Talk:Fred Chester Bond

"Bond's Law"
On line 2 of the article, the "citation needed" comment is not valid because the Wiki page Comminution calls it "Bond's Law." — Preceding unsigned comment added by Imat6441 (talk • contribs) 19:47, 24 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia is NOT a reliable reference.  Teapot  george Talk  19:49, 24 June 2011 (UTC)
 * As far as I can tell from the sourcing on various Wikipedia articles, the only person calling it "Bond's Law" appears to be Bond himself. And given that it appears only to be a quick-and-dirty estimation, calling it a "law" appears to be an exaggeration. HrafnTalkStalk(P) 06:08, 25 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Bond's original paper was titled "Third Theory of Comminution", published by the AIME in the journal Mining Engineering in 1952. If Wikipedia is to be a decent reference, the proper term "Theory" should be used. There is no benefit to calling them "Laws". The statement regarding "laws" adds nothing to this page. Fred Bond never called his third theory a law. If it is called a law elsewhere, that is wrong. Papers, such as Jankovic et. al., Journal of SAIMM, 2010 that call them "laws" call them theories as well. Sometimes in the same paragraph. Indeed, in the Jankovic paper, the Bond paper referred to above is misquoted as the "Third Law".John G Eggert (talk) 18:57, 31 October 2016 (UTC)

Bond on Bond
I'm stripping out the following ludicrously excessive amount of material cited to Bond's autobiographical works. If third-party sources can be found for it, or a WP:CONSENSUS for special case being made for any specific details, then they can be reincluded. HrafnTalkStalk(P) 06:22, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

...best known as author of the Third Theory of Comminution (sometimes called Bond's Law) in 1951 for crushing of ore, allowing for accurate predictions of energy required in a rock milling operation. A student of religion as well as science, he is also known for his metaphysical belief in the immaterial ether as God which he detailed and articulated in his writing.

Early life
He was born to Frank J. and Hallie (Songer) Bond, at Belcher Hill, Colorado, on what is, as of 2011, Jefferson County's White Ranch Park near the city of Golden. He was the oldest child with two sisters, Grace and Dorothy. His parents moved to an irrigated farm in Maple Grove west of Denver when he was quite young. His childhood was typical for rural children of the age, including the hard work of tending animals and crops. Father Frank, originally a rancher with a 6th grade education, became a respected community leader, was elected County Treasurer and County Clerk, President of the local Grange and served as manager of the Grange farmers’ store.

Education
After graduation as Salutatorian from Wheat Ridge High School in 1917, Bond went on to Denver University but at the end of his freshman year chose to transfer to the more challenging Colorado School of Mines, where he earned a B.S. Degree in 1922. After graduation he worked at several assaying jobs and taught as Chemistry Instructor at his alma mater. One of his assaying jobs was in Honduras in the midst of their bloody 1923 revolution. His continued studies at the School of Mines earned Bond a Masters in Chemical Engineering in 1926.

Career in mining
A few more short-term jobs in Arizona, Tennessee, and elsewhere were followed by a job offer from the Allis-Chalmers Manufacturing Company of West Allis, Wisconsin, a major manufacturer of ore crushing mills. He worked for Allis-Chalmers (A-C) as a Mining Engineer and Manager from 1930 to his retirement in 1965. An early A-C assignment sent Bond to the Eldorado Mine on the eastern shore of Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territory of Canada for two years, to install a concentrator mill for the first high grade uranium plant in the Americas. Uranium was then used to produce radium chloride for medical procedures, but in 1942 the mine was taken over by the Canadian government to produce plutonium for atomic weapons. About 30% of the uranium in “Little Boy,” the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, is estimated to have come from Eldorado. His next A-C assignment took Bond to the high Andes of Peru, and the mining town of Huachon, where for a year he assisted a Peruvian company in installing and operating a plant which processed 250 tons of gold ore per day. His wife and two young sons joined him there. Another assignment in Nazca followed, lengthening the family's Peruvian experience another six months. During subsequent years Bond had many shorter assignments in South and Central America as well as Mexico, Canada, and Australia.

Third Theory of Comminution (Bond's Law)
The accurate prediction of energy required to crush rock is crucial to efficiency and profitability of any ore processing operation. Two theories developed in the 1860s by German professors Rittinger and Kick were still in use by rock mill designers during the period 1930 to 1950. Bond did not agree with either theory. Based on his observations using new testing methods which he designed at the A-C laboratories during this period, and established through extensive analysis of rock breakage over several years, Bond developed the theory that the work required varies inversely as the square root of the diameter of the produced particles, or, by implication, as the length of the cracks produced. Bond's paper introducing his “Third Theory of Comminution” was formally presented at a meeting of the American Institute of Mining Engineers (AIME) in Mexico City in October 1951. At his retirement and move to Tucson, Arizona, in 1965, Bond was retained by A-C, continuing to serve as a consultant for the company and for other clients in the mining industry around the world until his death.

