George Labram
American engineer
George Labram (1859-1900) was an American engineer employed as Chief Mechanical Engineer at the De Beers diamond mines in Kimberley during the Siege of Kimberley.
Early life
Labram was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1859, but attended school at the Quincy Mine after his parents moved there around 1864.
Career
Labram started his working career at Samuel F. Hodge & Company in Detroit before moving to Chicago where he first worked at the MC Bullock Manufacturing Company and later at Fraser & Chalmers. From Chicago Labram moved to the Silver King Mine in Arizona and then became mechanical engineer on a smelter for Anaconda Copper. Following that Labram worked at Boston and Montana Consolidated Copper and Silver Mining Company for a short period before moving to the Butte and Boston Consolidated Mining Company where he worked for about a year as engineer in charge of machinery before moving to Dakota to erect a tin mill. At the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893 Labram ran a machinery exhibition.
In 1893 Labram was employed by the De Beers company in Kimberley to build and manage a crushing mill. In 1898 he was promoted to chief engineer. Under Labram's supervision as manager of the crushing plant, Fred Kirsten devised an automated diamond extraction process. Up to that time all diamonds were manually extracted by sight.
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This entry incorporates text from “George Labram” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.