THE EXPERIENCES THAT MAKE MONTANA TECH UNIQUE By Sherman Cahill
At Montana Tech, learning isn’t just an abstraction, and it isn’t something done exclusively behind classroom doors, while seated in desks. Instead, learning is hands-on, and principles learned behind the desk are applied in the lab. At Montana Tech, learning often means getting your hands dirty.
Nothing demonstrates that ethos better than the Orphan Boy. This mine was founded by Copper King William Clark and gifted, along with its sister the Orphan Girl (now part of the World Mining Museum), to Montana Tech in 2010. In 2012 it was opened up as a living laboratory for students to put what they’ve learned to use. I asked Scott Rosenthal, Chair of the Mining Engineering Department and instructor of the Practical Underground Mining class, how far you’d have to go to get a similar experience. “Well, Montana Tech has the only on-campus underground laboratory and teaching center in the U.S.” “I believe Freiberg in Germany has an under-campus lab,” he added. The Orphan Boy now functions as a lab to support coursework, as well as a research facility. Professor Rosenthal elaborated on just a few of its uses: “The Geological Engineering department uses the facility for mapping structure and weathering of the rock; Safety Health and Industrial Hygiene (OSH) have had mine safety classes visit the underground mine, and performed joint research with Mining Engineering in noise monitoring, dust monitoring, and hand-arm vibration assessment; Metallurgical and Materials Engineering have collected mineralized material for a mineral processing lab; and Mining Engineering uses the facility for ventilation and geomechanics labs as well as research in the area of controlled blasting, near-field blasting vibration assessment, and explosives performance.” The Orphan Boy has additional uses, too, as the only existing mine in town that still displays the veins of ore and minerals for which Butte is justifiably world famous. Students from all around the
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world, including West Virginia University, British Columbia Institute of Technology, and the University of Montreal, have come to observe practical mining in action. Then there’s research: in 2010, following a feasibility study, the Department of Energy awarded Montana Tech a grant to install heat exchangers in the Natural Resources Building as well as in the 300 gallons of warm water contained in the shaft. The water in the mine now provides some of the heat for the campus building. The presence of the Orphan Boy is a tremendous boon to Montana Tech, and to Butte, Montana. Other schools have to be content to learn about mining from books and whiteboards, but in Butte, they can do it from the privileged vantage of hundreds of feet underground. This may be a bit of cultural bias and hometown pride speaking here, but I seriously doubt that you’d get a better practical education in hard-rock mining if you learned to speak Deutsch and shipped off to Freiberg. Or maybe you know a prospective student who isn’t interested in getting their hands dirty. No matter—we can go the other way entirely. How about they spend some time learning in the cleanest room they’ve ever visited? No, not the dorm rooms, alas. We’re talking about the Nanotechnology Lab, a space kept so spotless that it’s certainly the cleanest lab of its sort in Montana, if not the whole Pacific Northwest. The lab has to be that clean, not to mention temperature and humidity controlled, to perform ultra-delicate fabrications of microscopic components. The tiny machines crafted there will end up on satellites, in consumer electronics, and wherever else a tiny, tiny bit (at least when it comes to size) of Butte ingenuity is needed.
