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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates

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To: Mike Buckley who wrote (24156)	5/4/2000 12:21:00 PM
From: BDR	Read Replies (2) of 54805

<<What the heck is a Denver Rock Drill?>> The answer is way off topic and constitutes thread bloat so please don't pelt me with PMs to that effect. Just skip it if you prefer. Basically it was a pneumatic drill similar to the jackhammers that one can see today breaking up concrete at construction sites. A hundred years ago it was high tech stuff. Before the mechanization and electrification of hard rock mining, drilling holes for the placement of dynamite in the rock face of a stope was accomplished by candle light with one man holding the drill while a second pounded it into the rock with a sledgehammer. Given that multiple holes had to be drilled for a set of charges, this was long and tedious work. Around the turn of the century, 1900 that is, the Denver Rock Drill dramatically increased the productivity of miners. Two men could set up the drill and accomplish in hours what had taken days with the old technology. Examples of the Denver Rock Drill can be seen if you take the Copper Queen Mine tour in Bisbee, AZ. If you can't take the tour, you can see an example of a rock drill from that era, which is no doubt an inferior brand (g), here: agso.gov.au In its day the Denver Rock Drill was an example of a disruptive, discontinuous innovation. It was proprietary (patented in the U.S. and my grandfather had the license for South Africa). I don't know if it would be characterized as open architecture but in time there were imitators. Switching costs, at least in S.A. at the time, were high (where else were you going to get a mechanized drill? The U.S. was 30+ days away by steamship.). And there definitely was a tornado in the market at that time. To think- my grandfather, that old Gorilla Gamer! What does my family's association with gold mining (my paternal grandfather was the chief electrical engineer at a S.A. mine) have to do with my investing acumen? About as much as the earlier poster's posturing as a "gold bug". That is to say, nothing.

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