Our History
Mineral Industry Advisers Since 1911
Behre Dolbear is one of the oldest, continuously operating, mineral industry consultancy firms in the world. Since 1911 the firm has specialised in studies for commercial and multi-lateral financial institutions, mining companies, governments and governmental agencies, legal firms and other parties with interests in the mineral industry.
The firm was founded in Denver, Colorado in the United States, by Samuel H. Dolbear, Charles H. Behre, Jr., Parke A. Hodges, and Theodore B. Counselman, who had associated with them other geologists, mining engineers, milling and metallurgical technologists, and mineral economists, with extensive explorational, operating, and managerial experience in the metallic and nonmetallic fields.
Dr Samuel H. Dolbear was born in Somerville, Mass. in 1886 son of Prof. Amos Emerson Dolbear (Amos Dolbear – Wikipedia), a telephonic inventor. He attended Tufts College and Clark University. After a few years as miner and prospector, he had a succession of important posts with several major companies.
He served as President of Wright, Dolbear Co., Inc., of New York and headed its successor, Behre, Dolbear & Co., mining, geological and metallurgical consultants. During a career that encompasses more than half a century, Dr. Dolbear has written many published technical papers and holds a number of U. S. and Canadian patents, including about thirty on mineral processes and apparatus. He was prominent in activities involving trona, potash, magnesite, refractories, asbestos, mica, borax and others. His operations included mine examination, plant design, and construction.
Dr. Dolbear was also a former consultant to the U. S. Bureau of Mines; former Chairman of the advisory committee on chromite, and a former member of the advisory committee on mica, Army & Navy Munitions Board. In 1945 he was appointed mineral adviser to the Provisional Government of Korea; and in 1947, technical adviser to the National Resources Committee of China. Dr. Dolbear was particularly active in its Society of Mining Engineers, especially in the Industrial Minerals Division of which he was first Chairman. He was the Editor of the first two editions of “Industrial Minerals and Rocks.
Charles Henry Behre, Jr., was born in 1896 and died February 18, 1986, a month before his ninetieth birthday.
Dr. Behre’s teaching career spanned fifty years, during which time he profoundly influenced geology and the other natural sciences. He will be remembered by many students and peers around the world as one of the last great generalists who focused his broad intellectual background and ability on the genesis of ore deposits, He was also a world authority on the economics of minable raw materials.
Besides teaching activities, which included chairmanship of the Columbia Department of Geology from 1956 to 1959, he took an active part in many professional societies, serving as Councillor, Secretary, Vice-President, and President of the Society of Economic Geologists, and as Distinguished Lecturer for the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, the American Geological Institute, the Earth Science Panel, and the National Science Foundation. He was a founding member of the International Association on Genesis of Ore Deposits; Vice-President of the New York Academy of Science, and Chairman of the Committee on Geological Exploration, New York Joint Resource and Development Board. He was a Fellow of the Geological Society of America, the American Geographical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Mineralogical Society of America, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Internationally he was an honorary member of the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina and the Association Ingenieur de Leige. Among his awards were the Posepny medal of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, the Neil Miner Award of the American Association of Geology Teachers, and an honorary doctorate from the College of Franklin and Marshall.
The past members of the firm have served as consultants and technical advisers to private clients and corporations as well as to the governments of many foreign countries. The firm has established representatives in Europe and Asia from whom direct and authoritative information can be obtained concerning local and economic conditions relative to particular projects under consideration; thus a worldwide and comprehensive service is provided.
Since its founding, the company has spanned the industry from the primitive pick and shovel days of mining to the digital age. The company specialises in performing studies and consulting for a wide range of businesses with interests in the minerals industry.
Behre Dolbear is a company established to focus on a comprehensive range of services which can deliver a project from mine to metal through conceptual engineering, pre-feasibility phase, final bankable study phase, and following on to detailed engineering design, procurement, construction management, training and maintenance planning.
