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Chemistry in the Industries 275
prospectors hunt the tungsten at night. The richest strike
yet made is in central Idaho where men, hunting for anti-
mony, stumbled upon a very high-grade deposit of tungsten
ore. To a modern industrial country, at war, there would be
few catastrophes to compare with a real shortage of tungsten.
It gives strength to steels and armor-piercing projectiles. It
has that sterling property of getting hot without losing its
temper. Tungsten carbide tools cut at speeds so great that
the edge is blue-hot from the fierceness of the friction. Oil-
field drilling bits are “faced” with tungsten carbide. They
will drill through solid quartz.

Ranking high as a toughener of steels is molybdenum,
“Moly” for short. Alloyed with steels it takes out the creep,
which is the tendency of metal to stretch under strain. Of
major importance is the discovery that molybdenum can be
substituted for much of the tungsten in making high-speed
steels. In molybdenum supplies we are indeed fortunate for
this country produces more than 90 per cent of the world’s
requirements.

In brasses, bronzes, and innumerable alloys, copper is
vitally needed for cartridge cases, bullet jackets, propellers
of ships, electrical equipment, etc. Modern concentration
methods have made it practicable to extract the small per-
centage of copper even from old waste dumps. The water,
flowing from the mines, is made to yield copper—6 million
pounds per year—through the utilization of your old iron
cans and other iron scrap over which the water is caused to
flow. The copper is replaced by the iron, forms heavy
sludges, and is recovered. Less than 2 per cent of beryllium,
if alloyed with copper, will make that metal so hard that it
will cut steel. Used in springs and diaphragms of delicate
instruments, these alloys stick to their job under fiercely
corrosive conditions.

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