Sam Gordon and the Tsumeb azurite.(Biography)

Sam Gordon (1897-1952) was a prominent Philadelphia mineralogist, and the author of many works on descriptive mineralogy and crystallography, including The Mineralogy of Pennsylvania (1922) and the description of nine new mineral species. He was also the principal founder (at the age of 19) of The American Mineralogist and served as curator of minerals at the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences for 30 years.

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Samuel George Gordon was born in Philadelphia on June 21, 1897, the son of German Jewish immigrants Flora and Isaac Gordon, a cigar-maker. He attended classes at the Wagner Free Institute, where the avid young mineralogist and mineral collector Dr. Edgar T. Wherry inspired his interest in mineralogy and became his friend and mentor.

In 1913, at the age of 16, Gordon received a Student Fellowship to work part-time as an assistant in the mineralogy department of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences. Gordon proved so useful to the Academy that in 1915 he was appointed assistant curator of minerals and given a salary of about $1,000/year.

In 1921 Gordon traveled through Ecuador, Bolivia, Chile and Peru on a six-month collecting trip sponsored in part by George Vaux Jr. (1863-1927), wealthy nephew of William S. Vaux, whose fabulous mineral collection had been bequeathed to the Academy in 1882. His second major collecting expedition, in 1923, was to Greenland, and his third (1925) took him back to the Andes, where he was particularly successful at Llallagua, Bolivia.

Gordon's fourth and most ambitious expedition, eight months long, took place in 1929-1930, taking him to South America and parts of central and southern Africa. He shipped 63 boxes of specimens back to the Academy from Bolivia, and 90 boxes from various localities in Africa, including 12 cases (over 500 pounds) from Tsumeb in South-West Africa. It was at Tsumeb on December 10, 1929 that he discovered one of the most extraordinary pockets of azurite crystals ever encountered in that famous mine.

"The most interesting mineral specimens I collected on this journey," he later wrote, "were the azurite crystals at a copper mine at Tsumeb in South-West Africa. I visited the 8th level workings first, dropping quickly by cage in a vertical shaft some 700 feet deep, and climbing down to the working stopes below. The ore looked very compact and unpromising for finding any azurite crystals. But high up in one place I noticed some bluish stains. With a ladder I reached the blue-stained area, and started to work with a hammer ...