¶ Copper
Index Entry
Copper:
"The beginning is really World War I-- the first big industrial war using big industrial tools. Here man shunted energy into the ends of levers in an enormous way. The way you get the most energy from one place to another in the greatest amount and in the greatest hurry is by wire, which is much faster than by pipeline or tanker. In World War I copper was used because it was the most plentiful of the metals and was a good conductor. In just one year, 1917, man mined and put to work more copper than he had in the whole of man’s history before-- an idea of the magnitude of the energy undertakings in World War I. He had two new technical capabilities, flotation and electrolytics, refinements that made it possible to get that copper to work very much faster. Since that time, man has been using copper in new magnitudes. But when the war was over and that wire was mounted on those poles it kept right on conducting electricity. What we have done was to rearrange the environment. We had taken the copper out of the Earth and we put it to use where we wanted.
“Because we had developed a production capability by landing energies on the ends of those levers, we were generating great”
