 Okay. So, could you please state your full name? Gordon Maltham, Red Sea. And your age, please? Almost 86. And where were you born? Halifax, Nova Scotia. Okay. And what did your parents do when you were a child? My mother was worked in the bank as a teller, I guess. But that was before I was born, so I don't know anything about that. And my father was an accountant, vice president, eventually. You have a shipload fitting firm in Halifax. Okay. And you as a child, what did you do? What were your pastimes or your interests? The summer would be baseball, cycling, hiking, camping, winter skiing, skating. You were a sporty guy. Yeah. And at school, what were your interests? Were they geared towards the sciences or what were your strengths? I guess I was interested in everything at school until I got into about grade 11. And then I wasn't too interested in math at that time. And I suppose in grade 12, physics was not all that exciting to me, but I was strong in chemistry all through because my dad had built a lab for me. I don't know. Someone was about 14 or 15 in the basement. And I guess probably because he wanted to go to university when he was a teenager and take chemistry. I didn't know this until years later. Okay. That was his passion. Yeah. And it turned out to be mine. And he got to live vicariously through you? Yeah, right. It's not a bad thing. No. So you went into chemistry. What did you decide your path to be after high school? My path actually from about age six was to be a medical doctor. And so when I entered university, it was in pre-med. And because I was entering at the time of the war vets coming back from the war in 45, I was entering in 47. It was still pretty difficult to get into university coming from high school. And of course in Halifax, they only went to grade 12, which Ontario does now. So I entered from grade 11. You didn't have to take grade 12. You could take grade 12. And you've got five credits if you took an arts degree in university, but I was not taking arts. In pre-med, I would get two credits, so I decided to go right from grade 11. So I enrolled in pre-med, but this passion for chemistry, I expanded that pre-med to a bachelor of science in chemistry and took every chemistry the university offered, including all the medical chemistries, pharmaceuticals and whatnot. So the other passion was music. And they gave me a test when I entered university as to what I should be doing. And the bottom line of that testing was that I should not be going into science. I should be for medicine. I should be in university. And your other passion was music. Music. So immediately they found out that I played the piano. They said, well, we want you in the orchestra. We're a piano player. We want you to play the tuba. And I said, well, I never played the tuba. I played horns because I was in the Navy band of the reserve. And so I played a couple of different horns. And they said, oh, well, take the horn home with you. And you can read the notes. So I was self-taught. And so two weeks later, I was with the band, with the orchestra, playing HMS Pinafore, Gilbert and Selvam. And I guess a couple weeks later we actually put on the performance, full dress performance. So the tuba in the orchestra led to the university band asking me to come with the band and football games and the hockey games all over the province, which was okay until I got to Cady University. It was right in the heart of the Annapolis Valley. And of course all the apples. So we'd be marching down the street and the Cady kids would be throwing apples at this big target of the tuba. Throw them in? Oh, yeah. So by the time we got to the university itself, to get ready for the game, I couldn't blow it all in this thing. Was it jammed? Yeah. So I'd flushed over the hose. Wow. Every football game, not the hockey games, it was okay. I just hated it on the tuba player. Yeah. So did you ever go back to piano or tuba is your instrument now? No. No, I never went back to the horns. Okay. I was off because when I finished university, I, within six months, I was up in the Arctic. And there was no piano there for a while. And I didn't have a piano when I came down here five years later. So I was off music for about ten years, I guess. And I remembered near everything a new one, music, but it's never the same. You forget. So, but I think my first year of university, or the year before I went to university, my piano teacher, because I'd started piano a year before. So that was about, I was a guess, about 15. And she was a neighbor. And I had seen three showings of a song to remember, which was a story about Chopin. And I got excited about getting into music again, because my parents had had me go to music piano lessons when I was about ten years old, as well as maybe younger. And I hated that, I hated it with passion. Sometimes you're just too young. Yeah, well, I couldn't stand the scales. The technique. Yeah. And so I asked my parents if I could start music again, and they said, sure. And I said, well, there's a mother of