Richard Austin Cooper, mineralogist and metallurgist, was the son of Henry Cooper and his wife Elizabeth, born Reed. He started work as a laboratory assistant on East Rand Proprietary Mines Limited in 1912. In 1919 he was transferred to the laboratory of the Rand Mines Metallurgical Department and from 1933 to his retirement in 1948 he was reduction officer on various mines of the Rand Mines Group. He became a member of the South African Chemical Institute in 1917 and was still a member in 1958, when he lived in Newcastle, KwaZulu-Natal. He was also an active member of the Chemical, Metallurgical and Mining Society of South Africa (later renamed the South African Institute of Mining and Metallurgy), served on its council for many years and was vice-president in 1933/1934. In January 1917 he married Doris Kilfoil in Boksburg, Transvaal.
Cooper is credited with having designed the first circular konimeter [an instrument used to measure the concentration of dust in the air, in mines or other industrial settings]. While at the Rand Mines laboratories he published some noteworthy scientific papers. Two of these, "Notes on the manipulation of osmiridium concentrate" and "The acidity of mine water" (the latter with F.W. Watson), both published in the Journal of the Chemical, Metallurgical and Mining Society of South Africa, earned him the society's gold medal in 1922. Some years later, in 1929, he received the society's Certificate of Merit for his paper "Development of the chlorine process of extraction of platinum metals from ores". However, his most important paper, "Mineral constituents of Rand concentrates" (Journal of the Chemical, Metallurgical and Mining Society of South Africa, 1923, Vol. 24, pp. 90-95) dealt with the results of his mineralogical examination of gold concentrates from the various reduction works on the Witwatersrand. He was the first to report the presence of the radio-active mineral uranitite (which contains both uranium and thorium) in Witwatersrand ores. This discovery went relatively unnoticed, among others because the mineral occurred in very small quantities, until a demand for uranium arose as a result of the American atom bomb project towards the end of World War II (1939-1945). His paper marks the start of the uranium industry in South Africa.
