An Optimist's View of the Iron-Ore Supply

ARE iron and steel about to go out of use? or is the impending exhaustion of our iron-ore supply about to oppress us severely by causing a sudden and enormous increase in the cost of iron? That some such calamity is close upon us might easily be inferred from much that has been written lately. For instance, if the consumption of iron were to increase hereafter as fast as it did between 1893 and 1906, the ten billion tons of ore with which Professor Tornebohm credits the world in his report to the Swedish government, would be used up in about forty years. This seems to mean that, in the lifetime of the young people of to-day, mankind will be confronted with the stupendous task of replacing iron with some other material, not only for machinery of all kinds, but also for such important objects as railroad rails and wheels, ships, high buildings, roof-trusses, springs, cutting-tools, and magnets, which are the basis of all commercial electricity, of the telegraph, and of the telephone. We may almost say that the materials with which iron can be replaced arc yet to be discovered. The other metals and their known alloys come nearest to being promising substitutes, but even apart from their far higher cost, they are much less fitted than iron for making most of these objects, and almost wholly unfit for making some of them, for instance, magnets. What is far worse, the very exuberance of our activity, which at first sight seems to threaten us with an iron famine, is likely to exhaust the supply of the other metals at about the same time. At such a picture we may well say with Burns, —

Nevertheless I believe that the cost of iron will not begin to oppress us within many hundreds, yes, thousands of years, if indeed it ever does.

How can this belief be justified? Not by pointing out how greatly Professor Tornebohm has underestimated our own iron-ore supply, which, according to Mr. Eckels of the United States Geological Survey, is at least ten, if not twenty, times as great as that with which the learned Swede credits us. Not by the consideration that only certain parts of Europe and a relatively small part of North America have thus far been explored carefully, and that the rest of these two continents, together with South America, Asia, Africa, and Australia, may reasonably be expected to have, collectively, enormous quantities of ore. Nor yet by pointing out that one of the richest and most abundant of ores, pyrite, is not included in any of our current estimates. These considerations are important; they increase the expected life of our iron-ore supply from decades to centuries; but they are much less important than the fact that there is an incalculable quantity of material which, though not ore to-day, will become ore as soon as it is needed.

What is iron ore? At any given time it is simply rock rich enough, in large enough masses, and near enough to the surface, to be treated with profit in competition with the other ironbearing rocks which man is then working. Rock with two and one-half per cent of gold is an extraordinarily rich gold ore; rock with two and one-half per cent of copper is copper ore to-day; rock with two and one-half per cent of iron is not iron ore to-day, for the sole reason that it cannot be worked at a profit in competition with existing richer rocks. It will become ore just as soon as the exhaustion of the richer rocks shall have enabled its owners to treat it with profit. Whether a given ferruginous rock is or is not ore, then, is purely a question of existing demand and supply. Most iron ores mined to-day contain at least twenty-five per cent of iron, and some contain more than sixty per cent. As these richer ores are exhausted, poorer and poorer ones will come into use, until, to the eye of the prophet, a large bed of four per cent ore, perhaps even of two and one-half per cent ore, becomes a veritable bonanza.

This does not mean that iron will then be a semi-precious metal, because the cost of the other metals will rise like that of iron. It means only that iron may cost then as much as copper costs now. Our scale of cost will advance as a whole. Then we shall protect iron from theft, corrosion, and abrasion, as we now protect copper; and for that matter we shall then guard our copper as we now guard our gold, and watch our platinum as we now watch our diamonds. As the ranch is now, so will the four-acre lot be then.

Between these limits, the rich ores of to-day and the two and one-half per cent ores of that possible æon-distant time, there is an incalculably great quantity of potential ore, for as we descend in the scale of richness we ascend much faster in the scale of quantity stored for our use. How very rapid the ascent is may be inferred from the fact that the igneous rocks, which form a very large fraction of the entire crust of the earth, contain on an average about four and one-half per cent of iron, according to late estimates.

