Robert Carl Sticht

Robert Carl Sticht (State Library of Victoria)

Robert Carl Sticht (8 October 1856 – 30 April 1922) was an American metallurgist and copper mine manager, active in Colorado and Montana, U.S.A. and in Tasmania, Australia. Sticht was the developer of the first successful purely pyritic smelting in the world. He was also an important book and art collector, a large part of whose collections were acquired by the Public Library of Victoria and the National Gallery of Victoria in the 1920s.

Early life

Sticht was born at Hoboken, New Jersey, U.S.A., the son of German-American parents from Brooklyn, his father's name was John C. Sticht. Sticht studied at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and graduated from there with a BSc in 1875. He then studied metallurgy at the Clausthal Royal Mining Academy, Germany, where he graduated with honours in 1880.

Career

Returning to the US, Sticht was appointed chief chemist and assistant metallurgist at a Colorado smelting company and erected smelters in Colorado and Montana. In 1893, on the recommendation of the American mining expert Edward Dyer Peters, Sticht was appointed chief metallurgist to the Mount Lyell Mining and Railway Co. Ltd. in Tasmania. Sticht married Marion Oak née Staige, of Illinois in January 1895. The newly married couple arrived in Queenstown, Tasmania around July 1895.

Sticht persuaded the company to use pyritic smelting, designed and supervised the erection of the reduction works plant and in 1897 was appointed general manager of the company. His successful dealing with pyritic ores marked him out as a great metallurgist. Other difficult problems arose but each was successfully dealt with as it came, and his ability in selecting suitable assistants and heads of departments was a great factor in the continued success of the company. Although a technical success, pyritic smelting had a "horrendous cost to the environment in the destruction of a vast area of rainforest and in pollution of rivers".

Sticht's time at Mount Lyell was marked by a disastrous underground fire at the North mine on 12 October 1912, when some 42 miners died from carbon monoxide poisoning.

Sticht had a holiday tour in the United States in 1914–15; in 1917 he was again in Tasmania investigating problems in connection with the Mount Read and Rosebery ores. He died at Launceston, Tasmania, on 30 April 1922 and was succeeded by Russell Mervyn Murray, an employee for whom he had little regard but who managed the mines successfully for a similar length of time. Sticht was survived by his wife and three sons.

Memberships

• Australasian Institute of Mining Engineers president 1905, 1915, vice-president 1909
• Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science president, Section C (chemistry, metallurgy, and mineralogy) 1907

Legacy

Sticht was a cultivated man, interested in music, art and literature.

As Heather Lowe wrote in the Art Journal:

Sticht’s collecting activities were far broader than has been recognised...: in the first decade of this century he was to gather in his home on the remote west coast of Tasmania important collections not only of oil paintings, works on paper, incunabula and antiquarian books, book bindings, title pages, inscribed fly-leaves, and watermarks, but also of anthropological artefacts and mineral and botanical specimens. Within the history of art collecting in Australia, the Sticht Collection is unusual and fascinating, and deserves close attention for a variety of reasons, including the geographical isolation in which it was formed, and the wide-reaching intellectual inquisitiveness that structured its formation.

In 1923, following Sticht's death, the Melbourne bookseller Albert Henry Spencer of the Hill of Content bookshop was appointed to handle the dispersal of the former's private library. Spencer later described it as "the finest library yet sold in Australia" and noted that "[i]t was rich in general literature as well in Australiana, beginning with manuscripts written before the invention of printing, going on to many items of incunabula, then on to great books through the centuries."

Among the buyers was the Public Library of Victoria which snapped up 'a large number of rare and important works'. These included a number of early Bibles, Euclid's Elementa (1482) (one of only three complete copies in the world), the 'Hendriks collection' of fly-leaves and title-pages, numbering over 3000 pieces, 137 volumes of the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the twenty-two volumes of Georg Kaspar Nagler's Neues allgemeines Künstler-Lexicon (1835–1852), Richard Earlom's Liber veritatis, or, A collection of two hundred prints, after the original designs of Claude Le Lorrain (1777), J.H. Green's A catalogue and description of the whole of the works of the celebrated Jacques Callot (1804), and Francesco Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499), described as 'the most beautiful book of the fifteenth century'.

Some months earlier Public Library of Victoria and the National Gallery of Victoria had used funds from the Felton Bequest to purchase direct from the Sticht estate his large collection of Old Master prints and drawings, and a collection of early typography and books of extraordinary value, items which are now divided between the National Gallery of Victoria and the State Library of Victoria.

Sticht showed his interest in the welfare of the employees of the Mount Lyell mine by the establishment of "betterment" facilities near the mine, and took a leading part in the opening of the technical school in Queenstown. Sticht's kindliness was extended to his employees, to prospectors, and all interested in the mining industry; he was devoted to his work, and the mine owed its success to his administrative powers, his resourcefulness and his great knowledge. Sticht's reputation became world-wide and the long chapter of 125 pages in the 1907 edition of The Principles of Copper Smelting, by Edward Dyer Peters, owed so much to him, that the author stated that "to save constant quotation marks and references, I believe that it will be more just to ascribe this chapter, in the main, to Mr Sticht".

The mineral stichtite is named for him, as is the Sticht Range of mountains.

Further reading

• Blainey, Geoffrey (2000). The Peaks of Lyell (6th ed.). Hobart: St. David's Park Publishing. ISBN 0-7246-2265-9.
• Whitham, Charles (2003). Western Tasmania - A land of riches and beauty (Reprint 2003 ed.). Queenstown: Municipality of Queenstown.
• Rae, Lou (Doctoral thesis, April 2005). The Lost Province : exploration, isolation, innovation and domination in the Mount Lyell Region 1859-1935 (PDF). University of Tasmania. Retrieved 19 February 2019.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)