Talk:Herbert Hoover

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Edit to Herbert Hoover article; Draft edit to the Herbert Hoover article, under the section headed "Mining Engineer"

Jlyster (talk) 14:26, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

Hoover went to Australia in 1897 as an employee of Bewick, Moreing & Co., a London-based mining company. Hoover first went to Coolgardie, the-then, center of the Western Australian goldfields, where he worked under Edward Hooper, a company partner. Conditions were harsh as these goldfields were centered in the Great Victoria Desert and Hoover described the region as a land of "black flies, red dust, and white heat." He served as a geologist and mining engineer while searching the Western Australian goldfields for investments. After being appointed as mine manager at the age of 23, he led a major program of expansion for the Sons of Gwalia gold mine at Gwalia, Western Australia, and brought in many Italian immigrants to cut costs and counter the union militancy of the Australian miners.[5][6] He believed "the rivalry between the Italians and the other men was of no small benefit."[5] He also described Italians as "fully 20 per cent superior"[5] to other miners.

Hoover worked at gold mines in Big Bell, Cue, Leonora, Menzies and Coolgardie, Western Australia. [7][8] It was during his time in Western Australia, 1897-98, that Hoover first met Mr. Fleury James Lyster.

Hoover married his Stanford sweetheart, Lou Henry, in 1899. The Hoovers had two sons, Herbert Clark Hoover Jr. (1903–1969) and Allan Henry Hoover (1907–1993). The family went to China, where Hoover worked for Bewick, Moreing & Co. as the company's lead engineer. Hoover and his wife learned Mandarin Chinese while he worked in China and used it during his tenure at the White House when they wanted to foil eavesdroppers.[9] The Boxer Rebellion trapped the Hoovers in Tianjin in June 1900. For almost a month, the settlement was under fire. Hoover himself guided U.S. Marines around Tianjin during the battle, using his knowledge of the local terrain.[10]

Hoover was made a partner in Bewick, Moreing & Co. in 1901 and assumed responsibility for various Australian operations and investments. The company would eventually control approximately 50% of gold production in Western Australia. By now, Hoover was no longer living in Australia, instead he visited the country in 1902, 1903, 1905 and 1907 as an overseas investor. In August–September 1905, he founded the Zinc Corporation (later, following various mergers, to become Consolidated Zinc and then a part of the Rio Tinto Group) with William Baillieu and others, with the intention to purchase and treat the zinc rich tailings in Broken Hill, New South Wales. Known as "the Sulphide Problem", it had been noticed that considerable zinc in the lead-silver could not be recovered and was lost as tailings. Initially, Broken Hill mining companies mostly extracted the silver by crushing and gravitation methods by the turn of the century. Hydro-metallurgical and magnetic separation methods were also tried, but the main breakthrough came in 1902 when Delprat and Potter independently devised processes that would eventually be patented as the Delprat-Potter method. This was a part of the overall effort being made in Broken Hill to devise a practical and profitable method to use the newly developed froth flotation process to treat these tailings and recover the zinc.[11] Flotation, an important mineral separation process, was pioneered in Broken Hill and numerous efforts were being made in various locations around the world to refine this process. The Delprat-Potter process became the main method used in various companies in Broken Hill up until 1912, however Hoover's investment in Zinc Corporation struggled to gain success using this process. As a director, Hoover was responsible for achieving a successful method in order to ensure the survival of the company. It was at the time of Hoover's 1907 Australian visit that Fluery James Lyster relocated from Hoover's original location in the Western Australian goldmines to Broken Hill and began his experiments which resulted in the "Lyster process". This enabled the Zinc Corporation to operate the world's first Selective or Differential Flotation plant by September, 1912. The Minerals Separation, Limited entity was able to secure the rights to the proceeds of these developments for the investors when Lyster signed US patents in 1916 and 1921. Working with his brother, Theodore J. Hoover through the UK based Minerals Separation Ltd., and his own company, Hoover was supplying the world's industries, such as steel, with the needed base minerals, including Zinc. Hoover left Bewick Moreing & Co by 1908 and, setting out on his own, eventually ended up with investments on every continent and offices in San Francisco, London, New York City, St. Petersburg, Paris and Mandalay, Burma. He had his second majorly successful venture with the British firm Burma Corporation, again producing silver, lead and Zinc in large quantities at the Namtu Bawdwin Mine, where he caught malaria in 1907. By 1914, Hoover was an extremely wealthy man, with an estimated personal fortune of $4m. He was once quoted as saying "If a man has not made a million dollars by the time he is forty, he is not worth much". Sixty-six years after opening the mine in 1897, Hoover still had a partial share in the Sons of Gwalia mines when it finally closed in 1963, just one year before the former President's death in New York City in 1964. The successful mine had yielded $55m in gold and $10m in dividends for investors. Herbert Hoover, acting as a main investor, financier, mining speculator and organiser of men, played a major role in the important metallurgical developments that occured in Broken Hill in the first decade of the twentieth century, developments that had a great impact on the world mining and production of silver, lead and zinc.
Jlyster (talk) 09:37, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

better start with George Nash's major biography that covers all this. Please avoid original research into primary documents--rely on Nash for that. Drop patent numbers. The Lyons book is no longer a RS. Yergin and McNeill are dubious sources on Hoover. Try not to string more than 2 notes in a row. Use American spelling not British....and good luck! Rjensen

