These activities took the salesmen far afield. They disposed of lumber to the Panama Canal operators, sold nitrate to the Government of Holland, converted the great ammonium nitrate plant at Perryville into a hospital operated by the Public Health Service for the benefit of disabled ex-service men, transferred tin to the Navy Department, and demonstrated to the Department of Agriculture that the containers in which it had been intended to ship trench mortar shell could serve equally well as containers of dehydrated vegetables. They disposed of rope to the Department of Agriculture. They sold a thousand revolvers to the police force of Washington. To the federal road-builders they turned over trucks and smokeless powder and trinitrotoluol to be used as blasting explosive.
One of the largest single undertakings in ordnance salvage was the disposal of manufacturing plants either built outright or equipped with machinery by the Government. There were some 300 of these, and the Government’s investment in them was practically $525,000,000. The array included cannon and gun-carriage plants, shell-loading plants, powder works, chemical and acid plants, toluol plants, small-arms factories, ammunition factories, nitrate-fixation plants, and numerous shell-making plants. In the liquidation of the ordnance industry large additional quantities of ordnance production machinery, both new and used, fell into the hands of the Government. All of it, beyond the selections retained in the military reserves, had to be sold. During the first year after the armistice the sales of ordnance plants and machinery brought in a return of over $70,000,000. (Manufacturing facilities worth double that amount had either been stored or installed at the various arsenals, or else had been turned over to other departments of the Government.) In the spring of 1920 half the vast accumulation of ordnance plants and machinery had been disposed of.
The most spectacular sale accomplished in this branch of ordnance salvage was that of the smokeless powder plant at Nitro, West Virginia. This plant was a self-contained town, with three square miles of land in its site, with houses for 20,000 people, theatres, schools, churches, stores, electric lights, paved streets, gas, a telephone system, water, and other modern improvements. The Director of Sales himself conducted the negotiations whereby the entire establishment was sold en bloc to a development corporation, which planned to resell the establishment piecemeal to manufacturers and thus create a permanent industrial city at Nitro. The corporation paid a flat price to the Government for the Nitro plant and in addition admitted the Government as a partner in the profits. Several companies have already occupied factory buildings there. The Ordnance Salvage Board maintained representatives at Nitro to approve the resales as they were made.
The Ordnance Department took over from the producers after the armistice large quantities of steel in process of being made into artillery shell. A great deal of this steel consisted of finished and semi-finished parts for shell. No matter how much labor had been expended on these shell parts, their only value commercially was as melting stock. The users of steel evidently expected to be able to pick up the Government’s surplus stock of it after the armistice for a song: the highest bids for the first offerings of it on the market were only about $12 a ton. The ordnance salvers cannily decided not to sell at such prices and, except for some trifling, but advantageous, sales, did nothing about it until the summer of 1919. By that time the commercial revival began to make itself felt in the demand for steel, the prices of which were further enhanced by an impending strike in the steel industry. Then it was that the wisdom of holding on to the steel stocks became evident. The sale of shell steel was handled directly by the Ordnance Salvage Board, which, after the prices rose, dealt only with heavy purchasers. The average price paid to the Government for this steel was about $30 a ton. The Salvage Board handled about 1,000,000 tons of it.
There were also large surpluses of nonferrous metals,—copper, zinc, lead, tin, antimony, and nickel,—the stocks including nearly 20,000 ounces of platinum, which sold, it may be noted, for an average price of $105 an ounce—just about what it had cost. The copper, as we have seen, went back to the producers at a fair price. The Board sold 65,000,000 pounds of zinc at an average of eight cents a pound. The surplus of brass amounted to 135,000,000 pounds, and this has been selling at good prices. During the year following the armistice the salvers disposed of nonferrous metals worth $40,000,000.