As with the workable richness, so with the workable depth. We think and speak to-day as if deposits of ore could in the nature of things be worked only to a very moderate depth, a few thousand feet. But this is an error. What is true is that the cost of working increases rapidly with the depth at which the work is carried on, so that at any given time the profitable depth of working is limited by the competition of ore from shallower mines. But, like the richness which makes an ore profitable, the profitable working-depth is purely a question of demand and supply. The whole crust of the earth is ours. We will first take the richest ores, those in the largest masses, and those nearest the surface, in short the most profitable ores; but we shall later take poorer and deeper ones. To this process there is hardly a limit.

Thus it is not a real iron famine that awaits us, but only the need of mining at greater depths and of handling more tons of ore and barren rock for each ton of metallic iron ready for man’s use. This handling will in general have to include crushing the ore, and separating by mechanical process its scattered particles of minerals rich in iron from the great mass of barren minerals with which they are usually mixed.

Here it may interest and perhaps profit us to speculate a little, adopting the plausible belief that the earth itself is a huge iron meteor, with a relatively thin crust of rocks, and attempting to confer on future generations some fraction of the powers which they will surely develop. To any such speculation it is essential that we should remember the extreme crudity of our present civilization. Here we are but a few centuries past the beginning of the historic period, while before us lie untold millions on millions of years during which the world may remain inhabitable. Let us conceive that the Middle Ages, which in our vanity we put some centuries behind us, in fact lie millions of years before us; thatwe have hardly yet advanced well into the dawn of history; that the mechanical powers of our successors will exceed ours a thousand-fold more than ours exceed those of the cave-dwellers. This should be ourattitude if we would have any approach to true perspective. We must remember that things which today seem impossible, are impossible only because of our present crudity and dense ignorance; that, if man’s power over nature increases in the next million years at the rate at which it has increased in the few years since Watt gave us the steam engine, almost the only things mechanically impossible will be those which to-day are unthinkable and self-contradictory. From this point of view we can see the shaft of some bold syndicate piercing its way through the thin crust of rocks to the iron core. Impossible and inconceivable, most men will say! Inconceivable if we base our conceptions solely on our present development; conceivable if we take into account the probable development of man’s mastery over nature. I do not attempt to spell out the exact mechanism of this exploitation. I simply say that, if man shall some day come to need that iron, he will, if he becomes the master that I picture him, make a way to use this mass which God has given him. I am looking forward, not hundreds, but thousands and millions of years.

Once the core of the globe is reached, we shall have iron enough to last, until the secular cooling of the globe shall have gradually crowded to nothing the area warm enough for vegetation, and thus shall have killed the last man by depriving him at once of his food and of his oxygen; or until our water or our oxygen has been dissipated into space. The end of vegetation means not only starvation but suffocation, because it is vegetation alone that regenerates the oxygen which we breathe. Long after we have begun to regain from the ocean the matter of which our present mountains are formed; beyond the vast ages in which we nestle ever deeper into the bosom of our great mother, where is stored for us that heat which, though squandered to-day, will then be as the breath of our nostrils; when the polar ice-caps slowly creeping outwards at last meet at the equator; when Mother Earth, exhausted, draws together those icy curtains for her endless sleep; this vast store of iron will remain unlessened to mock the last of our race.

But may we not put off the day of death? May we not make up for the paling of our sunshine by devices for raising our food, and generating our oxygen, by means of the energy of waterfalls, wind, waves, tides, sunshine, and the enormous momentum of the earth itself? Grant it: it is but a postponement; we should exhaust these sources of energy in turn; yet even then the store of iron would remain, because it is not destroyed by use but only dissolved or worn to powder, to re-precipitate and re-concentrate.

