Silliman helped Blake with his first appointments. Before graduation, Isaac Tyson, an early mining developer, hired Blake to work in his Baltimore Chrome Works, the largest of their kind at the time. Thus, Robert V. Bruce in "The Launching of Modern American Science" (p. 144) credits Blake as "the first college-trained chemist employed full-time in American industry." Silliman later drew Blake away to help collect specimens for a mineral exhibit in New York, a path he would take many times over the ensuing decades. Benjamin Silliman's descriptions of the collection in an 1854 article in the "Mining Magazine" reveals Blake's travels from the gold belt in the southern Appalachians to up-state New York and New England. He was quickly becoming one of the most informed geologists in the country. One result was an honorary M.A. from Dartmouth in 1863.