Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 74.djvu/283

Rh Finally, there is a small amount produced annually in Sweden and Norway. The total world's output in 1906 was in the vicinity of 19,000 tons. The largest use to which it is now put is in the manufacture of an alloy with iron which is particularly hard and tough, and hence suitable for armor plate. After that comes nickel coinage and plating. The metal has excellent qualifications for these latter purposes. It will not corrode or blacken under ordinary atmospheric conditions, it takes a high polish, and its soft white luster, with a faint tinge of yellow in it, is exceptionally pleasing to the eye. The modern world has a genuine need of nickel, and so the production will increase, but it is never likely to become as common a metal in the arts as copper or lead or zinc.

The heaviest of all the metals is also the rarest of those that have become staple articles of commerce. It required nearly seventy-five years after its discovery for mankind to find uses for it. Then its extreme resistance to heat, and to the action of acids, commended it to the chemist, and later to the electrician. It began to come into the market in small quantities in 1824, from the region where it was first found—the western foothills of the Andes in the republic of Colombia. Almost simultaneously it was found in the Ural Mountains of Russia. The Colombian region has never been exploited or worked regularly, owing to the unsettled political conditions of the country, and it is figured that up to date not over 25 tons altogether of South American origin have been produced, practically all of which was gathered by natives in a desultory way. The Russian field has been operated regularly since its discovery, but with little enterprise or judgment or science. The metal has also been found in small quantities associated with gold in the auriferous gravel deposits of the Pacific coast of our own country. But up to the end of 1907 not more than 160 tons altogether of platinum had been produced throughout the world since its discovery, in spite of its rapidly increasing price, for it is now worth, weight for weight, about 25 per cent, more than gold. It is a real commercial misfortune that the two localities where it exists in such comparative abundance, and from which it could be produced in quantity, are under the control of nationalities so backward in social conditions and general civilization, that capital and engineering talent hesitate to take the risks involved in the illiberal laws and disturbed conditions that prevail. The metal occurs in nature generally in the pure or native state, and in the condition of grains, nuggets and dust disseminated throughout deposits of gravel, from which it is very easily recovered by methods similar to those employed in operating gold-bearing placer mines.