We often speak as if the momentum of the earth could not be utilized by those standing upon it, forgetful that the ether through which it is plunging is a fulcrum, — not the most convenient one possible, but yet a fulcrum, — whence it may be pried, A man on a cannon-ball rising through theair might utilize the momentum of the ball itself, by means of a windmill driven by the friction of the air through which he passed. Thus man, living on our earth as it rushes through the ether, may some day learn howto utilize the earth’s momentum by means of an ether mill, a mechanism driven by the friction of the ether through which he is moving. In doing this he would retard the earth’s speed, be it ever so gradually, and cause it the sooner to run down, and come to rest upon the sun. Indeed, as the sun cools, we may purposely delay the earth’s cooling, and thus prolong the age through which it will remain warm enough to support life, by retarding its velocity, and thus bringing it nearer to its source of heat. Thus may man one day modify the climate of our planet. Who shall say that he may not in time modify the seasons themselves, — improving nature’s scheme in this grand way?

We know too little about the properties of the ether to speculate to advantage about the mechanism of an etherdriven mill. But however strikingly it may differ from all other forms of matter, it is after all only matter, to be harnessed in due time by the race which has in its infancy already learned to speak by the lightning.

If we form a picture of man’s beginning his drafts on this iron core; of his putting successive lots of this iron into use; and of the gradual rusting and wearing to powder of lot after lot, till those drafts shall have amounted to any considerable fraction of the core itself; if we remember that this iron rust and powder will be spread out over the face of the earth, or at most be carried by solution into the earth’s crust; and if we bear in mind that this crust is probably but a few hundred miles deep, whereas the iron core is thousands of miles thick; we find it hard to escape the conviction that this vast quantity of iron-rust and powder must in itself form reconcentrations upon which man may draw for his use. Indeed, if all this iron were distributed evenly throughout the earth’s crust, that whole crust would thereby become a tolerably rich iron ore. The essential thing to recognize here is that, although iron disappears from sight as dust or rust, it is not destroyed, but is ever accumulating. Thus the supply of iron is not simply relatively, but absolutely, inexhaustible. From this point of view it is indeed possible that, even before we shall have used up the accessible iron in the earth’s crust, these reconcentrations will form rapidly enough to supply with iron a population greater than that which the growth of vegetation can support.

Argument is hardly needed to show how impossible it would be for man to put into simultaneous use any large fraction of the huge mass of iron contained in the earth’s core. As we attempt to conceive our successive drafts on this vast fund, looking at them first from one standpoint and then from another, we see limiting conditions which would arrest us before we had drawn and used any large fraction of the supply stored to our credit. For instance, if we consider the conversion of iron into frame buildings, set side by side in actual contact one with another all over the earth, and if we imagine that some marvelous engineer, some giant, outstripping Napoleon in genius ten times as far as he outstripped the commonest dullard, could raise these buildings untold miles above the level at which his workmen could breathe; before even such an enterprise could use up any significant fraction of the iron of the earth, those buildings would stretch far above the upper surge of all the majestic billows of thinnest air which may tower and rage at the surface of our atmosphere.

Then, again, before any large fraction of our iron could be put into use, the incidental rusting of successive masses of it which meanwhile had dene their work and disappeared from sight, would so far rob the atmosphere of its oxygen as to make it unbreathable.

Pondering thus, the Martian would smile incredulously if told that man, living as he does on an iron-cored globe, was fretting about the exhaustion of the most exhaustless of his supplies.

Oxygen and food can be had only so long as energy remains. The store of terrestrial and solar energy is finite; its passing is but a day in the life of the universe; and when it is exhausted life must cease. But the earth cannot get rid of the iron of which so great a fraction of its very self is formed.

It is of more immediate interest to consider whether man is likely to be oppressed by the increased cost of iron in the early centuries of the period between the present and that immeasurably, yes, inconceivably distant day when we shall gain access to the earth’s central mass of iron. Two questions suggest themselves: —

First, how rapidly will the increase in the cost of ore raise the cost of the iron made from that ore?