one of my friends just up the street. She was a piano player. Well, my mother was a good piano player, but I figured it was better to go to somebody outside the family. So I went over the next day and asked this lady if she'd teach me, and she said, sure. I said, well, I got a couple of conditions. One is, here's a book. I had bought this book on Chopin. Mixed type of music. And the second is I don't want to play any scales or exercises. She says, we can't learn music without those. Nice as well. Chopin's music has got a lot of this type of music. That's his music. She says, yeah, you're right. So where do you want to start? And I said page one. And so that was somewhere around October, I guess. So first of May, after I had my lesson, she said, well, I've got you slated to play at the cathedral next Wednesday. And she said to play an hour. And she said, you've remembered. You've memorized everything you've played. You hardly ever use notes anymore. So she should just go there and sit down and play. That's what I did. And she said, I want you to keep it up because you're destined for Carnegie Hall. I could do it at that time. But I could also build any chemistry compound I wanted in the pharmaceutical side, the organic side. So it was a dilemma. It was a dilemma for a couple of days. And do you ever regret not going into music as opposed to chemistry? No. My decision was I can get by with music. I would never attain a high living. And if I missed not getting into places like Carnegie Hall of Status. Which is very difficult. There's only a few get there. Exactly. But I could make a good living as a chemist. Yeah, music was more realistic as a hobby. And as a hobby, exactly. So that's what it is. So I'll sit down, play an hour or two every day. Sometimes I don't feel like playing. Same here. That's what music is about, I guess. So you said after school that you went up to the Arctic, was that one of your first official jobs? No, the first job was in Ottawa as a summer student because by that time, like I had my degree, my undergraduate degree, and by special permission from the president of the university, I was allowed to stay in the undergraduate faculty. I wanted to take one more chemistry. But I wanted to take my master's. And at the same time, I was in medical school doing my first year. So my last year was my fifth year. I was in three faculties, undergraduate, master's in medicine. How in the world were you thinking of juggling a master's in med school? I didn't do any thinking about that sort of thing. I had a bike, and I just went from there down two or three kilometres to the med school and quickly get back to one of the other classes. And so somewhere around March, I suppose, of my graduation year, the girl that I was sharing this lab with, we were both working on our master's. She says, Court, she said, what are you going to do? Where are you going to go for your PhD? I said, I'm not interested in a PhD. I said, I'm in medical school. I want to med a MD. And she says, well, why are you taking the master's? So we're sitting across, you know, having our coffee at about three o'clock in the morning doing this. And I says, you're right. I don't need this degree. So I got up and shook hands with her. I says, good to know you're a vet. Good luck. And I says, I'll leave him. So I had all my research essentially done and just that it wasn't written out. It's too bad I didn't write it out because that research that I did was the chemical, the same chemical configuration that ten years later became the start of this solvent extraction of uranium and copper and all the other metals we're doing since then. So that was the forerunner. My two professors, because I majored in inorganic and organic chemistry, they set the objectives for my masters as development of an organic molecule that was capable of the coordination extraction of tin. So within a month or two I had this compound built and working. I could extract tin. I could extract copper and some other metals changed the acidity. So that was a little bit of short-sightedness there. So when I graduated I had the I was still in medical school and I went to Ottawa. Ottawa had offered me this job at the Regal Activity Division of Energy Mines Resources and it was working on uranium, extraction of uranium from their present operating plant up in the Arctic on Great Bear Lake and also working on the development of their new plant that was coming on stream in 1954, I think it was, 1954. Different type of circuit and I had put them in this one application and I guess they had about 2,000 applicants and they hired seven over that 2,000. You were one of them? God is one of them. And the other was the extraction, the isolation of cobalt because the mine up in the Arctic Port Radium of Eldorado mining refining it had about 45 metals in there or very complex ore and amongst them was very high cobalt so that project was to extract and isolate cobalt this was for what they called the cobalt bomb in those days. It was really a radioactive tool. They