¶ Copper
RBF Definitions
wealth-- and we kept right on doing so when the war was over. America and the rest of the world didn’t quite understand all that wealth. Many said that there must be a lot of corruption in America because here the war was over and suddenly there were a lot of millionaires. During World War II, too, America was lend-leasing, etc., using and giving away all manner of things, but still we came out of the war vastly richer than we had been, despite all the things we had done, all the ships sunk and the rest. But even from those sunken ships we have been recovering the metals used to make them. This is an entirely new aspect to our world: that all metals that get mined, even if they are used to make something that becomes obsolete, are scrapped and then put right back into circulation. Of all the copper mined in the history of man, in fact, only about 14 percent has gone out of circulation. The rest gets melted up and used over and over again. And every time we use it, the wire carries more messages-per-cross-section than it did before. We continually up the performance per pound as we reuse those metals."