Second, will this prick be so much sharper than the others which must accompany it, that it will be felt as a hardship different in kind from the rest?

As regards the first question, let us remember that the cost of iron in the ore is only a fraction of the cost of the finished iron articles themselves, hardly a quarter of the cost of even such crude products as rails, and an insignificant part of the cost of many of the important finished articles, such as springs, cutting-tools, wire, etc., now made of iron, and less readily made from animal or vegetable matter. If, through the necessity of using ores much poorer than our present, ones, the cost of a ton of iron in the ore, concentrated and ready for smelting, were to double, the cost of a ton of rails would increase by only one-quarter, and the cost of a table-knife by a trifling fraction. Indeed, by increasing the cost of the fuel needed for treating our ores, the rapid exhaustion of our coal-fields may do more than the growing poverty of those ores themselves to increase the cost, of iron.

yon may ask whether the cost of iron to each of us is going to be raised seriously by the continuous and irresistible rise in wages. Probably not. Given a world of men nearly all of whom work in one way or another, the chief permanent element of cost of each product to each consumer is the number of days of labor and of care which its production requires. Note clearly that this is the true measure for our present purpose. The fact that our future ores will be poorer and deeper-seated than our present ones may raise the cost of iron thus measured, but the rise of wages should not, as we can readily see on reflection.

Measured as they should be by their purchasing power, wrages have risen with the secular rise in the scale of living which has given the almshouse pauper what would have been fabulous luxury to Siegfried, Achilles, or Noah. But though this rise should certainly continue, it does not imply an increase in the cost of iron or other products, measured by the true scale — days of labor. This increase in the quantity of goods which society, or mankind collectively, returns to each worker for each day’s work, is of course possible only because of the greater quantity of goods which, thanks to improvement in the processes of manufacture and distribution, society gets from each day’s labor. What all men collectively can distribute to all individual workers severally, is nothing more than the sum of what all men collectively have received from those individual workers, be they laborers, superintendents, presidents, or financiers. Practically speaking, all but an insignificant fraction of us are workers in one way or another. If we each get more for our sweat, or for our thought, than our peers did in Noah’s day, it is possible only because as a whole we create more with a day’s work. The increased purchasing power of a day’s wages simply reflects the increased producing power of a day’s labor. A hundred years hence society, as represented by the shopkeepers, will give the workman who makes iron more goods in return for a day’s wages than it gives him to-day. But with the labor which he gives for those wages he will then make proportionally more iron than now for society, as represented immediately by his employer, and ultimately by you and me, his employer’s ultimate customers; so that society, you and I, will give him no more goods for his pound of iron than we give him to-day. He will get, and we shall give, more goods for a day’s labor, but not more for each pound of iron that he makes.

Turning to our second question, the cost of iron and of the other metals, indeed of all mineral substances, seems likely to increase relatively to the cost of food, wool, cotton, leather, and other vegetable and animal products, because though our present rich and superficial ore bodies are not re-creatable, and though we must turn ever to poorer and deeper-seated ones, the supply of vegetation seems to be not only recreatable at will, but susceptible of enormous increase. I do not here consider the very distant time when the natural reconcentration of the metals worn out and rusted away in use shall have begun to form useful ore deposits. We may assume that we shall soon cease to squander our little store of phosphates, potash, and other mineral matter necessary for plant-life by washing them away with the waste products of city life, out through the sewers into the rivers, and thence to the ocean; and that, within a measurable time, we shall treat all sewage so as to recover these mineral matters, and return them to the land. This we shall certainly do, for if we do not, we die. These precious substances are no more re-creatable than iron ore, but fortunately they are recoverable by simple means.

Yet even so, one cannot feel quite sure that vegetation will continue indefinitely to be abundant. It is possible that the cultivation of the land by civilization necessarily implies that the spring floods must, century by century, wash away into the ocean the thin layer of plant-sustaining top-soil which long ages have accumulated, and wash it away faster than it can be regenerated. Even if we impound the precious mud which is now heedlessly wasted, and dredge or hold it back from every ocean, even then will it not slip from us faster than it can be renewed by the decay of rocks? This is conceivable.