Personal beliefs
The product of a church-going family and the husband of a strictly religious wife, Bond devoted much thought and study to the origins of Man and the Universe, beginning in his 40s. He daily spent hours in his study, reading the Bible, then the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads and works on mysticism. His study resulted in a well defined personal belief system which did not fully align with any organized religion or theology, but relied on both rational scientific evidence and on personal subjective experience—or, as he often put it, the material and the immaterial. He believed in a real, all-pervasive but immaterial God who is the ether from which all matter and energy is derived. He cites gravity, not understood by Science at all, as the love-force of the Ether-God.

[End of excessive autobiographical material HrafnTalkStalk(P) 06:22, 25 June 2011 (UTC) ]

Claims not support by third-party refs
HrafnTalkStalk(P) 06:33, 25 June 2011 (UTC)
 * http://www.mining.ubc.ca/faculty/meech/MINE290/proces/Bond.php makes no mention of the "Third Theory of Comminution", "Bond's Law" (only the "Bond Work Index"), that "the accurate prediction of energy required to crush rock is crucial to efficiency and profitability of any ore processing operation", that "two theories developed in the 1860s by German professors Rittinger and Kick were still in use by rock mill designers during the period 1930 to 1950", that "Bond did not agree with either theory", or that "based on his observations using new testing methods which he designed at the A-C laboratories during this period, and established through extensive analysis of rock breakage over several years".
 * http://www.mining.ubc.ca/faculty/meech/MINE290/proces/size_reduction.php does not mention that the Bond Work Index "is still widely used throughout the world"
 * http://www.smenet.org/awards/awardIssued.cfm?awardId=699&category=6 makes no mention of Bond.


 * http://www.smenet.org/awards/awardIssued.cfm?awardId=699&category=6 says "Awarded To: Fred Chester Bond". How does that make no mention of Bond? --Demiurge1000 (talk) 10:34, 25 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Sorry, must have misread that one. HrafnTalkStalk(P) 13:44, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

Notability
Perhaps we might initiate a discussion of notability here?

Some background on the role of crushing and grinding equipment in mining:

Many commercial mining operations have two parts: a mine, from which mineralized ore is extracted; and a mill, which crushes, grinds, and processes that ore to make it commercially transportable and (where relevant) capable of being further purified by processes such as smelting. Broadly speaking, a mill extracts material that contains an economically high percentage of the minerals of interest, which can then be transported for further processing or direct use, and leaves behind a great deal of ore which is mostly 'waste.' (This chart, prepared in the context of the environmental impacts of mining, graphically illustrates the various degrees to which economically valuable minerals must be separated from waste ore.)

In most cases, to extract economically-valuable ore from hard rock in a mill, you must first crush that rock to particles of sufficiently small dimension in order to apply follow-on extraction processes, such as gravity separation and/or treatment with chemicals via processes like heap leaching. Typically, you would start with coarse crushing using equipment such as a jaw or cone crusher, followed by finer grinding using equipment such as a ball or rod mill.

Regarding the contributions made to mining engineering by Fred C. Bond, in the area of improving predictions of the behavior of crushing and grinding equipment:

My understanding of the impact of Fred C. Bond's contributions to mining engineering is that, as a result of his work, most notably the Third Theory of Comminution and the various work indicies he also contributed, mining enterprises and consultancies can more accurately specify upfront the type, size, energy requirements, etc. of the crushing and grinding equipment to be used in a specific mill. That is, this specification can be carried out with significantly greater predictability, and hence with a lower probability of costly error.

According to one mining consultancy, ALS Ammtec, accurate specification of this equipment can be critical to the overall success of a mining project, because a majority of the up-front capital expense for most mining projects is devoted to the equipment for crushing and grinding ore. Admittedly, they're a self-interested party, but they'd be unlikely to make such an assertion if it were not recognized as at least broadly accurate by their current and potential clients in the industry. It is not an exaggeration, then, to state that Bond's work, by inference, may have contributed materially to the economic success of a great many mining projects and have been of considerable importance to that industry:

"In most resource projects the majority of the capital expenditure will be spent in the comminution area with the milling circuit itself being the most expensive item. Should the design parameters for comminution plant not be correctly determined then the entire project may fail."

Regarding notability of this biographical article:

It's revealing to see:
 * The frequency of his name in the Wikipedia article on Geometallurgy, which summarizes current practices in that field.
 * Four of Bond's indices mentioned by ALS Ammtec on the page on which the quote above was found.
 * Multiple mentions of details of Bond's career and the impact of his contributions to mining engineering, in several published books in his field (citations to follow).
 * The book, devotes approximately three pages to Bond's contributions and career, as can be viewed via.

