tput of the natural stone by the combination of dealers
and, further, the diamond is valued not for its usefulness or beauty but
by its real or supposed rarity. Chesterton says: "All is gold that
glitters, for the glitter is the gold." This is not so true of gold, for
if gold were as cheap as nickel it would be very valuable, since we
should gold-plate our machinery, our ships, our bridges and our roofs.
But if diamonds were cheap they would be good for nothing except
grindstones and drills. An imitation diamond made of heavy glass (paste)
cannot be distinguished from the genuine gem except by an expert. It
sparkles about as brilliantly, for its refractive index is nearly as
high. The reason why it is not priced so highly is because the natural
stone has presumably been obtained through the toil and sweat of
hundreds of negroes searching in the blue ground of the Transvaal for
many months. It is valued exclusively by its cost. To wear a diamond
necklace is the same as hanging a certified check for $100,000 by a
string around the neck.

Real values are enhanced by reduction in the cost of the price of
production. Fictitious values are destroyed by it. Aluminum at
twenty-five cents a pound is immensely more valuable to the world than
when it is a curiosity in the chemist's cabinet and priced at $160 a
pound.

So the scope of the electric furnace reaches from the costly but
comparatively valueless diamond to the cheap but indispensable steel. As
F.J. Tone says, if the automobile manufacturers were deprived of Niagara
products, the abrasives, aluminum, acetylene for welding and high-speed
tool steel, a factory now turning out five hundred cars a day would be
reduced to one hundred. I have here been chiefly concerned with
electricity as effecting chemical changes in combining or separating
elements, but I must not omit to mention its rapidly extending use as a
source of heat, as in the production and casting of steel. In 1908 there
were only fifty-five tons of steel produced by the electric furnace in
the United States, but by 1918 this had risen to 511,364 tons. And
besides ordinary steel the electric furnace has given us alloys of iron
with the once "rare metals" that have created a new science of
metallurgy.

CHAPTER XIV

METALS, OLD AND NEW

The primitive metallurgist could only make use of such metals as he
found free in nature, that is, such as had not been attacked and
corroded by the ubiquitous oxygen.