But will the increase in the cost of iron ore be felt more sharply than that of other mineral matter—gold, copper, and the other metals, coal, lime, cement, and the precious stones?

It will be felt more than the increase in the cost of most other metals, not through its being more rapid, but because we are more dependent on iron than on any other metal, indeed probably more than on all the others put together.

The increase in the cost of iron will be quicker and will be felt more sharply than in that of lime and cement, because the stores of limestone and cement-yielding rock are so vast. In the same way, it may be much quicker than the increase in the cost of aluminum, because of the great quantity of this latter metal which our clays and crystalline rocks contain.

As the cost of iron increases relatively to the cost of the vegetable products, or of those mineral products of which such vast stores are at hand, and as this relative increase begins to be felt, it will retard itself by checking our present waste of iron, and by checking also the demand for iron, which will be replaced by those other and cheaper substances. Indeed, concrete has already replaced iron for certain purposes, because it has become so cheap.

But the increase in the cost of iron will be only a pin-prick beside the loss of our coal; first, because coal is much more important than iron — indeed the money value of the coal which we use is five times that of the iron ore; next, because, in the nature of the case, dearness of coal, which is our fuel for heating and cooking, pinches the individual much more sharply than dearness of iron can; and finally, because coal will advance in cost incomparably faster than iron, indeed at an ever-accelerating rate.

For this there are two chief reasons. First, the fact that most coal exists in the carboniferous formation has led to the systematic exploration of that formation in many countries, so that we already have a rough knowledge of how much coal there is in Europe and North America, though we cannot even guess at the quantity of iron ore, because iron ore may exist in any geological formation.

Second, because it is only in the relatively thin layers of rocks which represent the short period since vegetable life began on the globe that we can hope to find coal, while iron we may confidently expect to discover throughout the enormously greater mass of rocks underlying them, and reaching the iron core itself. Indeed, the deeper we go the richer should those rocks be in so heavy a substance as iron.

Of coal it is a true famine that lies ahead; of iron, it is merely a gradual increase in cost; for, whereas there is only a trifling stock of coal, and this is absolutely destroyed in use, the exhaustless stores of the indestructible metal of Mars are even now renewing themselves, so that before the immeasurably distant future when any large fraction of our iron shall have been in service, new masses of it will have reconcentrated ready to our hands. Then iron will indeed have grown dearer, like horses, cotton, Greek vases, and land; but coal will have vanished forever, like the ichthyosaurus, to be replaced by energy from waves, wind, sun, and ether.

Let me sum up my argument. When wecome to consider the effect which the drafts on our iron-ore resources will have in increasing the cost of iron as measured in days of labor, we see that this effect will not be felt oppressively until after an incalculable age, if indeed it ever is: first and chiefly because of the inconceivable immensity of the stores of potential poor and deep-seated ores: second, because the cost of the iron in the ore is only a fraction, often only an insignificant fraction, of the costof the iron articles of our actual use, so that a considerable percentage of increase in the cost of the former causes only an inconsiderable increase in the cost of the latter; and third, because our sense of this increase will be dulled by the simultaneous rise in the cost of almost all other tangible things. To the hardship of this general rise, even to the total disappearance of that most precious deodand, our coal, we shall certainly learn to accommodate ourselves. And though the fraction of this hardship which consists of the increase in the cost of iron may be greater than some of the other fractions of discomfort, such as those formed by the advance in the cost of the other metals, and of certain animal and vegetable products, yet it will not differ from the accompanying fractions taken severally, and certainly not from their sum, in such a way as to be felt oppressively and apart from the rest. Let us husband our iron ore, like every other gift of God. But when we cry out to others to join in the husbandry, let our appeal square with the facts, that those who hear may heed.