Silver Bullets and Silver Ballots

METALS Silver, despite its artificial price, has become so useful as a substitute for genuinely scarce tin, copper and other metals that the Treasury is going to release 40,000 tons from its own hoard. It has become so useful, indeed, that some of its friends think the No. 1 political metal may even be taken out of politics.

Metallurgists estimated last week that actual and potential uses could absorb 100 to 120 million ounces of silver this year (U.S. production in 1941: 70 million ounces). Hardy & Harman, famed Manhattan silver refiners and dealers, used to have about 500 customers, mostly in jewelry and other crafts. Now they have 15,000 customers, mostly in industry. Where they used to send out salesmen, they now send engineers.

Chief industrial use for silver is the silver brazing alloy, which brings about an almost instantaneous "wedding" of separate metal parts. The alloy has a melting point between 1,175 and 1,300 degrees F., avoiding the injury to metals which sometimes results from the 1,600-degree heat required for base-metal alloys.

>In a test of the silver brazing alloy process, steel noses were attached to 29,000 bombs in a 22-hour day by a single plant. Highest hourly rate was 1,800.

Silver-alloyed bombs delivered to U.S. armed forces in November were re-delivered to the Japs by plane last month.

> In ships, piping takes up much valuable space. When silver brazing alloy is used instead of threaded joints, the thickness of the pipe can be reduced about one-half. It can be installed more quickly, too.

> The alloy is used in airplane engine coolers and radiators, ignition systems, cabin heaters, fuselage construction, parachute rip cords, anti-aircraft guns, machine guns, anti-tank guns, shells and torpedoes.

> Metallic silver is used in airplane motors as a dissipator of heat. It provides corrosion-resisting contacts in Signal Corps and other electrical apparatus.

> Indirectly, war is putting silver spoons in American mouths. Sterling silver tableware contains much less copper than high-grade plated ware, is therefore likely to be available when plated ware is not.

The "commercial" price of silver is now 35 1/8-c- an ounce. This price buys imported silver only, since the Treasury is required to buy all U.S.-mined silver at 71.11-c- an ounce. Even the import price is not a free price, for the Treasury will buy all the imported silver offered at 35-c-. Only recently has industrial demand made it possible for the Treasury to stop buying foreign silver.

Lying in sunless crypts at West Point and elsewhere are some 86,000 tons of Treasury silver, U.S. and foreign. Its average cost to the Treasury was around 50-c- an ounce. To pay for it, the Treasury in effect manufactures paper money known as silver certificates, familiar to the public as $1, $5 and $10 bills. Each ounce of silver becomes $1.29 in paper money. This monetary magic permits the Treasury to use only a part of its silver as backing for certificates. The balance, called seigniorage or "free silver," amounts to some 40,000 tons. This the Treasury now wants to put at industry's disposal.

But the Treasury is also forbidden by law to sell its silver below $1.29 an ounce. Washington lawyers managed to dope out a way to lend-lease it. The way: use silver instead of copper for bus bars in electric generating plants and in the "pot lines" of aluminum and magnesium plants. A typical large bus bar would take a chunk of silver 24 feet long, eight inches wide, three-fourths of an inch thick-weighing 650 lb. After the war the silver, little or none the worse for wear, could be replaced by copper again and returned to West Point for reburial.

A less devious method, of course, would be to repeal the 1934 Silver Purchase Act and let silver's price find its commercial level-perhaps as low as 15-c- an ounce. Mining State Senators last week were preparing a last-ditch defense of their 71-c- racket. As though to prove they had lost none of their nerve, they even demanded priorities on mining equipment to meet the new war-industry demand for silver-at twice the already artificial market price. Hard-hitting American Metal Market (trade organ) found a word for it in O. Henry: "The legitimate ethics of pure swindling."

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