Sheldon P. Wimpfen Papers, 1934-1994

Mining engineer Sheldon Phillip Wimpfen was born December 3, 1913 in Norwalk, Connecticut. In 1934, he received a degree in mining engineering from the University of Texas College of Mines and Metallurgy. His mining career began in the gold mines of the Colorado Front Range where he worked underground in various mines. He then moved to Arizona where he worked as a nipper, mucker, and miner at the Octave gold mine near Congress Junction. He returned to Texas in 1935 to work for American Metal Company, where he was promoted to mine engineer at the Presidio Mine in Shafter.

In 1937, the lure of travel took Wimpfen to Mindanao in the Philippine Islands, where he discovered a gold mine in the Diuata Mountains. He then worked three years near Baguio on Luzon as chief chemist and assayer for the Balatoc gold mine. The threat of invasion by the Japanese took him back to Shafter, Texas for a year, then on to the Benton Mine near Grants Pass, Oregon. When that mine was shut down in 1942, Wimpfen went to the tin mines of Potosi and Pulacayo, Bolivia. He returned to the U.S. in 1943 to teach civil engineering at Texas A&M University for a year before entering the U.S. Marine Corps.

When WWII ended, Wimpfen worked in New York City as assistant editor of Mining and Metallurgy. He moved to Washington, D.C. in 1948 to become the editor of Mining Congress Journal. In 1951, Wimpfen joined the Atomic Energy Commission to run its program on recovery of uranium from low-grade resources. With the need for more uranium to meet military demand during the Korean War, he transferred to the AEC’s Grand Junction, Colorado Operations Office to direct its uranium exploration and production program.

In 1956, Wimpfen moved to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania as Vice President of the Glen Alden Corporation. Then, after a short engineering post with Western Machinery in San Francisco, he went to Richmond, Virginia as vice president of Reynolds Mining, the raw materials arm of Reynolds Metals. He traveled to Toquepala, Peru in 1967 to become president and general manager of Southern Peru Copper Corporation, which operated one of the world’s largest copper mines. From 1970 to 1980, Wimpfen worked for the U.S. Bureau of Mines as assistant director, then chief mining engineer. After retiring from the Bureau in 1980, he became a mining consultant, working on projects in Iran and the United States.