The American Institute of Mining Engineers, Founded Here
Near Scranton, Pennsylvania
In eighteen seventy-one, twenty-two mining professionals gathered at the Wyoming Valley Hotel, which once stood on this site in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. They founded the American Institute of Mining Engineers, one of the first national engineering societies in the United States. The timing was no accident.
The anthracite coalfields of northeastern Pennsylvania were at the center of the industrial world, and the men working in them faced enormous risks with little shared knowledge. The new institute was built to change that: to spread safety practices, advance mining technology, and set professional standards across the industry. It grew into a global organization with more than one hundred forty-five thousand members.
Today it continues as part of the Society for Mining, Metallurgy, and Exploration. That first meeting in a Wilkes-Barre hotel anchored the profession at the heart of the coal country that made it necessary.
