The Treasure Hunters

In Florida's sandy flatlands near Bartow last week, the Atomic energy Commission pulled back the curtain on a mysterious little factory tucked in behind the world's biggest phosphate plant. The mother plant is International Minerals & Chemical Corp.'s new $15 million operation that can turn out a total of 40,000 tons of fertilizer and 120,000 tons of cattle-feed supplement annually. But the baby annex, with its maze of pipes and vats, is even more impressive. Behind a barbed-wire fence, International Minerals & Chemical is making commercial quantities of high-grade uranium as a byproduct from phosphates.

The process is secret, but the AEC has spent more than $1,000,000 helping International Minerals develop its method of extracting the pasty green uranium compound from phosphates (probably deposited in the rock by sea water). Extracting uranium from phosphates is not new. Scientists have known about it for years, but large-scale production has always been too expensive. By introducing new methods and by making it a byproduct of its normal business, International Minerals makes the old idea pay new dividends. Florida has the world's richest-known phosphate deposits, and the AEC says that, suitably developed, the uranium from phosphates would be able to compete with that from the Colorado ores.

Taste for Growth. Finding uranium in fertilizer is just the kind of moneymaking operation that International Minerals and its bald, bouncing President Louis Ware specialize in. Ware, who learned the mining business from the shovel up, is a combination of scientist and hardheaded businessman, thinks researchers can ferret out untold new products hidden in the earth's drabbest minerals.

Since Ware took over in 1939, he has spent $43 million on research and expansion, often by buying up likely-looking companies. He has built a chemical giant with 70 plants in 26 states, making everything from fertilizer for farmers to taste powders for housewives' stews. For example, in 1942, Ware's researchers, who were then extracting potash from sugar beets, discovered that one of their byproducts was monosodium glutamate. Ware bought up a small Ohio taste-powder company that was making the chemical out of molasses, and proceeded to make it his new way. Now sales of International Minerals' Accent total $10 million a year and some 700 food processors use it.

Opening Doors. International Minerals, which once concentrated on phosphates for fertilizer and cattle feed, now makes 20 different products that have boosted sales from under $12 million to $88 million in 1953, with profits of $7,000,000 (up 5,500%). International Minerals makes bonding clays for foundry use, recovers feldspar which is useful to ceramics makers, extracts bentonite (another specialized clay) for use in oil-well drilling. Says Ware: "Research is our lifeblood. With it, you open one door and find four more. How far you go depends only on your resources and your native ingenuity."

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