 Hi, this is Jack Lifton and this is the Critical Metals Corner for Wednesday, February 24, 2021. And today I decided we're going to celebrate an anniversary. Today I'm calling the 6,000th anniversary of the beginning of the use of copper as a technology metal. It was for perhaps its first thousand years of being used as for tool making, the most important and critical metal on earth. It went into a hiatus for a while and in the 19th century has come back and is today clearly the most important critical metal of all because the transmission of electricity, which is the power source of our civilization, depends entirely on copper wire. So I decided today we're going to have an episode of what Critical Metals University because I'm reading a whole lot of uninformed commentary on critical metals and on the technology metals, the term I first started using about 15 years ago. So let's take a look at human history and I'll stay away. The stone age were told ended about 6,000 years ago, interesting coincidence now, but the fact is it really didn't. The stone age where stone was used for tools and structures and shelter didn't end until around 1880 and it ended when a French engineer Ferdinand Eiffel built a very tall tower out of steel, iron really, but it was a form of steel and he showed that you could bear enormous weights, steel could bear enormous weights, the original Eiffel Tower weighed something on the order of 7,000 tons and I've seen it a hundred times but I don't recall how tall it is, let's say it's 15 or 20 stories at least. That was the first structure built by human beings where the load was born entirely by a metal, in this case iron and steel. So until then stone and plant fiber, i.e. wood, were the principal methods of constructing buildings for human beings from time immemorial until about 200 years ago. So I call that the stone age, I don't care what anthropologists and paleontologists say, that was the stone age. What happened? We entered what I call the second phase of the iron age. The first phase of the iron age was where rather brittle iron and tiny amounts of handmade steel were used for tools, tools, nothing else. And this age, the iron age, actually came to an end in 1867 in very near to where I am today in Wyandotte, Michigan, Windsor-Henry Besmer invention, the Besmer converter began operations and started producing mass producing steel. So the age of steel began in 1867. We are still in the age of steel. Today of the two billion plus tons of metal produced in this world, every year 95% is steel. The next metal produced in quantity is aluminum, which was not known in mass in mass use until the late 19th century. And third is our good old friend copper at 30 million tons a year. Copper has been produced continuously for human use for about 6000 years. It is absolutely the winner of the contest. But I think that people misunderstand the term technology. Technology is very simply the engineering of science, but there really wasn't much science until the modern age. Let's say that I have no problem calling Galileo a scientist. He was probably the first modern scientist and he died about 400 years ago. So science is relatively new. Before then we had let's call it the artisan period of human invention. People had discovered copper and gold in metal form as far back as maybe 10,000 years ago and there was used for decoration. And then about 6000 years ago somebody figured out that the copper piece they dropped in the fire had gotten very hard and one of its edges was very sharp. So the hardening of copper was discovered and soon we had copper tools. We had copper tools. I don't know how you how most of you think the pyramids were built, but a lot of copper tools were worn out. We see in the quarries where the stones were quarried that there's a lot of copper shavings and that's because they were using hardened copper chisels. And remember the Great Pyramid was built almost 5000 years ago. So copper chisels had been used for some time then. The point is that that was not technology. That was simply discovery, but I'm sure it was trial and error. We have no idea how many thousands of years it may have taken for it generally to be known that a copper could be fire hardened and form an edge it could keep. Okay, now again I keep hearing from my younger friends that oh these new inventions, television, computers, rocket chips, radio, that type of thing. Boy, this is the modern age. Well, I've got news for all of you. Every one of the things I just mentioned was developed more at at least 100 maybe as much as 200 years ago. Now, why didn't, for example, television, which was first broadcast in the late 1920s, become universal? Why wasn't Franklin Roosevelt's second inaugural address broadcast on big screen TV to everybody? Well, the reason is because the limited, the metals known and in wide availability in that period, let's say from 1900 on to 1940, were incapable of making small devices. Okay, what I'm trying to say is that the modern age of technology, in other words, the modern versions of these old technology, by the way, computers were developed in 19th century and the electronic computer of today uses the exact same logic that Lord Byron's daughter used when she when she devised the first computer program about 200 years ago. So the intelligence behind the computer is fundamental. The actual machine itself, that's been changing rapidly. Now, why? What has the modern computer, television set, radio, if any of you remember that, and let's say displays of all kinds, what do they have in common? They have in common that they're miniaturized. We could have made, the cars could have been built with power windows in 1910, except the electric motor for or for or for the electric window would have in those days probably weighed as much as the car. So that wasn't done. And keep in mind that miniaturization is the driving force for technological advancement. The computer that flew on the Apollo that landed on the moon, I believe was about 64 kilobytes of memory or 32, something like that. In other words, much less than your smartwatch, much, much