produced cobalt 60 and this was for x-rays. Okay. And just before Labor Day weekend I was called in by the director of that operation on Lydia Street of energy mines resources called the Radioactivity Division asked if I would go up to the mine in the Arctic. Yeah, and be chief chemist. So this was right after your MD? No, this was after my bachelor's degree. And had you started your MD yet? I had already had that one year. So I was just up in Ottawa just for the summer. Okay. So asked if I'd go up there. So phone with parents, told them a story. I said, phone our doctor who is the head of the medical school and see whether they'll keep my place or should I go or what? Got some advice from the doctor and I'll phone you back tomorrow night. So phone back. They said, well, the doctor says your place to medical school will be kept. Every year they admit 44. That's the number of beds that Dalhousie had in the hospital in Halifax. So that was the restriction. The doctor had told my parents that yes, take the year off and because I've had a lot of sickness during the five years at university and come back after a year, well, I never went back. So I became a medical school dropout. I just loved the mining philosophy, the whole new horizon of being out, not cloistered in a lab or not a school, but a medical facility. I mean, at that point, even after my first year of medicine, the professors were saying I should go into medical research and develop some more pharmaceuticals. I had my eye on being a plastic surgeon. That was my high school. We had to write a booklet. It was called Career Booklet or something like that. I titled it Medicine and Plastic Surgery. This was all just new. This was all developed during the war. Penicillin was the big drug. And lo and behold, I won the prize for the best career book in Halifax that year. And the prize that I got was a book about a surgeon in Burma, a North American surgeon. I forget where he's Canadian. I still have it. So I had a lot of incentive to go in that route. Into medicine? I had started working in the drug store down the street from my home when I was about 12, I guess, delivering prescriptions on my bike. And as I got older and in university, I would then help behind the counter with prescriptions under their direction at first. So getting my blood somehow. It got into my blood. And then getting... So there was quite a departure going from a city with that idea of medicine and going up into the Arctic, which is quite barren, bleak, very, very cold, most beautiful summer as you ever see now, caribou wolves. And I enjoyed the rocks, the various types of ore specimens and minerals, and I could just not stay with that. So this was with Eldorado mines? Yeah. So you became their chief chemist? Yeah. But where was it in the Arctic? It's on Great Bear Lake, Port Radium. Port Radium, you said, yeah. Yeah. And from there, did you, as chief chemist, did you start some work on radioactivity? Yeah. Yeah, we started developing methods for the analysis of that particular type of ore with all those minerals and the solutions derived from the... during the process. And then, of course, I got into electronics and the maintenance of Geiger counters underground. So I'd go down underground every day in the morning and come back an hour later. So I didn't get any great radiation from the underground workings. I got a lot of excess radiation when I was still in school and had an operation of tonsils and adenoids. They left me under too long, I guess. And so I got burnt from the anesthetic and they tried all sorts of treatments. And eventually they went to radiation treatments and got into the hospital one day. This was about the fourth treatment. And the nurse put me, put all the lead around me. But I can't do much on the face because that's where they had the radiation. She went out for coffee and forgot about me. Actually? Yeah. And I got out from under this. I should have been in there for two or three minutes. I was there for more than 20. And I knew I was there too long. I walked over to the hospital, got on my bike, and I'd only gone two or three meters when the blood just gushed. And I collapsed on the street in front of the hospital. And years later, when I left El Dorado, 15 years later, the government, yeah, I guess it was El Dorado's physicians. Anyway, when I heard the story and they calculated the radiation dosage that I got there, the radiation dosage I got from working, it was doctor who says back, and he says, I can't believe it. He says, you should have been dead long ago. He says, your working radiation is nothing compared to that one hospital treatment. So, of course, I lost every hair in the head. I used to have a big shock of curly hair, and I went completely bald from that, and all came back, but not as much. Yeah, not as much. Of course, I didn't like the curls anyway. No? Did they come back straight? Yeah. Oh, yeah? There you go. So, how long did you work up north with El Dorado? About five years. Okay. And about ten down here. What did you do down here? I was assistant chief of the... What was it called? Assistant chemist. No, assistant chief chemist, I guess was the title, but I came here and then I transferred over into... So, that was still analytical. Then I transferred over from that group to process metallurgy and became head of that. And as opposed to developing analytical methods in small beakers, then I'm talking about gallons and pounds or tonnage quantities when running a plant. So, that's where I remained in process metallurgy. Okay. And when I went from there to the government lab again, pretty well the same group that I had been there as a summer student, 15 years earlier, that's when I went as research and processes. So, this was for Canada? