MINING: Future Assured

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Finding an impurity in their copper that they could not get rid of, exasperated German copper miners of the early 18th Century called it kupjernickel (copper devil). Canadian Copper Co. felt the same way about nickel until 1902 when it combined with two U. S. companies that owned a nickel-refining process. The combine eventually became The International Nickel Co. of Canada, Ltd., which produces 85% of the world's nickel and made $24,000,000 in 1938's first nine months.

International's biggest producer is the Frood Mine near Sudbury, Ont., discovered by Prospector Thomas Frood, who sold his claim for $30,000. Deep beneath tall smelter chimneys and black slag mounds, its shafts bite 3,425 feet into the earth; from its honeycomb of stopes come 12,000 tons of nut-brown ore every working day. A ton of Frood ore contains 95 pounds of copper, 47 pounds of nickel, and the farther the shafts pierce toward the earth's core the richer the ore becomes.

Nevertheless, International's bright-eyed, nickel-grey-haired President Robert Crooks Stanley announced last month that Frood had begun open-pit mining. By last week, these new operations were fast approaching a fixed-quota yield of 4,000 tons of ore a day. This is low-grade ore, expensive to smelt. But open-pit mining is much cheaper than shaft mining and—more important to smart President Stanley and International's 90,000 stockholders—combination of the two methods will assure an average grade of ore for many a year, will put off the day when even Frood's vast deposits give out.