Walter Renton Ingalls died on 25th February, 1956, at his home at Boxford, Massachusetts. He was 90 years of age.
Dr. Ingalls, a direct descendant of one of the settlers of 1628, was born at Lynn, Mass., and graduated B.S. mining engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1886. He was engaged in mining and metallurgy at Leadville and elsewhere in Colorado, and in 1890 became editor of Engineering and Mining Journal, resigning in 1892 to open tin mines in Mexico for Pittsburg and Mexican Tin Mining Co. A year later he set up a consulting mining engineering practice in New York City, and during 1893 and 1894 visited professionally various mining states in the U.S.A., Canada, Belgium, Germany and Poland, devoting himself especially to the metallurgy of zinc. During 1894 he had charge of operations in Florida of the Illinois Phosphate Co. and later became metallurgist to Gold and Silver Extraction Co. of America, Ltd. He was manager of a cyanide works at Cripple Creek, Colorado, in 1895, and in 1896 of copper-matte smelting works at Quien Sabe mine, Durango, Mexico.
He returned to New York in 1897, moving to Boston in 1899, and continued his consulting work until 1947, specializing in the mining and metallurgy of zinc. He contributed to the technical press as assistant editor of five volumes of The mineral industry (of which he was editor from 1905 to 1910), and as editor of Engineering and Mining journal in 1897 and from 1905 to 1919. From 1899 to 1904 he was metallurgical engineer to American Zinc, Lead and Smelting Co., Columbia Lead Co. and Laharpe Zinc Smelting Co., and in 1905 to 1906 was appointed chief of the Canadian Government Commission to report on zinc resources of British Columbia, and was its chairman from 1910 to 1914. He was chairman of a committee of consulting engineers in the U.S. Bureau of Mines on Prevention of Accidents in Metal Mines, 1911 to 1915, and of the U.S. Committee on Revision of the Mining Law, 1917 to 1923.
Dr. Ingalls received an honorary degree of doctor of engineering of the University of Missouri in 1923. From 1920 to 1947 he devoted much of his time to the newly founded American Bureau of Metal Statistics. He was the author of several books, among them Production and properties of zinc (1902), Metallurgy of zine and cadmium (1903), Lead smelting and refining (1906), Lead and zinc in the United States (1908), Wealth and income of the American people (1922), World survey of the zinc industry (1931); and he contributed many articles on mining, metallurgy, economics and weights and measures, including a paper in the Institution Transactions (vol. 26, 1916-1917) on ‘Shall Great Britain and America adopt the metric system?’
Dr. Ingalls was elected a Member of the Institution in 1904. He was also a member of several American professional societies.
Vol. 66, Trans IMM 1956-57, pp.306-7
