James McDonald Hyde (1873–1943) was a metallurgist who designed the first significant froth flotation plant in the United States. He also served as a member of the Los Angeles, California, City Council from 1931 to 1939. Biography James M. Hyde was born June 25, 1873, in Mystic Bridge, Connecticut, the son of Rev. William Penn Hyde and Seraphine Smith Carr. His mother was a Mayflower descendant. When he was age eight, his father moved the Hyde family of eight children to Santa Cruz, California, and, later, to Palo Alto, California. As the youngest son, not expected to enter the ministry, James studied mining engineering and geology at Stanford University. He was active in the school's geology club, engineers' club, and was an assistant instructor in assaying before graduating in 1901. In 1903, he married Bessie Lorraine Ransom, born in California 1872. They had one daughter, Helen Elizabeth, born in California in 1908. After Hyde resigned from Stanford in 1927, he moved to Los Angeles. He died July 18, 1943, in his home at 1300-3/4 North Sycamore Avenue in Hollywood. Early career After graduation, Hyde went to work for the California State Mining Bureau as curator of its museum and as field engineer. This was followed with three years, 1903 -1906, as professor and head of the University of Oregon, Eugene's mining department where he helped found the new department. Offered a job in industry, he left the university in the fall of 1906, and spent the next three years during a mining boom that went bust with the Panic of 1907: he was metallurgist for a silver mill in Guanajuato, Mexico, 1906-1907; then an assayer for the Charles Butters & Company's cyanide plant at Virginia City, Nevada, 1907; then, 1907-1908, superintendent of a small stamp mill and attached cyanide plant at the short-lived gold rush town of Manhattan, Nevada; and then managed a gold prospect in the California Mother Lode country. He returned to education in 1909 as director of the San Diego public school system's new agriculture and horticulture program. During this time, Hyde's reformer's zeal also manifested itself. At San Diego, he was a proponent of the City Beautiful movement; in Oregon he was president of the Good Roads Association in the state; and in Palo Alto he and brother William cheered on the Good Government League. An ongoing battle was with the California State Mining Bureau, which