Word: rat
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Thorn Carson. Twenty-two years ago, copper smelting furnaces were loaded from the top and by hand. Each furnace, filled to capacity, held only 240 tons. These facts, known to all miners, were particularly familiar to a vagabond prospector, George Carson, called the "Desert Rat." For 23 years, he had wandered from mine to mine, pursuing an idea. The idea was a smelter which men could load from the side, which might hold twice or three times as much ore as the old top-charging furnace...
...while working as a chemist in Denver, the Desert Rat captured his idea. He applied for a patent for a side-charging, reverberating furnace. That the patent was delayed did not prevent his peddling the idea to any and all engineers. He showed drawings, explained results. Copper companies, indifferent, rejected both...
Just nine years later, the U. S. granted the Carson patents. But the Desert Rat, discouraged, had little hope of selling them to the big companies. One night in 1915, he sat in a Manhattan auditorium, listening to the papers read to the American Society of Mining Engineers. One speaker started to explain a new copper reduction process, already in operation in the West. The Desert Rat rose in his seat eyes blazing. He was listening to a description of his own furnace...
Long and expensive ($300,000) was the contest in the courts. Alone, Inventor Carson could not have financed it. But to his aid came many a friendly Westerner. Rudolph Spreckels, San Francisco sugar and gas tycoon, organized the Carson Investment Co. to fight the Desert Rat's battle. And in February, 1925, Tycoon Spreckels went down to the waterfront boardinghouse to tell the Desert Rat he was worth $5,000,000, perhaps $20,000,000. He became a national celebrity over night. Hundreds of newspapers carried his story; hundreds of women found matrimony desirable...
...Desert Rat never touched his for tune. At once, the American Smelting & Refining Co. asked a retrial, and 18 months passed before it was denied. Carson, ill in a San Francisco hospital, again reached the front pages: "No, I will not be a philanthropist. It would only create an other army of grafters. Perhaps I will raise trees. Even if I'm rich now, I don't believe any woman is going to get me" In March, 1927, while the case was on appeal, he became the fifth husband of Mrs. Hersee Gross. At the Fairmont Hotel...