Christoph Andreas Schlüter

Christoph Andreas Schlüter (sometimes Latinized as Christophorus Andreas Schlüter and known in French as Christophe-André Schlutter; 1668–1743) was a German metallurgist, assayer and mining official in the Harz, and the author of one of the most important metallurgical works of the eighteenth century. He spent his career in the ducal smelting administration, rising to the senior fiscal post of Zehntner (tithe-master) of the Lower Harz. His treatise, Gründlicher Unterricht von Hütte-Werken, published in 1738, is a comprehensive account of smelting works together with a complete manual of assaying.

Life

Family and early life Schlüter was born in 1668 near Goslar. His father, Heinrich Zacharias Schlüter, was a Hüttenreiter (overseer of a smelting works) in the service of the Dukes of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, responsible for supervising the ducal smelters, keeping the raw silver in custody, controlling the fine-refiners, and delivering the refined silver and lead to the ducal factorage. At the age of fourteen, he was assigned to his father to be trained as a smelting specialist. the work comprises two parts in one volume: the main treatise on smelting works and an appended complete Probier-Buch (assaying manual). The folio contains an engraved frontispiece, an engraved headpiece with two portraits, and 58 engraved plates. The frontispiece shows a view of Goslar with allegorical figures, while the folding plates depict numerous furnaces, buildings, machinery, implements and instruments. The work was issued under an imperial privilege of Emperor Charles VI, which set a penalty for unauthorized reprinting of six marks of fine gold, as well as under the privilege of the King of Poland and Elector of Saxony. and to the reigning Duke Karl I of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel.

Contents, method and geographic scope Schlüter describes many different methods for extracting metals, using a range of furnace types (tapping, curved, high and wind furnaces among them), but he does not systematically compare them. His work presents knowledge gained in practice over more than fifty years. Herbert Hoover and Lou Henry Hoover, the translators of Agricola, rated the folio "as one of the most important in the Agricola, Ercker, Löhneyss tradition", singling out its accounts of separating silver from copper and from gold as especially admirable. Ludwig Darmstaedter likewise called it "one of the finest works on metallurgy and assaying". His treatise was also the first to make England's distinctive coal-fired reverberatory smelting known in Central Europe, by describing the cupola furnaces then used across England for lead and copper.