Erskine Ramsay

Erskine Ramsay was an Alabama industrialist.

He was born September 24, 1864 in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. His family came from Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland the same town as Andrew Carnegie. Erskine Ramsays father, a mining engineer, followed Carnegie to Pittsburgh hearing of his success there. The younger Ramsay started working in cooperative store at the mines as a teenager. In 1882, he attended Saint Vincent College, Latrobe, Pennsylvania, at the Senior level, graduating at the head of his class, with little previous formal education. He switched to the mining operations side and was quickly advanced being focused on productivity. He was hired away from Pennsylvania in his twenties to fill a managerial post at Tennessee Coal amp Iron. He came to Birmingham in 1887 to run the Pratt Mines, where he invented the rotary coal dump, swivel coupling, and many other innovations, eventually holding overpatents, according to industry journal Coal Age.

Source: Wikipedia