The salvers had to use their ingenuity in order to dispose of the surplus cupro-nickel advantageously. Cupro-nickel is an alloy of copper and nickel which is used in making jackets for small-arms bullets, but the metal has no commercial use. The Government was able to secure not a single bid for any of its large surplus of cupro-nickel. The alloy is too tough for ordinary metal-working machinery. The ordnance salvers first proposed that this metal be used at the Mint in making five-cent pieces, but the surplus of it was so large that it would have taken many years to consume it all in this use. The experimenters then took hold and found that, by melting cupro-nickel and further alloying it with zinc, they could produce German silver, a commodity for which there is extensive industrial use. This fact was demonstrated to the market, and the first result was a bid for 5,000,000 pounds of cupro-nickel at a favorable price.
An even more conspicuous example of resourcefulness on the part of the ordnance salvage forces was the sale of the so-called cartridge cloth. The Ordnance Department was an extensive war consumer of textiles of many kinds. Silk, cotton, wool, felt, and linen are used in numerous forms in the production of ordnance supplies. The quantities acquired during the war may be estimated from the fact that the surpluses left after the armistice brought on sale close to $25,000,000. In the surplus of textile goods was a considerable yardage of what was called cartridge cloth; and it must be said that at the outset none of the excess ordnance supplies seemed to be so hopeless as a salvaging proposition, so certain to account for a large loss of investment, as this stock of cartridge cloth.
The cartridge cloth was used during the war to make bags to be filled with the smokeless powder used as the propelling charges for guns of the larger calibers. The cloth was made of silk, for the reason that silk alone among fabrics burns perfectly and leaves no ash to smut the barrel of a gun. Cotton, in contrast, or any other fabric, is likely to leave charred pieces of itself smouldering in the breech of a gun after a shot; and these smouldering pieces may touch off the new powder charge prematurely and kill or maim the men serving the gun. Moreover, silk alone does not cause a flash at the muzzle of the gun when the shot is fired. Such flashes at night betray the gun’s position to the enemy.
But though cartridge cloth was made of pure silk, what a silk it was! Naturally, to keep down its cost, it was woven of the cheapest silk materials possible to obtain. It was made of what were practically the by-products of silk-weaving—noils and waste silk. Noils are cut cocoons, immature cocoons, and combings from the outsides of cocoons. The woof of cartridge cloth was made from silk noils and the warp from waste silk. All raw silk is filled with a natural gum, which in commercial processes is boiled out before the silk is woven. Since this gum did not impair the fabric for use in guns (the gum gave perfect combustion and left no ash), it was left in the raw material in order to keep down the cost of the fabric. In order to facilitate the manufacture of cloth from noils, the noils were carded, combed, and spun in oil, oil not being objectionable in the cloth. The result was a greasy, dark colored, rough cloth, looking like oily gunny sacking, a fabric about as unalluring as any that could be imagined. And it cost the Government on the average seventy-two cents a yard. At the time of the armistice the Ordnance Department had on hand about 22,000,000 yards of it. Most of this quantity was set aside as a war reserve. The rest was offered for sale. The best offer for it was twelve and one-half cents a yard. The Government, therefore, faced a considerable loss.
The ordnance salvers were not content to swallow this loss. The Salvage Board obtained $20,000 with which to experiment with the silk. An expert silk maker in the Sales Branch then tried boiling out the gum and oil and otherwise processing the fabric, after which he bleached, dyed, printed, and napped it. The result was a beautiful fabric, suitable for outer garments for both men and women, and for millinery, drapery, and upholstery. Beautiful color effects were obtained with it by certain silk-finishing companies. With this demonstration before the trade, the Salvage Board again asked for bids, and this time received a number of them, offering prices ranging from thirty-one cents a yard to forty. This still was not enough for the salvage salesmen, who went out and negotiated a contract with two companies—the Bush Terminal Company of New York and the McLane Silk Company of Turners Falls, Massachusetts—which netted the Government eighty-five and a half cents a yard, plus half the profits received from the sale of the fabric. A considerable quantity of the silk was sold under this arrangement.