in South Africa and Rhodesia. Oppenheimer became a junior clerk at the age...

William E. Dodge was an American merchant, cofounder of Phelps, Dodge & Company, which was one of the largest mining companies in the United States for more than a century. Descended from early New England...

Langley George Hancock was an Australian mining industrialist who unearthed some of the largest iron-ore reserves in the world, making him one of the nation’s richest citizens and financing his campaign...

Daniel Guggenheim was an American industrialist and philanthropist who oversaw the expansion of his family’s vast mining empire in the early 20th century. In 1891 his father, Meyer Guggenheim, consolidated...

John Hays Hammond was a U.S. mining engineer who helped develop gold mining in South Africa and California. In 1880 he was engaged by the U.S. Geological Survey for a study of the California goldfields;...

Sir Chester Beatty was a naturalized British mining engineer and company director who played an important role in the development of copper deposits in central Africa. After studying engineering at the...

Christopher Polhem was a Swedish mechanical and mining engineer. From 1693 to 1709 he devised water-powered machinery that mechanized operations at the great Falun copper mine. In 1704 he built a factory...

Georgius Agricola was a German scholar and scientist known as “the father of mineralogy.” While a highly educated classicist and humanist, well regarded by scholars of his own and later times, he was yet...

George Ferdinand Becker was a geologist who advanced the study of mining geology from physical, chemical, and mathematical approaches. Becker showed a talent for the natural sciences, particularly botany...