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, at that time it was called the Mines Branch. Yeah. Let's see, when I was there as a summer student it was called Mines and Technical Surveys. When I went back, it was called Energy Mines and Resources. And the division was called Can-Met. I'm not quite sure what it's called now. Can-Met, yeah. Yeah. I don't know what specific division, but yeah, Can-Met. You still have, yeah. Branch at NR Can. Yeah, that's what I didn't know, yeah. Yeah, Natural Resources Canada. Yeah. So, you did quite a bit of work with uranium for Can-Met. Yeah. Could you talk a bit about that? Yeah, because of my background I guess at El Dorado, one of the jobs that took me to all the new mines, new uranium mines that were being developed. So, at that time, which would be 1957, when I joined the government, because El Dorado was a Crown Company. Okay. So, El Dorado came under the umbrella of the government, most of the financing was done on the uranium. They sold, so they were self-sufficient. With the government at that time, there were, one of the things that the Radio Activity Division did where I originally started, and which Can-Met continued, was to help these new mines starting up on their process metallurgy, how to treat the ore and how to recover the uranium from it with the highest possible grade of product. And so each ore responds slightly differently to the same process, and so you've got to tailor make the process a little bit depending on the mineralogy of that new plant. Was this all hydro metallurgy? Yeah. So it was all with solutions? Always solutions. Some of the ores had to undergo a flotation process for concentration or separation of a commodity. But generally speaking, the tail end was somewhere. So that, as part of this help to the mine, I would go around to talk to the chemists, talk to the people, sometimes get involved with a pile of plants for a short time. So we would have the ores from these different mines on test at Can-Met. But that was really only a small part of Can-Met's work. Can-Met had a lot of their own in-house research. And so it was really directed towards improving, developing better new methods, looking towards energy and environmental effects due to the process itself. In other words, trying to work environment into the equation. Were there at the time the big environmental hazards or damages that were being caused by this type of mining, by uranium? Well, it was the radionucreites that were escaping and going into the tailings. And then the sea beach from the tailings owed into the environment. So there's many radioactive daughters from a uranium ore. The uranium itself has a half-life of about 1,650 years. But one of the other elements that's radioactive is thorium-230. And that's over 4,000 years. Then you've got polonium and lead-210 and radium-226. These are all radioactive components. But at that time, we were really mostly concerned with uranium and shortly after with radium. So those are in solution. We've got radon gas that comes off of the rock itself, like underground. We've got other types of radiation that comes off of bags of ore just sitting there waiting to be, say, trucked from A to B or flown from the Arctic down to the refinery, which was in Port Hope at the time. Now that's one of that Blind River, which is just west of Elliott Lake. So there was all sorts of these developments on the hydrometallurgy, but also on the use of equipment in the uranium process. The introduction of new technology that was in development, say at universities, or maybe somebody has just come from the university and all very technically, he's got a good background in this one particular subject, so he introduces it to the government labs and then the project will start. So there's that type. But there's also, in those days, we had a lot of freedom of expression and one could have an idea and your boss even might shoot it down, but it wasn't cast and led either. You come back the next day and say, look, I did try this and it worked. Let's say go ahead and do it then. So it wasn't like it has become sense. I don't know whether it is. I don't think it is this way now, but I think the previous government it was, they shadowed everything. So it was a time of freedom of thinking and doing and it was, the criticism