Letters Received to H.H. Barker, September 12, 1931

UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI COLUMBIA DEPARTMENT OF CHEMISTRY September 12th, 1931. Mr. H. H. Barker 535 Pearl Street New York City SEP 14 1931 My dear Barker: Let me give you a little account of the progress we have made with the men at Rolla concerning experiments on the concentrates of carnotite ore: After careful inquiry of the State Geologist who has been a long-time friend of mine and who has served as State Geologist stationed at Rolla for nearly 25 years, I took up the question with Mr. Will Coghill who is in charge of the Mississippi Valley Experiment Station of the United States Bureau of Mines. The experiment station is lo- cated at Rolla and I find that this station is the one which has the most up to date investigators in flotation, especially the flotation of non-sulfide ores. Mr. Coghill is ready to cooperate on this experiment and Mr. Bruce Klemmer who is directly in charge of flotation experiments will probably run a preliminary experiments on three samples of carnotite which I have supplied from the ore samples left over from your investigations here ten years ago. On a second visit to Rolla this week in company with Dr. Breckenridge we have made some further advance in planning these experiments. Dr. Schrenk in charge of the Department of Chemistry at the School of Mines enrolled a graduate student from the University of Utah who has had one year of experience in the Bureau of Mines Experiment Station there and this man is interested in flotation problems. He will thus be put on as a graduate research student on this problem. He will probably take care of the analytical work that is, analysis of the ores and concentrates for uranium and vanadium. We have not yet decided definitely about a program for making the radioactive measurements which should be a part of the investigation. I would like to see another graduate student put on to make the radioactive measurements under my direction but I fear that we shall not be able to interest a man in this phase of the work unless we can offer him a little financial assistance; but at the present time we are not making any definite plans for we would like to hear something about the preliminary experiments which are now pending. We hope, however, that they will be encouraging and as soon as we hear, we shall call upon you for assistance in securing typical ore samples; and we may have the further courage to call upon you for about $600. for graduate assis- tance to take care of the radioactive measurements. This morning we had a visit from a man who is proposing to take the Doctor's Degree in metallurgy working