Historic dam in danger

In the late 1820s, a couple of citizen scientists in upstate New York were amusing their friends with the latest technological parlor trick when they hit upon something useful. An electrically charged magnet, which could magically lift scraps of metal off the floor, was also capable of pulling shards of iron from a conveyor of crushed ore.

Joseph Henry of Albany, who would go on to become the first secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, perfected his electromagnet using iron of impeccable quality that was mined in Ironville, a dozen steep miles west of Lake Champlain’s Crown Point.

That led Ironville mining entrepreneur Allen Penfield to wonder aloud if magnets might be used to simply and easily separate out the valuable iron from the rocky chaff. Henry thought so, and indeed they could. This shortcut replaced lengthy set of occult processes that had previously been used to separate iron ore. And it did