2018
Saluting the trail blazers
“
This special supplement has been put together to celebrate the 2018
inductees to the International Mining Technology Hall of Fame. It was back
in 2013 that we began this series to recognise individuals and teams in the
industry, both past and present that really made a difference in mining in
terms of technologies and innovations they developed and introduced. These
include mineral exploration advances, mining and mineral processing
equipment design, mining software, bulk handling equipment and other
areas across multiple categories – this time 12 in all. We hope you enjoy
reading about all their achievements. Our Hall of Fame inductees are also
chosen 100% through voting by our prestigious College of Voters, who
represent the great and the good of the industry.
What’s been unique about our Hall of Fame is that unlike some other
awards, the primary aim is to give a nod of recognition to the people that
most deserve it, not to entice advertisers into a commercial enterprise.
We also held three celebration dinners in both Salt Lake City (2014) and
Denver (2015, 2017) to celebrate inductees where we had many families
attending and some real emotion as people came to collect their awards.
Some highlights from me, though there were many, included seeing Dick
Robbins accept the award for his father James Robbins, the inventor of the
modern tunnel boring machine (TBM), and seeing Dr James White, the now
late co-founder of Modular Mining Systems, collect his award in 2015. We
also presented the giant of mining software Fred Banfield with his award
– he founded Mintec, later to become part of Hexagon, from his apartment
in Tucson.
Getting new mining techniques, equipment and technologies to successful
commercialisation is no easy task, in a famously conservative industry.
Thanks to all the inductees for their contributions and thanks to the many
sponsors of the Hall of Fame, including Rio Tinto, Stantec, FLSmidth and
Hatch to name just a few. I also want to recognise our now retired
IM Founder John Chadwick who was largely responsible for setting up the
IM Technology Hall of Fame and put in many hundreds of hours of work on it.
Given the number of inductees so far and the range of innovations
represented we have opted to take a break from new nominations for a while
as we grow our more commercial events like The Electric Mine. This is not
the end of IM’s Technology Hall of Fame, however, please do continue to
send nominations and in due course we will endeavour to once again
showcase another stellar line-up of inductees.
Until the next time!
Paul Moore, Editorial Director, International Mining
”
Supplement International Mining | JUNE 2019 HoF 1