Hi Jlyster - this is a great first effort at writing Wikipedia content :) I can't comment on Rjensen's advice regarding the Lyons book because I simply don't know enough about it, but it seems to me you have the foundation of a decent content addition to the article. I agree that we need to be careful referencing primary sources, but we can use them in some circumstances (see WP:PRIMARY). I'm assuming that the primary sources here are the patents?

As Rjensen says there are some stylistic conventions that will need tweaking but that's easy enough to do. Do you mind if I go ahead and do that?

Rjensen's other point, which is probably worth addressing now, is the list of citations. I appreciate that the content is a distillation of all those sources, but for certain pieces of information—statistics, direct quotations, and anything likely to be challenged—we prefer citations on a per sentence basis. Obviously you know best which citations belong with which sentences so you'd be the ideal person to do that (but as I said, only for information of the type I've described; see Wikipedia:CITE#When and why to cite sources). Remaining cites can stay at the end. EyeSerene^talk 10:19, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

OK, I removed some refs according to Rjensen advice and yes go ahead with your "stylistic convention tweaks" please. Please let me know what exactly you do here, just for me to learn thx. I'm not an academic researcher so I must admit to being confused by what is a primary source. I left the notation "US Patents" in place whilst removing the patent numbers. Feel free to remove this if you deem fit to. What are the other primary sources that I should remove please? Hmm about the order of citations???? Now I'm all confused, I'll see what I can do. I really just read up on stuff over time and wrote down my essay off my head while keeping the sources there in a general way as you can see. Going through and finding specifics is a bit hard just now. JL Jlyster (talk) 15:30, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

Okay, I've been through and "wikified" the paragraph (mainly removing bold formatting which we only use in very specific places in articles, and removing some unnecessary internal links). I've also added {{fact}} tags to some sentences which are those that in my opinion could do with a specific citation. So called "fact bombing" is considered slightly impolite on Wikipedia, so I hope you'll forgive my presumption, but in the light of your previous post I felt it might help you with targeting your efforts on those lines. EyeSerene^talk 18:14, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

That's OK..............at this stage it is all a learning curve for me so go for it. I've seen these "curved brackets" (??) So these are templates? Yes, I'm seeing more things............more of the wiki systems. I'm not a computer person so even all this scripting is new to me, however there seems to be a certain logic to it all. Did I see something about {reflist} somewhere?????? Jlyster (talk) 15:03, 18 February 2012 (UTC)

Then you're doing extremely well in picking this up so quickly. You're right, anything enclosed in double curly brackets is a template. You don't need to worry about the reflist one though, because your refs in the above paragraph will automatically be added to the existing reflist at the end of the main article when the text is moved across. Thank you for citing those sentences I marked - I think we're fast approaching the point where we can add your content to the article. Is there anything else (apart from the image!) that you think needs doing? EyeSerene^talk 12:56, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

Footnote format

The ANU cites need work: The should look like this:
Fairweather, D. F., 'Lyster, Fleury James (Jim) (1872–1948)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/lyster-fleury-james-jim-10883/text19323, accessed 18 February 2012.
put all that inside this footnote form: <ref> ...put stuff here...</ref> Rjensen (talk) 15:40, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

Thx for this Rjensen.....it is late here now so off to bed.............I'll come back to work on these references tomorrow. I'll also see about getting the references to be a little more specific to the text if I can....cheers JL Jlyster (talk) 15:49, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

Rjensen, I notice that you have the URL for Lyster with the suffix "/text19323". This web page link works just as well with and without this............unless there is something I missed.......is there any reason for this add on please? Jlyster (talk) 12:30, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

pls disregard the last question as I just saws the reason thx Jlyster (talk) 12:43, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

Predidents who redistributed their pay?

" (Hoover) was the first of two Presidents to redistribute their salary (President Kennedy was the other; he donated all his paychecks to charity)"

FDR was second; he also donated his entire pay to charity, his family was wealthy.68.98.46.229 (talk) 15:45, 1 May 2012 (UTC)

Notes

Jlyster (talk) 09:40, 17 February 2012 (UTC) <references /ref>

Hoover's book "Freedom Betrayed"

Still no mention of this historically important book. {{subst:UnsignedIP|1=76.10.114.177|2=14:11, 7 July 2012 (UTC)}}

Herbert Hoover's book Freedom Betrayed

There is still no mention of this book.