less. Okay, today's rockets in the space station, for example, probably the space station and the vessels used to reach it, the computers in them probably have a million or a billion times as much memory and are at least 10 or 100 million times faster than the ones that took us to the moon. But we got to the moon with that all hammer and tongs technology. What didn't we get? We didn't get flying cars, did we? Remember the Jetsons were all going to fly? No, that didn't happen. We did get handheld television. That lasted, I think I blinked and handheld little television sets and of course I had some. We're gone and suddenly we had smartphones. And if you want, you can watch Tom and Jerry cartoons on smartphones or their equivalent of the US Congress debating. You can watch that if you like. And we have, let's say, if you've ever seen the inside of a computer, most of it is structure. The actual working parts are tiny, thin chips of silicon, germanium, gallium, arsenide, and each one of them, those chips has perhaps 100 layers deposited one after another to form the logic circuits that we refer to as a computer. So it's their miniature. The door on your car has several electric motors to raise, or at least one set, to raise the window. That's a miniature motor. Your power steering runs on a miniature motor. How did we do that? How do we miniaturize electronics, miniaturize motors? How do we do that? Well, the answer is we went through World War II. And in World War II, scientists were told and engineers were told to look for solutions to problems. For example, how do we mount a radar set on an airplane? We want it to be on the plane. And the engineers thought, my God, these things weigh tons. How are we going to do that? Well, one of the biggest problems was switching electricity, switching it on and off. And mechanical relays are not only large and noisy. If you want to switch a lot of power, they're quite weighty. So that doesn't solve the problem. Well, somebody, I can't remember who it was, but I think I knew once, said, you know what? Silicon, if it's extremely highly purified, and then just a little tiny bit of arsenic is added, it'll actually conduct, it'll take alternating current and turn into direct current. And you can also take extremely high, and the other way around too, and you can create extremely high frequency switching. Well, radar is extremely high frequency signals. And so, thus was born the airplane-mountable radar set. And one thing led to another. And in the, I actually met the gentleman who invented the transistor. And what happened was, after World War II, so many exotic metals, minor metals that had never been produced in the invisible quantities before were produced for R&D science. No cost was concerned. Nobody worried about cost. So, before World War II, I suspect the entire world supply of gallium would have fit in your back pocket. After World War II, there were tons and tons of it. Why? Because it was used to stabilize an alloy of plutonium. And that stable phase of plutonium was the one that goes boom when enough of it is in one place. So, when the Manhattan Project went to El Cohen and said, we need gallium. And El Cohen said, so what? We can't afford, the gallium only presents at 5, 10 parts per million in aluminum. We just let it run through to the aluminum because taking it out would be horribly expensive. And the defense department, excuse me, the war department in 1943 said, how much would it cost you to produce, we need tons. They said $10 million, which for information today would be a quarter of a billion dollars. So, the defense department said, guy pulled out his checkbook. He said, here's the check. When can you have it? And they said, it'll take a couple of years. He said, we'll give you six months. And they did. They did. So, at the end of the war, gallium all over the place. No problem getting gallium. You could use it for many things. But there were no uses. Well, the transistor was first one was made from germanium. Another material that was only available because of the enormous amount of processing of other metals, a tiny bit of which were germanium. And so that it was extracted. And germanium metal was made as a curiosity. Well, the Shockley and Mardin decided in 1946 or 7 at Bell Telephone Laboratories, they thought we can make a switch, make a high-frequency electronic switch. And they used a chip, a chunk of germanium and a contact. And that became the transistor. Then, and this shows you how interesting my life has been, I met the gentleman who had looked at that and he said, you know what? You don't need the bulk germanium for that. If we just put down a thin film of germanium, we can sort of print the necessary circuit onto the germanium. And taking that and silicon and he invented the integrated circuit. A guy named Kilby at Texas Instruments. And I think it was in the 60s. Okay. So now we have silicon. The second, I think it's the second most common element on the earth is suddenly a technology metal. And germanium, you sort of went away because silicon was a lot cheaper and much better. And in the meantime, somebody in the 50s said, you know what? I'm going to try gallium arsenide, see what electronic properties are. Well, boom. That was the highest frequency switching material ever seen. And what did we get from that? Opto electronics. We can now send images at a speed such that when we're looking at our television screen, we don't see the flickering. Okay. The information and the putting the imaging of it is coming that fast. In the war, where earths were used for ammunition, pyrophoric ammunition, every 10th round in a machine gun belt was a copper slog covering a mixed where earth metal core. And when the outer copper film burned away, the rare earth metal caught fire. And so John Wayne could hold that machine gun and you'd see these white dots. They're actually every 10th round while his ribs are breaking and his spine is crushing. But he could hold a 30 caliber machine gun. I've never seen anybody else could do that. The point is that was rare earths. So that was nice. In the war, they needed uranium and