Balbach Smelting & Refining Company (also known as Balbach and Sons Refining and Smelting Company) was a smelting plant in
Newark, New Jersey
Newark ( , ) is the most populous city in the U.S. state of New Jersey and the seat of Essex County and the second largest city within the New York metropolitan area.electrolytic refinery in the United States, and until its closure in the 1920s, it was the second largest metal processing enterprise in the United States.
History
The company president was Edward Balbach Jr., a
metallurgist
Metallurgy is a domain of materials science and engineering that studies the physical and chemical behavior of metallic elements, their inter-metallic compounds, and their mixtures, which are known as alloys.
Metallurgy encompasses both the sc ...
born in 1839 in
Karlsruhe
Karlsruhe ( , , ; South Franconian: ''Kallsruh'') is the third-largest city of the German state (''Land'') of Baden-Württemberg after its capital of Stuttgart and Mannheim, and the 22nd-largest city in the nation, with 308,436 inhabitants. ...
,
Baden, Germany
The Grand Duchy of Baden (german: Großherzogtum Baden) was a state in the southwest German Empire on the east bank of the Rhine. It existed between 1806 and 1918.
It came into existence in the 12th century as the Margraviate of Baden and subse ...
. He came to the United States in 1848 with his father Edward Balbach Sr. (1804–1890), who started the Balbach family fortune by collecting gold and silver dust from Newark jewelry shop floors, turning it into bullion. In 1865, Edward Balbach Jr. patented the "
Balbach Process Balbach may refer to:
* Balbach Smelting & Refining Company, a former metal smelting plant in Newark, New Jersey, US
* Oberbalbach ("Upper Balbach"), a district in Lauda-Königshofen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany
* Unterbalbach ("Lower Balbach"), ...
" which separated gold and silver from lead, which in 1872 evolved into something closely resembling the
Parkes process
The Parkes process is a pyrometallurgical industrial process for removing silver
Silver is a chemical element with the Symbol (chemistry), symbol Ag (from the Latin ', derived from the Proto-Indo-European wikt:Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Europ ...
, which had been developed earlier (1850) in England. In 1881, the Balbachs began to manufacture copper, just in time for a boom in demand thanks to the invention of the telephone and shortly thereafter electricity. In 1883, the factory opened an electrolytic refinery for copper, the first electrolytic refinery in the United States. In December 1910, Edward Balbach Jr. died at the age of 72 and control of the company passed to his daughter Julia's husband Edward Randolph (1870–1919) who had been working there since 1898. In 1919, Edward Randolph died and in the 1920s the Balbach operation was closed by its directors in favor of facilities closer to where the ore was mined. The County purchased the factory and converted it to a baseball field, located at
Riverbank Park
Riverbank Park is a park in the Ironbound section of Newark, New Jersey, Newark, Essex County, New Jersey, Essex County, New Jersey, United States. The park was opened in 1910 and was added to the National Register of Historic Places on April 16, ...
.
Factory conditions were difficult. In the 1880s, workers earned $1.50 to $1.65 a day. (worth $ to $ today). It could also be dangerous, if water seeped into a boiler it turned to steam and could cause an explosion, spraying molten metal onto workers who, if not immobilized, were known to run into the
Passaic River
Passaic River ( ) is a river, approximately long, in Northern New Jersey. The river in its upper course flows in a highly circuitous route, meandering through the swamp lowlands between the ridge hills of rural and suburban northern New Jersey, ...
. The accidents were not limited to workers - in January 1881 a boiler exploded causing a flying brick to strike a sleeping guest in the head through a third floor window at the nearby Balbach family mansion.