Gordon Battelle
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Gordon Battelle (10 August 1883 – 21 September 1923) was the founder of Battelle Memorial Institute, a non-profit independent research and development organization.
Gordon Battelle was born in Covington, Kentucky, to Ohio industrialist Colonel John Gordon Battelle (1845–1918) and his wife Annie Maude Battelle née Norton (1865–1925). He was named for his grandfather, prominent Methodist minister Gordon Battelle, who had helped found the state of West Virginia before dying of disease as a chaplain in the American Civil War. John Gordon Battelle had become a pioneer in the steel industry as owner of Columbus Iron & Steel Company.[1] His wife, Annie Maude Norton Battelle, was a suffragette. They married in Memphis, Tennessee in 1881, where John Gordon Battelle had moved from Wheeling, West Virginia to establish an iron manufacturing company. The family moved to the Cincinnati, Ohio metropolitan area (which includes Covington) as John Gordon Battelle established the Piqua Rolling Mill Company and the Cincinnati Corrugating Company. In 1905, the family moved to Columbus, Ohio, where John Gordon Battelle died in 1918. Annie Maude Norton Battelle died in March 1925 (outliving her son Gordon by two years).
Education
As the only son of John and Annie Battelle, Gordon was trained to inherit and manage his father's holdings in the steel industry. He attended military school in Chester, Pennsylvania, and later studied metallurgy at the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale University.
Career
After working for his father for several years, young Gordon Battelle struck out on his own and invested in lead mining and smelting operations near Joplin, Missouri.
While there, he became acquainted with a scientist and former professor, George Waring, who was trying to develop a process to recover saleable minerals from mine tailings and mine water. Battelle became interested in the experimental work and built a small laboratory for Waring. This resulted in the successful completion of the process, which was then taken to a commercial laboratory for economic appraisal.