was that it was a glorified university that government labs had become. But I think at places like NRC and the government labs that can, I think it proved that we had the talent to produce stuff for the future. It didn't have to be used today. It can be used in the future and we should have that bank of information. So there's, in my field, which, although I had the interest in the whole aspect of the hydrometer, where's your flow sheet? I had a section eventually of about 35 people, about half of which were working on hydrometallurgy and the other half were working on tailings, waste and how to, and developing a tailings management type of approach and which I ended up writing a textbook on, that subject. And a couple of textbooks on the hydrometallurgical aspects but devoted to only one unit operation which is self-extraction. And that's from my personal endeavors. Remained, that became more of a hobby in later years. And that's because I, after retiring from CANMAT in 89, I spent, I think, 27 years or 26 years as a private consultant and I was consulting in all aspects of hydrometallurgy but particularly solvent extraction and also including the tailings management. So I started giving short courses on both of those in, well, no, the solvent extraction in 71 and probably given 100 or so of those courses. To schools or to companies? It started out as open ones. Anybody, well, really the very first courses I gave were mostly the senior owners of mines. It might be the owners, it might be the president who attended, people who knew nothing about the engineering or the chemistry. But had a lot of money invested. Yeah, they wanted to know what this new project and process was all about. Could it help them? And I remember giving one in Adelaide Australia along with a friend of mine from the UK and I think there were some like 32 or 42 people there. They were all technical people of some sort but none of them had ever brushed anywhere as close to this process. What was the process called? Solvent extraction. So we'd gone four days or three and a half days of lectures and they were getting a little more glass-eyed every day. And so I called the halt to it and I asked them for each one of them to get a sheet of paper and put it up around the wall, around the room and with their main problem, plant problem, and describe where that problem fit in their process. So showed the flow sheets and there's a problem there and maybe they can't filter or maybe they can't separate in purity or something. And then I said, okay, we'll divide everybody up into groups of three or four. So I want a chemist, I want an engineer and I want anybody with hydrometallurgy experience. And I said we can probably solve a lot of these problems right here now. Everybody shook their head, not possible. Well, I think we solved all but two. All with solvents extraction. Well, with the group that was there, even though none of them had worked together, they all had a good background in something, chemistry or engineering or some with hydrometallurgy. Some were accountants and new things about the costs of commodities. And they came up with some pretty good answers. So one of the major nickel company in Australia at the time, he came over to me in the last day and said, you think you'd come out to Perth? Because that's on the other side of the country and I'm on the east side. And take a look at our operations and give an in-house course on nickel for them. So I said sure. So they adopted the process right away. And that was similar through Canada and the States and most countries. UK I gave a lot. A lot of Europeans came to the UK ones and not too much mining in the UK. That is of minerals. But they blown the hull. They had a plant up and running on one of my processes within a couple of years. And some of that technology went over to places in Europe and from there trickled down through Belgium and plants that they owned in the Congo. And then a lot of this technology that we've been talking about in the course that suddenly started that down there. You really kind of applied it in many, many places around the world. And was extractive metallurgy, did you have patents in the solvent extraction? Yeah, I've got about 20, 21 filed patents. All having to do with solvent extraction? Yeah, I think there may be one or two that aren't solvent extraction. Yeah, there's one or two. And if you had to pick which one are you proudest of or that sticks out the most or you believe is the most important? Well, the one that I believe is the most important isn't being used. Okay. Explain. So that's called solvent involvement. That is, we do solvent extraction, apply the solvent to a slurry. After leaching instead of filtering, we mix the solution with the slurry, take out the value, and that means the solids going out and with the treated solution contains very little of, let's say, uranium. So instead of a normal operation recovery of maybe 95% which many of them plants are, it would be 99 something because if you filter it, you lose a lot