Quotations in Quicksilver

In Manhattan's modestly housed Commodity Exchange, some 60 brokers pressed around the mahogany rail circling a sunken trading pit as a bell rang promptly at 9:50 a.m. "March," intoned the exchange's trading superintendent, Patrick J. White, from his elevated perch at the edge of the ring. "Ninety," shouted Herbert Coyne of the commodity firm of Rayner & Stonington Inc. "Sold," cried Robert Marcus of Imperial Commodities Corp. A beige-jacketed clerk chalked the figure on a blackboard.

So last week, in the cryptic jargon of commodity dealers, began the world's first public trading in mercury futures --contracts calling for delivery in a future month of the slippery metal known to mystified ancients, beloved of medieval alchemists, prized by modern industry for everything from thermometers to detonating caps. By his call of 90, Coyne had offered to pay $490 per flask for ten flasks of mercury* to be delivered the month after next. Marcus grabbed at the bid because the price surprised him. "We thought it would open at $480 to $485," he explained.

Uncommon Gyrations. The only common metal that is liquid at ordinary temperatures, mercury often shows uncommon price gyrations--in response to floods, strikes, politics, foreign smuggling, or even occasional hijacking of mercury-loaded trucks in the U.S. From a twelve-year low of $189 a flask in 1963, the New York price of mercury soared to a record $740 in June 1965, then sank to $330 a year later after the Federal Government began selling surplus metal from its strategic stockpile. Last week the price bounced as usual--from a Tuesday low of $480 to a Thursday high of $508, closing at $501 after some $2,750,000 of trading.

The 34-year-old Commodity Exchange, which also trades in copper, tin, silver, lead, zinc, hides and rubber, hopes that quotations stretching up to 18 months in the future will help to level off mercury's price swings. Though gamblers may now play the mercury market, the chief advantage of futures trading falls to big mercury users. They can buy ahead if prices seem to be headed up, need pay only $500 per contract until actual delivery. If they hold large inventories, they can sell to hedge against the possibility of losing money on falling prices.

Poison & Salve. Actually, most traders expect mercury's price to climb, at least in the long run. Though the U.S. is the world's No. 1 mercury consumer, the nation produces less than a third of the metal it needs. It depends heavily on imports from Spain, whose 2,400-year-old Almaden mine, the world's richest, was first worked by invading Phoenicians. Both U.S. and world demand are growing faster than production, partly because of mercury's increasing use as a catalyst in the making of chlorine and caustic soda for the expanding chemical, paper and plastics industries. A corrosive poison in some forms (mercury bichloride), a therapeutic salve in others (mercury ammonium chloride), fickle mercury also goes in hefty quantities into such disparate products as dental fillings and dry-cell batteries, antibarnacle paint and electrical control apparatus. Hatmakers, however, have ceased using the stuff to soften felt. Reason: poisoned by mercury vapor, almost one U.S. hatter in ten developed shakes and mental disturbances. The resulting cliche, mad as a hatter, survives.

* Weighing 76 Ibs. each, which was originally considered the optimum weight for a slave to lift.

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