Lambert was also the man who talent spotted and recruited the remarkable Polish-born scholar-mineralogist Ignacy Domeyko to take a post as Professor of Chemistry and Mineralogy at the Liceo Gregorio Cordovez (college) at La Serena (Coquimbo).

[4] On 31 December 1793 Charles Saint Lambert was born in Bruchsal, a small town near Lauterbourg where the family had been based since at least as far back as 1735.

His father, Joseph Matthieu Lambert, was a physician who during the French Revolution became a member of the National Convention, France's revolutionary government, based in Paris.

[1][5] On 30 October 1810, still aged only 17, and after a measure of calm had returned to French streets, he himself attended another revolutionary institution, the prestigious École Polytechnique (Polytechnical college) in Paris, studying Metallurgy and Geology.

[3] Immediately following the restoration he continued to work in France, mastering his trade as a mining engineer and acquiring the skills on which he would later build his fortune.

[3] Through his combination of vision, skill and energy, by the middle of the nineteenth century Carlos Lambert had become one of South America's richest men.

[1] In 1840 he met the copper entrepreneur and (of at least equal significance) ship owner Henry Bath while visiting Swansea: possibly the two men had by this time already worked with one another from their respective continents.

[10] Swansea, thanks to abundant local availability of coal with a high combustion temperature and - relatively - low levels of smoke emission, had been established since the early eighteenth century as the world's principal centre for copper smelting,[10] but the supplies of copper ore from Cornwall on which the Swansea smelting business had grown up in the eighteenth century were not expected to last for ever.

The British paddle-sloop HMS Gorgon engaged in a succession of actions which were followed by the defeat of the revolt (and the recovery, for Carlos Lambert, of his steam ship).

The longer term outcome of the uprising involved difficulties for many of the leading citizens of La Serena, most of whom had backed the local rebels in their confrontation with the authoritarian government from far away Santiago to the south.

[7] Although, through his son, his family and commercial ties with Chile remained very strong, Charles Saint Lambert himself never returned to that country.

In Swansea he purchased a large plot of land on the foreshore to the east of the city at Port Tennant, and overlooked by the Kilvey Hill.

[22] According to a local newspaper obituary of his eldest son (who also died on the family estate, just twelve years later), the elder Charles Lambert "left behind him the reputation of having been a millionaire".