CORPORATIONS: New Luster for Vanadium

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For years the Vanadium Corp. of America jogged along in its own quiet way, all but unknown to the public. Last week it was blasted into the limelight. Vanadium is one of the chief suppliers to the atomic bomb project.

Vanadium Corp. was established in 1907.

Ever since, its engineers have poked into the earth's crust in search of deposits of vanadium, tungsten, chromium and other rare metals. In Peru it controls the world's largest vanadium deposits, and a leaching plant nearly three miles above sea level.

It owns smaller mines at Naturita, Colo., and at Monticello, Utah.

In 1935 the company got a new president, stocky, pink-jowled Edwin Dagobert Bransome. No engineer, Bransome pulled the company out of a financial hole. It promptly earned a profit of $152,000, Vanadium's first in six years. By 1944 Bransome was able to report to his stock holders that Vanadium had cleared $459,00 on gross sales of $16 million.

Last week Vanadium's president was mum. He would discuss neither his company nor its future. But investors would no longer ignore it: in three days after Hiroshima was bombed, Vanadium's stock was pushed up from $25½to $33 ⅜a share. Next day it went down to $28⅜ as speculators took their profits.