Isaac Tyson Jr. (1792–1861) was a Quaker businessman from Baltimore, Maryland, who held a virtual monopoly on world supplies of chromium minerals during the mid-19th century and a very successful entrepreneur and industrialist. The son of Baltimore flour merchant Jesse Tyson senior, and his wife Margaret, the younger Tyson studied geology, mineralogy, and chemistry in France, skills which he would use to great advantages during his industrial career. He first began mining chromite on his farm at Bare Hills in surrounding rural Baltimore County some time after 1808. The sight of a piece of chromite being used to prop a barrel at a Bel Air market in Harford County, Maryland, led him to investigate its source. Tyson was among the first to make the connection between the occurrence of chromite and serpentine barrens, areas of sparse vegetation on metal-rich and inhospitable serpentine deposits. One of these was Soldiers Delight, near northwestern Baltimore County's Owings Mills area. Tyson began mining chromite here in 1827. He commenced buying up serpentine barrens wherever he could find them. The primary belt extended from Maryland into the southern counties of Pennsylvania, including the Nottingham, Pennsylvania serpentine barrens and the Wood Farm in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, which would become the world's largest single chromite mining site during his ownership. Having bought up all the significant chromite sites in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, Tyson found himself with a world monopoly on chromite as the original earlier discovered chromium sources in Siberia (eastern Russian Empire) petered out. Not content to confine his efforts to chromium ores, he also prospected for copper, and investigated the Strafford, Vermont, copper mines in 1828. He was involved in the Ely Mine, and by 1830, had become a partner with the local Binney family in working copper deposits on Copperas Hill, in Strafford. He personally supervised the construction and operation of six small furnaces nearby in 1833 and 1834, hoping to introduce hot blast techniques, using hard anthracite coal, to refining copper from the refractory pyrrhotite ores of the deposit. This was a very novel venture for the time, as hot blast was only just being considered for iron smelting. The furnaces were shut down in 1835 during public riots over city bank closings or 1837 due to financial difficulties during the financial panic and recession of the time (though not any particular deficiency of his smelting methods), but he retained a half-share