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THE GOLDEN SEMICIRCLE
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491
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♦ I ♦
A T the time of the formation of
the Anglo American Cor-poration, the gold-bearing reefs of the
'Rand'—then, to an even greater extent than now, the backbone of South
African economic life, and then, as now, by far the most prolific
single source of the 'free world's' gold supplies—were being worked on
the segment of a circle which stretched from Randfontein in the west to
the town of Springs in the east, with an outlying pendant in the shape
of the mines in the Heidelberg area. The segment was bounded on the
south by the Vaal River, and south and north-east of it lay the
coal-beds of Vereeniging and Springfield and the great deposits of the
Witbank-Middelburg-Breyten coal-field. Thus the gold-mining industry
was fortunate in having available in its immediate vicinity the
necessary supplies of water and of fuel, upon which the working of a
progressively more mechanized system of mining depended.
In
1917 the fifty-two mines of the Witwatersrand area proper produced
8,715,000 fine ounces of gold, to which must be added the 107,000
ounces produced from the two mines in the Heidelberg district; to get
this output the mines had milled 27*4 million short tons of ore; the
average grade was 6-38 dwt per ton. Of this total of nearly nine
million fine ounces, the two producing mines of the Anglo American
Corporation group—Brakpan and Springs—furnished 422,000 ounces or
approximately 4-8 per cent of the total. In 1958 the producing mines of
the Anglo American Corporation group yielded 4,500,000 ounces out of a
total produced by the fifty-five producing gold-mines, members of the
Transvaal and Orange Free State Chamber of Mines, of 16,500,000 ounces,
that is, 27-2 per cent of the whole. This great change is due to a
parallel growth in the gold-mining areas and in the activities of the
Anglo American Corporation group, and the first element is closely
dependent on the second. In the last thirty years the segment of the
circle has evolved into a vast semicircle—thus adding to the old West,
Central and East Rand districts, the Orange Free State fields, the
Klerksdorp field, the Far West Rand and the greater part of the Far
East Rand. Historically, it is not entirely true that the existence of
the wider area was not known before the last thirty years, nor is it
true that no attempts had been made to exploit it; more will be said of
this below. Nevertheless, the more effective exploitation of the Far
East Rand, still more the opening up of the Far West Rand, the
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