What was once a mountain was turned into a kind of dust, which was then mechanically and chemically processed in what became known as ‘flotation separation’: the ore dust was mixed with an oily compound and then sloshed and shaken inside large tanks, allowing copper particles to float to the surface before being smelted into solid metal. Steam shovels and steam crushers were brought in to ferry and grind the ores. Vast quantities of explosives were deployed to blast massive chunks of low-grade ore out of the ground. In 1904 at Bingham Canyon, just outside Salt Lake City, Utah, he answered that question in dramatic fashion. But, wondered Jackling, might there be some way of changing the calculus? They were set aside because it was simply too expensive to justify refining them. What if, Jackling asked himself, you could extract copper not just out of those high-grade chunks (copper content of over five per cent) but also out of the other stuff too? In many mines around the world there were vast volumes of ores which looked to the untrained eye like normal rocks but contained a few percentage points of copper. That brings us back to Jackling, a self-made man who came from poverty but managed to get himself trained as a mining engineer. Even as he was inventing some of the world’s first lightbulbs and building the world’s first power stations, Thomas Edison was fretting about being able to lay his hands on enough copper to put inside them. So, as the electrical age dawned, global copper production was flatlining. The problem was, by the turn of the twentieth century the most abundant ores had already been mined out. High-grade ores with more than a few percentage points of copper were sent off for smelting and processing and the rest was left in the ground. Chunks of rock were torn away from the ground and inspected to check whether they had the tell-tale signs of copper (sometimes the green of oxidised copper, sometimes a yellow crystalline mineral known as chalcopyrite). Up until the late nineteenth century, most of the world’s copper was mined and sorted more or less manually. Indeed, for a period in the late nineteenth century it looked worryingly as if the electrical era would halt before it began, because of a shortage of the red metal. Yet without copper there would have been no electrical age – no second Industrial Revolution. Perhaps that’s because unlike the other foundational components of civilisation like steel or concrete, copper is invariably sheathed away from view inside wiring. Up until recently it has been quite easy to forget how important copper is to the modern world. He was the man who transformed the job of turning rock into metal. Jobs used to describe Jackling as a ‘copper baron’, but that was understating it, for he might better be seen as a modern-day alchemist. Yet since Jackling was a creature of what I like to call the ‘ Material World’ – the unappreciated underbelly of modern life – his contribution to our lives is enormously neglected, despite the fact that it is there in the fabric of nearly everything we touch. If we have been living in Steve Jobs’ world of computers and devices for a decade or so then we have been inhabiting Jackling’s world for a century or so.
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Don’t worry if you haven’t heard of him: he is mostly forgotten these days, but Jackling’s legacy is arguably even greater than that of the man who brought us the Mac and the iPhone. The house was named after the man for whom it was originally built, a fellow called Daniel C. But the Jackling House, as it was known, would continue to haunt him, one way or another, for the rest of his life. Eventually Jobs moved out, into a smaller, more manageable place down in Palo Alto. One girlfriend found the place so spooky she refused to live there. He would eat meals on the bare floor and sleep on a bare mattress. The Apple cofounder lived there for around a decade but never actually got round to furnishing it. Surrounded by six acres of encroaching forest, the dilapidated house was enormous – 30 rooms, 14 bedrooms and 13 and a half bathrooms – and was filled with odd trinkets, including a fully-functioning pipe organ. The property was hardly the obvious choice for a young entrepreneur. In 1983, the 29-year-old Steve Jobs bought a rambling old mansion in Woodside, a quiet, wealthy little Californian town midway between San Francisco and San Jose.
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