of your values on the filter cake and it becomes an economic cost to do multiple washings. So that has the potential. So somewhere in the, I forget when it was, anyway, during my last part of working with the government I had a UN secondment through IAEA to go to First Egypt and then China. And China has uranium. Egypt doesn't have much. But China has uranium. They have refinery and they've been processing since we started here in Canada, essentially. At least since about the time the Elliot Lake Ores started, which would have been the late 50s, and plants looking very similar. They had gone using ion exchange for the recovery of uranium. They became a very inefficient process for them. They had poor recoveries, high maintenance, high chemical costs, high energy costs. And so they sent me over there, IAEA sent me over there to try to get all these things lowered and increase the recovery object being to have greater than 90% recovery with at least an 80% grade of product. So they did another thing that I had, I didn't get a patent on this. I felt rather didn't want to patent it. But this is to produce a final product called ammonium urinal tricarbonate. And this you could produce at the plant. And over to that, by heating you could produce U03, which is then can be treated with hydrogen to produce U02, and then we go from there to the U02 can-do reactor type of stuff, or you can go to reduce it further to uranium metal into one of the other generating station type of processes. So they had developed the same technology. So this was in the early 60s that I was working on that. And we ran our pile of plants, we produced our U02 up in Chalk River, and it was suitable. Chinese found the same thing, and so they had that on this particular plant that I worked at in China. So we converted that plant over to solvent extraction. And that is still going, very satisfactory. Now in the meantime, they had seen my reports on solvent pulp. There's several papers and there's a patent on it. They had read these and said to me at the Uranium Institute there, they told me the work you did on solvent pulp was very interesting, but there's one thing that you never did if you didn't get done. And I'm going to leave you to worry about it while you're lecturing today. So at the end of the day where I was giving some, well, I was giving lectures every day for about 30 days, he says, do you know what you didn't do? I said, no, I can't think of it. He said you didn't put it into practice. So I said that's true. We almost had it into practice at our own plant, but the geologists at the time that we were ready to go, the geologist said we didn't have enough ore. We're going to have to close down in a couple of years. And we couldn't pay for the new plant. So it never did get put into practice. So they have a solvent pulp plant, at least one, I was told, for the Uranium and I was also told they had one for Vanadium. So that was a process which I think has got a patent on it, but it hasn't gone very far. Well, sometimes it takes time. Yes, so really the patent has gone furthest and most work has been done on it is cobalm nickel separation. And there's a big flurry in Australia. Different companies used it, various reasons why they never really made a good success either using their own equipment, some little thing in the design. Companies can become very protective of their technology or the plant that they put in. They don't like somebody like myself come along and tell them that you've done it wrong. So it's a bit unfortunate. But we applied the same process in Cuba and three or four successful pilot plants were run. We applied the same process to or in Burundi Central East Africa, another place that I worked. Pilot plants were run in Arizona and a very large one in Burundi. So it depends much on the mineralogy of the ore and the design configuration of the plant, materials construction and so many things separating a winner from a loser. That's what's so tricky and delicate with chemistry. So it's a continuing challenge. That's what keeps you with it. We'll switch it up a little bit and I have a few more questions and then we'll call it a day. These are more social questions. So through your career, how absent or present were women in the workplace? And has that changed? I think it's changed from sort of almost zero to a hundred now. And when I started, let's see, in my class in university, I think we had two women and I think that first year class was probably a hundred. Well, time when I got down to graduate school, there was just this one girl, the one that I was working with. It was the only one. There was, I think, eight of us on the graduate program. Eight years started, but I think there was only eight of us into graduate studies. Now you go to the university. It doesn't matter where you go in the world. I would say that there's at least 50% are women. Yeah, in universities, yes. Yeah, there's actually more women now than men in university. It's still lower, though, for... The workplace. The workplace, but also for your specifics like engineering, the sciences, especially, but more the natural resource industry, that still I think it's around in the 20%. