Where Is It Coming From?

Although 90% occupied with defense business, Revere Copper & Brass, copper fabricator, last week revealed that it had laid off 1,100 workers, 12% of its working force. It just could not get enough copper. Neither can the U.S.--OPM foresees a 770,000-ton (30%) gap between 1942 needs and supplies. Problem of the week was how to narrow this gap.

Price. One step was to set up a two-price system for copper. Year ago (TIME, Dec. 2) the Government figured out that increasing prices would not increase U.S. copper production more than a drop in the bucket, decided to keep the price of copper at 12-c-. Last week, needing the drop, the Government, without altering this general price, decided it would pay more for marginal copper that could not be produced for 12-c-.

The Treasury's Procurement Division (buying for Lend-Lease) announced the signing of OPA-and OPM-approved contracts with three small high-cost Michigan mines (Quincy, Isle Royale, Copper Range) for all the copper they could dig--perhaps 20,000 tons a year. The deal: the mines were to get it above their "out-of-pocket" mine costs, about 15-c- or 16-c- (depending on the producer). The U.S. will still release the copper to fabricators at 12-c-, absorb the difference. Similar offers will doubtless soon be made to other high-cost mines (like Miami Copper's low-grade Castle Dome property in Arizona). But the Government doesn't think that any price in the firmament can pry loose much more than 75,000-100,000 tons of additional U.S. copper.

Latin America. RFC's Metals Reserve Co.'s original 10-c- a lb. offer (delivered in New York) did not encourage all-out production in Latin America. So Jesse Jones's Deputy Will Clayton late in September raised his ante to 11 1/2-c-a lb. By last week, the latest import figures made it appear that he had also licked the other big Latin American copper problem: shipping space. Chile alone (counted on for 80% of U.S. copper imports) shipped 54,000 tons to the U.S. in August, more than twice last February's low. OPM now counts on Latin America for not more than 600,000 tons ( 1/3 of total U.S. supplies) for 1942. Only if Latin American copper exports can be increased over this figure--which is unlikely--will they reduce the expected U.S. shortage.

The British Empire controls two other big-time copper sources. Rhodesia alone can produce some 500,000 tons a year from enormous reserves. Rhodesia's production (whose fabulously low cost was a major cause of the U.S. 4-c- copper duty) is a military secret, but is said to have suffered from a shortage of skilled white overseers.

Britain itself has contracted for 80% of Canada's output (peak production around 300,000 tons), has first call on Africa's mines. Since the U.S. is now re-exporting, under Lend-Lease, some 40% of its copper imports from the Western Hemisphere, it would make little sense to press for more of the Empire copper that Britain is already getting directly.

Saving copper is thus still the only answer to the copper crisis. Some of the fancier notions of this sort:

> Making cartridge shells (which already swallow 1/3 of the U.S. copper supply) of soft steel, as the U.S.S.R. and Germany have done.

> Substituting scarcer aluminum for scarce copper (thesis: bauxite-in-the-ground is more plentiful than copper-in-the-ground).

> Using some of the Treasury's 100,000-ton hoard of silver as a substitute for copper in electrical machinery.

>Making pennies from plastics.

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