uranium had been used for making ceramic, yellow ceramic glazes prior to the war. There weren't any uses for uranium. But some discoveries in Germany and England in the late 30s pointed out that you could make a hell of a weapon if you could just get enough of the correct form of uranium. So everybody started looking for uranium and America was getting our uranium, I believe, from the Belgian Congo during the war. And after the war, the search for uranium, when I was a little boy, everybody had a Geiger column. You went out and you went out in the countryside and if you found a lot of clicks, you called because the government was offering $25,000 and there was a lot of money in 1950 for the discovery of uranium deposits. Well, they sort of found one at Mountain Pass, California, except it was just a small amount of uranium and thorium in a big deposit of rare earths. Well, so what? The military had enough rare earths for ammunition, but they started looking at rare earths for their electronic properties. In the 60s, color television, I remember the first color television, they looked like a washed, a too often washed shirt. It was so dull, the colors. Then somebody discovered that you could make a brilliant red phosphor with the rare earth element, europium, but it had to be pure. So, some technology that the French had discovered in the 20s was now used to ultra-purify, separate and purify rare earths, and the target for a company called Malicor in the 1960s was producing europium from their rare earth, of which it was one tenth percent of the total rare earths in their ore. And they built a huge system to do that. Unfortunately, for them, by the time the system was done, scientists at the NBC had decided that they only needed about one fifteenth as much europium, so the price dropped, and although the Malicor kept making rare earths, there wasn't much call for it. Okay, last thing I'm going to bore you with. In the 1970s, designers of cars at General Motors said, we've got to have power windows. The engineers said, uh-uh, those motors are too big, too thick, and the door is going to be so thick it'll look like it'll look like a bank vault door. We don't want to do that. And at that time, two scientists, one in Japan and one at General Motors, had been looking at some Russian work from the 60s on permanent magnets made with the rare earth samarium and the rather rare metal cobalt. And they said, you know what, this kind of magnet is 100 times as strong as an iron magnet, which means it can be 100th the size and have the same strength. And thus, the rare earth permanent magnet motor was built. The engineering of that into mass production was done by the Sumitomo Corporation in conjunction with General Motors because each one of them had one of the premier scientists in this area. And the making of rare earth permanent magnet motors went into mass production in the early 1980s, thus giving Mali Corp a reason to keep producing rare earths in mountain pass and starting a new industry. Well, pretty soon, some financier cornered the cobalt market and the price of these magnets skyrocketed. So, Professor Sugawa in Japan said, you know what, how about neodymium iron boron? That's just as good. And so they said, okay, well, we got to get the neodymium. Well, Mali Corp was there. They were producing the neodymium and the rest is history. Now, we have these metals that were unknown in, let's say before World War II. World War II is the breaking point. So, everything I've said leads me to this. What are critical metals? Critical metals are those for which, without which we can't make something that we want to have. Okay? So, there's two impediments to critical metals in any society. One is, how much the cost to produce them? The other one is, do we have any of that in our country? Well, both of them are active in our world. I keep saying copper is the most critical metal in our civilization because you can produce electricity in any number of ways. You can consume electricity in a number of ways, but you can only transmit it with copper. Okay, so that's number one. Well, the U.S. has a lot of copper. Alaska is loaded with copper. Arizona has a lot of copper. Utah has a lot of copper. Not a problem. Iron, we have lots of iron ore in the United States, but today we produce about 70 million tons a year of steel in the United States, which is more than enough for our needs. That's not critical. What's critical are mostly these very, I won't say, they're all rare. They're rare, but the reason that many metals are rare is not just that you don't find much of them on the planet because neodymium, for example, is more common than lead in the Earth's crust. The problem is we need deposits of them large enough to be economical from which to produce the metals we need. That's the real problem. And nature did not provide a uniform distribution of these materials, not at all. The majority of the accessible where Earth's are in China, the majority of the accessible cobalts in the Congo, the majority of copper is along the Pacific coast of South America. We don't have a world government. We don't have a world nation. And geopolitics is a big problem for the supply of metals. So just to wrap up this session of critical metals university, I want to say that before you decide which metals are critical, you need to decide what it is you can do without. Notwithstanding it's the end of the world if we don't reduce carbon emissions. I want to tell you something we can do without electric cars. If you insist on electric cars, this is going to make me a lot of unfriends. You don't need cobalt. You don't even need nickel. Most of China's batteries are lithium, iron, phosphate. China produces none of them. They do produce iron. They produce very little lithium. They don't have much phosphate material. Nobody's worried about it. These are cheap and universally available. Critical metals to be critical must be for something we either need or want to have. So next week, I'm going to tell you what we need and you'll see the difference between what we need and what we want to have. Until then, talk to you.