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Show TOMORROW FBflMK PARKER I DEFENSE materials When a nation contemplates fighting, either for offense or defense, de-fense, it needs a lot of different materials which it can always get in time of peace but which are hard to lay hands on when needed in time of war. Military men call such materials that are not readily read-ily at hand in an emergency "critical" "cri-tical" materials. There is a long list of "critical "cri-tical materials which will have to be provided for before be-fore the great program of national na-tional defense now starting can be completed. First on the Army's list Is manganese. Then there are tin, rubber, silk, magnesium and charcoal char-coal of a special quality. Manganese comes first, because without it steel of the necessary hardness and toughness for use in firearms, and all other military euipment made of steel, cannot be produced. The best estimate of the nation's manganese require- .taiuiauient Dro-sram Dro-sram is 9 60,000 tons a year The steel companies, among them,' have and L 6 thaD that on han1. s L , government has bought : r' fr ""out two and a But outside of Russia the whole produce, only 64 0,000 tons CYCLOPS .... aisappeared Very little manganese is produced pro-duced in the United States. The fw PLdr6r iS Brazil- the last Wor d War the U. S. collier Cyclops,' loaded with 10,000 tons of Brazilian manganese disappeared dis-appeared so completely that no trace of the ship or crew has ever been found; probably the work of a German submarine. Washington has never forgotten that, and is trying to find sources nearer home. The most promising source seems to bo Cuba. A process develoied by the Freeport Sulphur comiumy, owner of the Cuban deposits, concentrates concen-trates the low-grade ore into the higher grade necessary for steel making. But the Cuban - American Manganese corporation has a capacity of only 100,000 tons a year of ferro-grnde manganese, or about one-tenth of expected rearmament requirements. With manganese shipments from Russia, India and Africa shut offi by the war and those from South America threatened, the search for domestic sources is intense. Plenty of low-grade deposits have been found, but few suitable for high-grade steel making. The Bureau Bu-reau of Mines is spending two mil- rich, Firestone and others. ThereS been a lot of worry wor-ry In Washington about the charcoal supply. Gas masks must have charcoal filters, and tho best substance for those has been coconut shells, which have to be brought a long way by sea. But the Carbide & Carbon Chemicals corporation has just announced an-nounced the invention of a method of making a better gas mask charcoal char-coal out of ordinary sawdust, coal or other materials. OCEAN mined Everything known to man is in the sea, if you know where to find it. There's more gold in the sea than ever was mined, but it costs too much to get it out. But some smart chemist, working for the Dow Chemical company, found lion dollars in the hunt. One big copper mining company is developing devel-oping a method of refining American Ameri-can ore. But we are still short of manganese. TI vital Tin is another metal which we don't produce but have to have, not only for containers but as an alloy for use with other metals in making many important parts of military machines. The alloy of tin and copper, which we call bronze, is the oldest of all alloys. When the ancient Carthaginians ventured to sail their ships to England, they found the native Britons mining tin in Cornwall, and became rich bringing it back to sell to Rome. Bronze swords, arrowheads and shields were the first effective ef-fective weapons of war. They were far superior to the stone weapons of the primitive tribes, and enabled peoples which had them to become great nations. After a while other jieoples found out how to smelt iron and the Bronze Age passed into history. And Rome exterminated Carthage. We get little tin from the British Bri-tish mines now. Most of our supply sup-ply comes from the Malay Peninsula Penin-sula and Bolivia, a long sea voyage voy-age in each case. But new methods of reclaiming tin from old cans, and a still newer method of making mak-ing tin-less food containers, promise prom-ise relief in time from the present critical shortage of tin. SUBSTITUTES . . . available Military people have stopped worrying about their rubber supply, sup-ply, though great "stock piles" of natural rubber are being accumulated, accumu-lated, because it is cheaper, so far, than the new and superior synthetic syn-thetic rubbers produced by Good- how to get out of the sea two elements ele-ments which are essential in the construction and operation of modern mo-dern airplanes. One is the metal magnesium, the other is bromine. Magnesium is the lightest of all metals, wliich makes it valuable in airplane builaing. It is tough and easily worked, but hard to find. Chemists learned that there's enough magnesium in a cubic mile of sea water to supply all the airplane needs of the world for years to come. They found an economical way of extracting extract-ing it, and now we're building build-ing planes out of the Gulf of Mexico! Modern high-pressure engines call for "anti-knock" gasoline. One of the things added to gas for that purpose is bromine. Off the Carolina coast huge pumps bring sea-water to great chemical plants where the bromine is extracted and shipped to the gasoline refineries. re-fineries. There isn't anything a man can't do if he has to! |