Aronro (talk) 16:10, 30 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Yes, Lynch & Rowland (with occasional addition from other sources) would provide a perfectly adequate basis for a biographical article. HrafnTalkStalk(P) 05:50, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

Response
HrafnTalkStalk(P) 04:58, 28 June 2011 (UTC)
 * 1) Please don't put ref-tags into talk-space, they nearly always become a pain in its more dynamic environment than article-space.
 * 2) Let's get something straight -- there is no "Third Theory of Comminution" -- as this is not a scientific theory. Likewise there is no "Bond's Law" as this is not a scientific law. All it is is an estimation formula -- an "index" in the phraseology of the two of your sources that actually mention Bond.
 * 3) I am sure that Bond made a valuable contribution to the field of Comminution, and that this contribution should be noted there (but with third-party citations). However we have little or no third-party biographical information with which to create a biography of the man himself that is adequate and compliant with policy. This is why WP:Notability requires "significant coverage" which it defines to be "sources address the subject directly in detail, so no original research is needed to extract the content." Lacking third-party sources that achieve this, the choices are merger or deletion.

Reply
First, thank you very much for your patient editorial review and editing help, Hrafn.
 * 1) Please don't put ref-tags into talk-space... D'accord and thanks. Am an as-yet inexperienced editor of Wikipedia articles and had difficulty identifying the preferred way to provide cites on talk pages - will look further into the in-line cite formats. (Am hoping this reply format is reasonable, as well.)
 * 2) Distinction between estimation formulas and theory. That's a useful point. Perhaps more investigation is needed as to whether there may be a meaningful distinction between the several work indexes that Bond contributed to mining engineering, which as you correctly noted are estimation formulas, and what several sources refer to -- some in the abstract, with Bond's work not necessarily central to those cites -- as a theory or theories of comminution. Some thoughts:
 * 3) Several of the first results returned from a use that phrase.
 * 4) The most plausible distinction I've been able to come up with, noting this is from my layperson's perspective, is that theories of comminution may be abstract models, meant to apply universally to the fracturing of particles, whether or not taking place during crushing and grinding work -- and in that sense may be closer to, say, other physical or engineering models -- whereas the work indexes appear to be applied formulas, intended to help estimate the work output and energy requirements of a specific type of crushing or grinding equipment. This  from page 62 of  describes two aspects of a theory of comminution: the physics of particle fracture and a quantitative model of the rate of breakage of an assembly of particles. There is another take on what such a theory might consist of, described in the abstract to, with a focus on the physics of the energy required to break particles and on the transfer of energy to the just-fractured particles.
 * 5) In that sense, it appears that in 1951, Bond might plausibly be said to have contributed a third theory of comminution -- a theoretical model for the fracturing of particles. This theory appears from casual reading to have been viewed by some observers as a major improvement over the two previous theories developed in the late 1800s, acknowledging that it build upon those past theories, particularly the second.
 * 6) In the 1940s and 1950s, or thereabouts, he also contributed a set of work indexes, or estimation formulas, which appear to have been used widely in mining engineering -- in part apparently in so-called "testwork protocols," in evaluating actual ore samples from a project and thus identifying the type, size and energy requirements of suitable crushing or grinding equipment. As you note, there is a clear, meaningful distinction between these work indexes and any theory or theories of comminution.
 * 7)  ... little or no third-party biographical information. Noted with thanks for this valuable clarification. Perhaps that material may yet exist -- there may be a third-party-written obituary, article or interview, or a biography published in conjunction with an award in Bond's life, for instance -- which has yet to be cited? Absent this, your overview of options makes sense for now. Is there a recognized process by which a biography can remain as a stub for a well-defined time, until such third-party information can be provided? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Aronro (talk • contribs)


 * As long as the article is not so bad as to meet the criteria of WP:SPEEDY deletion (which this article avoids by a reasonable margin), it comes down to whether anybody considers it worth their while to WP:AFD it. Speaking for myself (and as long as it doesn't refill with autobiographical material to too great an extent), I see no problem with leaving it be for the time being -- if worse comes to worst (and it ends up being merged), it will at least provide a useful magnet for material for addition to Comminution (which is currently both rather brief and rather poorly sourced). (On the topic of obituaries, they tend to be a mixed bag reliability/independence-wise -- some are prewritten by major newspapers in preparation for the death of a celebrity, others are family-written paid inclusions.) HrafnTalkStalk(P) 16:29, 28 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Thanks, Hrafn -- this characterization is valuable! Over the next several weeks, will begin the task of identifying third-party sources that characterize Bond's professional contributions, and/or which can serve as independent cites for key biographical details.