Bartolomé de Medina (Metallurgy)

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Bartolomé de Medina (* around 1497 in Seville , Spain ; † 1585 in Pachuca Hidalgo (or de Soto), Mexico ) was a Spanish merchant and metallurgist.

Life

Bartolomé de Medina was a businessman from Seville who learned from a German, a certain "Maestro Lorenzo" ("Master Lorenz"), the use of mercury to extract silver from silver ores.

After a financial setback, de Medina embarked for Mexico in 1553 and found rich ore deposits between 1554 and 1555 north of Mexico City , in Pachuca Hidalgo on the grounds of the Purísima Concepción Hacienda (now owned by a tennis club), where he used the new methods Separation of the deaf rock from the silver ore through the process of amalgamation , that is, the intimate mixing of the ore, especially with mercury and salts , tried and tested and made ready for technical application. The process - called “beneficio de patio” - proved to be ideal for the dry, tree-poor highlands of Central and South America because of its energy and water-saving method. The patio method - of ( Spanish patio for Patio) because of the cobbled courtyard, patio , where the ore was mixed with the mercury - appears to have already been known to the locals and revolutionized the silver recovery in America and Europe for the next more than two and a half centuries.

The mercury required for this came mainly from the Almadén mine in Spain and Huancavelica in Peru and was a royal monopoly.

By processing with bare feet, without any protective device or with inadequate work breaks, the black and Indian corporal workers who had to extract the mercury in the pits or amalgamated with the silver in the patio process suffered severe physical damage ( mercury poisoning ). The Incas had already severely restricted the extraction of mercury because of its adverse health effects.

Bartolomé de Medina obtained a viceroyalty patent for his invention and a percentage of the income from those who used his method.

Bartolomé de Medina was married to Leonor de Morales, whom he had to follow to Mexico and with whom he had five children. He died in Pachuca in 1585 as a wealthy man through investments and his commissions.

literature

  • Algunos documentos nuevos sobre Bartolomé de Medina . Archivio Histórico del Museo de Minería de la Ciudad de Pachuca Hidalgo.
  • Huamán Poma (Don Felipe Huamán Poma de Ayala): Letter to a King. A Peruvian Chief's Account of Life under the Incas and under Spanish Rule . Arranged and edited with an Introduction by Christoper Dilke and translated from Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno . New York: Dutton 1978. - Poma de Ayala describes in a separate chapter (with ill.) The working conditions of the miners in Huancavelica, where the work in the mountain itself and on the ovens caused the worst suffering. Although the patio process took place outdoors and without heating the metals, the physical contact also caused severe symptoms of the disease.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Isidro Hernández Pompa: Gambusinos Y Mineros Mexicanos. Palibrio, 2013, ISBN 1-4633-5491-6 , p. 111 f.
  2. ↑ In Europe, too, the use of mercury was barely regulated for a long time; in the mirror works in Fürth, where mercury was used for mirroring, until the middle of the 1880s (!) "almost all mirror workers suffered from mercury"; Meyers Großes Konversations-Lexikon, 6th edition, Vol. 16 (1907), p. 508 fsv Mercury poisoning.
personal data
SURNAME Medina, Bartolome de
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Spanish merchant and metallurgist
DATE OF BIRTH around 1497
PLACE OF BIRTH Seville , Spain
DATE OF DEATH 1585
Place of death Pachuca Hidalgo (or de Soto), Mexico