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I think. But in terms of, in general, the population of women in university is now higher than that. Yeah. Now there's, in a lot of the, a lot of solvent extraction plants around the world, many plants, the leader is a woman. And the technicians out on the plant are women. So I think I found the greatest number of women in Finland, I think. Oh, yeah? I think it was Finland. Finland and Russia also had a lot. Okay. Another question, you traveled a lot. Where, just for fun, where was your favorite place to go? If you had to pick one. I guess it was Australia. Yeah, Australia. I was there more than 60 times. Wow, okay. Wow. But I guess the more you go to a place, the more you like it. Yeah. So a lot of these places, I wouldn't go back necessarily. You know, I liked Egypt as a country. Their attitude towards production was rather slack. While I was there, they would be incredible and very dedicated because many of the professionals wanted to go one step higher and get their PhD. So the projects, almost all the projects that I had to, that I was looking after at the atomic energy in Cairo were PhD-oriented. So while I would be there on a visit, those PhD students were working very hard. When I would leave, research almost stopped. Just know the initiative wasn't there. But you go to China and it was quite different. There was a lot of women there in the plants. A lot of engineers. Engineers and chemists and really smart people. I would leave them with what I thought would be enough work for three or four months. And I'd get a call from IEA. Sam, we've got the report of the work you left them. They're ready for you to come back. I said, that's not possible. It's only a month. They've got it all done. So he could go back again. Pretty efficient. And the women were just every bit as good as men. Perhaps a little more detailed. That's what I hear. They're also more careful. Yeah, they're careful. But they will protest quicker than the men. If they don't like it, they'll tell you. Yeah, they'll let you know. In any language. Another question I'd like to ask is, do you believe there's a disconnect between the mining industry, the natural resource industry, and the rest of the world, the general public? I think there is definitely. And also, why is that? I think it's all communication. The lack of it. People don't have the time to read, it seems. I mean, I'm a great reader. But I don't read nearly enough about what's going on technically. You know, you take a look at TV and the percentage of news that's technical related to our resources or to medicine or to agriculture, it's next to nil. So if people aren't hearing it, seeing it, reading it, and if they're not of an inquiring mind about that subject, they're not listening. So I think that's one of the reasons. I mean, I felt when I was with the government that there was this terrible disconnect. People out there really didn't understand what we were doing. Certainly the governing body at the time, very little of them understood. I was assigned to the minister's office, minister mine's office for six months back in the, I guess it was somewhere around the mid-1970s. And part of my duties was to spend every afternoon in question period in Parliament. I had to be at my desk at 8 o'clock in the morning. And by that time, the minister already had gone through stuff and he'd have a bunch of file folders on my desk with different colors, so different priorities. Some of which had to be in by 9 o'clock. These were the ones he had to deal with in Parliament that afternoon. So he'd go through the question period and then they break for, he'd go down the capture and have lunch or dinner. And then into these committees, maybe the committees are only five or ten people, these committee meetings might go to 3 o'clock in the morning, you're back at work at 8. And I found it very enlightening listening to some of these questions and listening to the answers realizing that here are these, these are the people who are governing our country and they haven't got an idea what's going on. So, you know, from the professional side, the professional can find out very easy because he just has to go to a conference and all the same thinking people are there. And you learn but unfortunately there's a long distance between the first note in the street and the scientist or the chemist and the engineer, geologist. We have such a wealth of knowledge in Canada. Canada was really one of the, was the leader in mining and metallurgy when I started my career. And we took a big hit this past ten years and sort of dropped behind the clouds but there's much of what's going on around the world in mining, metallurgy, geology, exploration, developed right here in Canada. All the, all the exploration, geology done in Egypt for instance was done by our geologists at Geological Survey here