Harvey Seeley Mudd

American mining engineer and entrepreneur (1888–1955)

Harvey Seeley Mudd (30 August 1888 – 12 April 1955) was a mining engineer and founder, investor, and president of Cyprus Mines Corporation, a Los Angeles–based international enterprise that operated copper mines on the island of Cyprus. Mudd was vice president of the board of trustees for the California Institute of Technology. He helped found Claremont McKenna College. The science and engineering college Harvey Mudd College at Claremont was named in memory of him. Mudd was chair of local symphony organizations and art museums.

Harvey Mudd was born in Leadville, Colorado, in 1888 to Colonel Seeley W. Mudd, the manager of the Small Hopes silver mine, and Della Mulock Mudd. Harvey had a younger brother, Seeley (1895–1968), who was a physician and cancer researcher at the California Institute of Technology and then professor and dean at the School of Medicine at the University of Southern California. In 1902, Col. Mudd moved his family to Los Angeles, California, where he worked as a consulting engineer for the Guggenheim Exploration Company. In 1907, he developed the Ray mine in Arizona, which is still in production. Harvey attended Stanford University for two years and then transferred to Columbia University, where he received a degree in mining engineering in 1912. In antiquity, Cyprus was a major center for the production of copper, since the second or even third millennium BC. In fact, the Roman name for copper was aes cyprium, from the name of Cyprus in Greek: Κύπρος, which is read as: Kypros. In later centuries aes cyprium became simply cyprium and then cuprum. This was further transformed and gave the word for copper in European languages, for example copper in English. However, at the time the Mudds began the Cyprus Mines Corp., copper had not been mined on Cyprus for almost 1500 years. With the backing of Colonel Seeley Mudd, geologist Charles Godfrey Gunther searched for new copper on Cyprus, but it was twenty years before Cyprus Mines paid its first dividends in 1936. As head of Cyprus Mines, Harvey Mudd developed and managed copper mines in the Mediterranean, as well as an iron mine in Peru and oil properties in the United States. In 1949, the Columbia University Engineering School Alumni Association awarded him its Egleston Medal for distinguished engineering achievement. Mudd's will left $50,000 to Caltech for research on the genesis of ore deposits.

At the time of Mudd's death, he was chairman of the Board of the Southern California Symphony Association, the Welfare Federation of Los Angeles, and Greater Los Angeles Plans, Inc. He was a trustee and former president of the Southwest Museum, a member of the Board of Governors of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and member of the advisory committee of the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery. Fellow copper baron William Andrews Clark Jr. had founded the Philharmonic in 1919, but he had exhausted his fortune supporting the orchestra. To oversee the Philharmonic, the Southern California Symphony Association was created in 1933 with Mudd as chairman. They had two children: Henry T. Mudd (1913–1990) and Caryll Mudd Sprague (1914–1978). Caryll's husband was Norman F. Sprague Jr. (1914–1997), a medical doctor. Henry succeeded his father as head of the Cyprus Mines Corporation. Between 1934 and 1939, Mildred was able to double the enrollment in Los Angeles. She had been the director of the Children's Hospital in Los Angeles by 1938. Mudd lived in Beverly Hills on Benedict Canyon Drive. The Tudor style residence was designed for Charles Boldt, owner of the Ohio based Boldt Glass Co. that produced the popular Mason jars, by architect Elmer Grey in 1922. The residence is on an acre of land with seven bedrooms and a swimming pool. In 2008, the house was listed for sale at a price of $11.495 million. The historic property is known as the Harvey Mudd Estate. As of October 2013, this house is for sale again, asking price is $19.99 million. Mudd died of a heart attack on April 12, 1955, at his home in Beverly Hills, California. He was 66 years old. Mildred Mudd died three years later at the age of 67. which awards degrees in science and engineering. The degree programs require humanities and social science coursework.