Claude Theodore James Vautin, an Austraian born metallurgist residing in London, was the son of John Vautin and Louisa Chitty. He had much practical experience in gold mining and extraction in Victoria, Australia. By 1888 he was in the Cape Colony as a partner with James Cosmo Newbery, an analytical chemist to the government of Victoria, in the Newbery Vautin Gold Extraction Company. That year they improved a process for the extraction of gold from its ores by chlorination and patented it in Natal Colony, the South African Republic (Transvaal) and overseas. The next year Vautin and others were involved in a legal case brought by the Sheba Gold Mining Company of Barberton, South African Republic.
In 1890 Vautin published a paper, "On the occurrence of the gold in the Witwatersrand conglomerate", in the Witwatersrand Mining and Metallurgical Review. During the next few years he published several further papers in British journals: "The decomposition of auric chloride obtained in the chlorination of gold-bearing materials" (Transactions of the Institution of Mining and Metallurgy, 1892-1893); "The 'direct' method of producing refined copper" (Ibid, 1893-1894); "The electrolysis of fused salts" (Journal of the Society of Chemical Industry, 1894); and, as joint author with H. Goldschmidt, "Aluminium as a heating and reducing agent" (Ibid, 1898).
