My greatgrandfather is listed as a smelterman converter in 1911 in Anaconda, Montana. What would his job have been at that time?
Converting is a term used to describe a number of metallurgical smelting processes. The most commercially important use of the term is in the treatment of molten metal sulfides to produce crude metal and slag, as in the case of copper and nickel converting. Smelting is then defined as a chemical reduction, or a form of extractive metallurgy. The main use of smelting is to produce (extract) a metal from its ore. This includes iron extraction (for the production of steel) from iron ore, and copper extraction and other base metals from their ores. This would indicate he most likely worked with the furnaces used to get pure copper from copper ore, most likely mined in Montana.
