Show OUTLOOK FOR COPPER writing in the north american review sydney brooks british publicist says the end of the war will find areas in europe and asia minor inhabited by people practically without a pound of copper among them and when to these we add the territories that germany has overrun and despoiled we get a population of not less than in a state of copper famine it is not easy to realize all that this means our great grandfathers would not have minded the prospect three generations ago an output of less than tons a year sufficed for the needs of the entire world nowadays we consume annually over tons not only have great and populous regions been denuded of copper but the production of the metal has been so vastly accelerated by the events of the past three and a halt half years that the exhaustion of the chief existing mines is now a matter of one or two decades and no more the united states at present produces some 55 per cent of the total output in february 1914 five months before the outbreak of the war mr ryan the president of the amalgamated copper company declared that the copper available in the united states would be exhausted exhaust dd in fifteen years since then the unprecedented demands of the belligerents must have considerably reduced his estimate of americas productivity metallurgists seem to agree that the extracting of copper from low grade ores has already been carried pretty nearly as far as it can be thousands of laboratories are working on the problems of synthetic copper and of an efficient substitute sti tute but so far without even a gleam of success meanwhile the demand for copper which has been mounting in great upward leaps for the past thirty years has been immensely stimulated by the war and after the war will develop into a worldwide world wide and almost ferocious scramble we are not faced with any immediate prospect of the disappearance of this metal we are faced with a certainty of a shortage that among the nations that do not look ahead and guard themselves in advance will be little less than a famine |