Word: coppers
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Argument for Priorities. Last month William C. Arthur, Talon's president since 1939, went to Washington to present the zipper industry's plea for survival to OPM-OPACS. Because slide fasteners have tiny parts with precision fittings, the industry had to use an easily workable copper base. Talon made its fasteners of either nickel silver (65% copper, 18% nickel, 17% zinc) or gilding metal (85% copper, 15% zinc). But to operate at the last twelve months' rate (440,000,000 fasteners), the industry needed just 6,300 tons of copper a year (.6% of U.S. production...
...every dollar's worth of copper it got, the industry would pay out $10.80 in payrolls, add $20.37 of value. Moreover, its fasteners went to 100 other industries (clothing, footwear, luggage, etc.), to 20,000 manufacturers with 250,000 employes...
Washington was sympathetic. To make Meadville a ghost town for lack of 6,300 tons of copper seemed like junking an automobile for lack of a spark plug. That is sometimes necessary on the battlefield. Between armaments and slide fasteners, Washington could make only one choice. This week it was busy with inventory surveys, subcontracting plans, conservation drives (see p. 75), but it was not giving any priorities to Talon...
...European Russia would also ease Hitler's shortage of manganese, aluminum, lead and zinc-but not markedly. He would get little badly needed copper, nickel, tin or gold out of the Russian earth, but probably one of his greatest quick gains would be millions of tons of scrap metals, of many sorts, from wrecked Russian machinery and weapons...
Thus, in a few words, Jim Adams made mincemeat of his own elaborately worked-out quota system. Privately some OPM-ites had already said there was not enough copper for essential defense and civilian needs (TIME, Aug. 18); officially, OPM had recognized an 11,000,000-ton steel shortage for this year; the aluminum shortage was already a vaudeville joke. As far as OPM's meager statistics showed, the quotas were not only a maximum but a reverie. It was possible, to be sure, that automakers had much bigger inventories of scarce materials than they admitted. (They had enough...