Word: silver
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...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...
...commercial" price of silver is now 35 1/8? an ounce. This price buys imported silver only, since the Treasury is required to buy all U.S.-mined silver at 71.11? an ounce. Even the import price is not a free price, for the Treasury will buy all the imported silver offered at 35?. 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? 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...
...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...