dating back, oh, in the 20s, 30s. I was, I was quite fascinated in my number of trips to Egypt to find out how highly the Egyptians thought of Canadian scientists and geologists, just the whole community. And I think Australia is the same thing when I first went there in 1976. They were quite a ways behind us. But they had all sorts of Canadian techniques they were doing. Oh yeah, we were, we were leaders in many facets of mining and metallurgy throughout the 60s, 70s, 80s, yeah. I think about 1979 or 80 on one of my trips there I was asked by their OSIMM, the equivalent of our CIM if I could give a talk on what we're doing here in Canada on resources because the Australians would like to hear whether they're going the right way because at that time they were producing concentrates of anything they could produce and shipping it to Japan. And, of course, I came over with a different story. And I said, well, our objective is to produce final products where we can if it's going to be economic for us and ship the final product over. But I say, even that we're not doing enough of. We should be aiming for more final products and less concentrates. But we do that with everything. We do it with wood. We ship over the wood and we buy plywood back at very high prices. So it's a philosophy of management in the future that we should be thinking of. Yeah. Last question for you. And that's if you were talking to someone much younger, like a student, for example, what would be the most important piece of advice or life lesson you could give them? Well, if you're lucky, you've had a good mentor. I was lucky. And I had a wonderful, wonderful mentor who was my boss from day one. And when I joined El Dorado, he came over about six months later and became my boss again. And we became the best of friends. This was over to Ness. So that's number one if you can hook up with somebody who can tell you everything and still be your friend. I think you have to be a good listener. I think another thing with respect to success and certainly with mine has been to be able to work with a team that to be on your own is too secluded, I think. Synergyism is gained with numbers. And I think the last thing is that you've got to run with your ideas. You can't let convention stop you from thinking. I think that so many things that I've done, patents that have resulted, have been because I said I don't believe it until I see it. And Cobalt-Nickel is the best example of that. That's why it's one of my best patents because the literature says that you cannot separate people in Cobalt unless you do multi-precipitation crystallizations. And, of course, that makes it very expensive. That's one reason why Cobalt was expensive. I didn't believe it. I figured it's got to be a way of if we use something like solvent extraction where we have a lot of chemistry going for us and we've got valencies and we've got pHs. We can do something with this coordination. And my partner friend, Al Mashbrook, who was a great chemist, much better chemist than me, we looked at this tantalizing question of Cobalt-Nickel saying it has to be, we should be able to break that. Then we did all these tests one day. Little beakers, probably 100 or so that morning. And nothing worked, nothing worked. So we had a whole counter of beakers we left when we went to lunch. We came back after lunch and there was one beaker there where we had a beautiful pink up in the upper layer, Cobalt, and down below we had the blueish green of Nickel. We had made the separation. Didn't have anything written on it. Didn't know what test that was. So it took us a couple of days to figure that one out. That's another piece of advice. Be organized. Label your stuff. Label your stuff, yeah. That took time so we didn't. Crazy. So we found out the reason and we were able to repeat that test and my friend, the mentor and other senior people from the lab at El Dorado in Tunney's pasture here were left the left town for a day I think or so meeting elsewhere. Anyway, it ended up that I was the top man and I was in charge. So when you're in charge, you make changes if you can. So we decided between Alan and I to run this pilot plant with what we thought might be a new process and we run them in these columns which was also new for, they've been used for uranium but I was going to now use them for cobalt nickel because there could be many theoretical stages in there which is what happened it was. So we had this running and all the brass returns about three o'clock that afternoon and there's this beautiful technicolor all the pink coming off and the blue going out the bottom and so I said, what did you got there? And I said, that's the impossible. It's cobalt nickel separation. He says, great. He says, we got to continue that which we did and so we produced products and we sold them. It was only the start but it's the one where I followed the dream. Yeah, absolutely. And did the impossible. And did the impossible. Then somebody wrote a song there somewhere. Yeah. Well, thanks a lot. Appreciate it.