Bulk chemical prices 1930s?

[ffutures]

My long silence on Forgotten Futures has mainly been because I've junked most of the spaceship section and done a lot of rewriting. I'm now reasonably happy with most of it, and working on the spaceship design rules. As usual I'm pulling most of the numbers out out my [sounds vaguely like the seventh planet] but one thing that will probably come up a lot is fuel pricing.

“…they use a minute amount of uranium or radium as catalyst to release the energy in the fuel. Uranium has low activity; it will set off only metals like the alkalis, and ships using uranium motors burn salt. And radium, being more active, will set off the metals from iron to copper; so ships using a radium initiator usually burn one of the commoner iron or copper ores."
Stanley Weinbaum - Redemption Cairn

OK, so assuming that Weinbaum's engines needs tons of fuel (I'm thinking say 100 tons of salt to get a freighter to Mars - PLEASE don't tell me how badly I've got it wrong), I need to know how much the chemicals would have cost in industrial quantities circa the 1930s.

Sodium chloride.

Copper salts - is copper sulphate the most readily available for industrial purposes?

Iron salts - I would have said carbonates were the most common form, but I'm not sure. Iron sulphate?

I can make sodium chloride arbitrarily cheap because it's a by-product of one of the types of power plant I've mentioned - an atomic blast that uses some of the sodium chloride in sea water as fuel to make steam for a turbine generator, with lots of salt and purified water as byproducts. But it'd be good to have an idea of how much it cost in the real world at that time.

Anyone got any idea?


Later Found a web site with quite a lot of commodity prices, the National Bureau of Economic Research

http://www.nber.org/databases/macrohistory/contents/chapter04.html

1935
Iron Ore - $4.50 / long ton
Copper - 9.00 cents per pound (don't have ore prices, presumably less) = $201.60 / long ton

Can't so far find a price for salt but I think I can safely set it fairly low.

Comments

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

I see two countervailing economic tendencies which act together to let you make materials as cheap or as dear as you like (within reason):

(1) Human industry has presumably been using up many of these materials in large quantities since the development of atomic energy; by the later stories we've been burning them a couple of centuries, so the old mines might have run dry, but

(2) Since expanding into the Solar System, we would have access to vast new deposits of the required elements -- sometimes in the form of native metals (which would require little refining, mostly just purification of intrusive traces, to use).

Also, keep in mind that with atomic power plants all over the place, electricity will be cheap, and there are easy ways to separate out such common elements as iron and copper given nigh-infinite electricity. Oh, and you can get all the sodium chloride you need as a by-product of desalination plants.

One interesting question: what's the Earth's global population like in Weinbaum's future? I could easily see such an energy-rich world as sustaining a population of 5-10 billion, indefinitely.

[pauldrye.livejournal.com]

Siderite is the most common iron ore that's not an oxide, and it's iron carbonate (FeO₃). Is there a reason not to use an oxide? Magnetite and ferrite are more common than siderite. Ferrite is produced artificially in large quantities too.

[pauldrye.livejournal.com]

My dad, who is in the chemicals industry, suggests trying to find an archive of Chemical Marketing Reporter, which offered quarterly prices for industrial chemicals in the past. He's not sure how far back they go, but the magazine itself was founded in 1871.

CMR's part of ICIS.com now, and they offer a "free pricing trial", which may include access to the pricing archives.

[pauldrye.livejournal.com]

And this time I'll include the link, derp derp:

http://www.icis.com/staticpages/prices.htm

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Thanks, I'll send them an email first, see what they suggest.