The Ordnance Department took over from the producers after the armistice large quantities of steel in process of being made into artillery shell. A great deal of this steel consisted of finished and semi-finished parts for shell. No matter how much labor had been expended on these shell parts, their only value commercially was as melting stock. The users of steel evidently expected to be able to pick up the Government’s surplus stock of it after the armistice for a song: the highest bids for the first offerings of it on the market were only about $12 a ton. The ordnance salvers cannily decided not to sell at such prices and, except for some trifling, but advantageous, sales, did nothing about it until the summer of 1919. By that time the commercial revival began to make itself felt in the demand for steel, the prices of which were further enhanced by an impending strike in the steel industry. Then it was that the wisdom of holding on to the steel stocks became evident. The sale of shell steel was handled directly by the Ordnance Salvage Board, which, after the prices rose, dealt only with heavy purchasers. The average price paid to the Government for this steel was about $30 a ton. The Salvage Board handled about 1,000,000 tons of it. There were also large surpluses of nonferrous metals,--copper, zinc, lead, tin, antimony, and nickel,--the stocks including nearly 20,000 ounces of platinum, which sold, it may be noted, for an average price of $105 an ounce--just about what it had cost. The copper, as we have seen, went back to the producers at a fair price. The Board sold 65,000,000 pounds of zinc at an average of eight cents a pound. The surplus of brass amounted to 135,000,000 pounds, and this has been selling at good prices. During the year following the armistice the salvers disposed of nonferrous metals worth $40,000,000. The salvers had to use their ingenuity in order to dispose of the surplus cupro-nickel advantageously. Cupro-nickel is an alloy of copper and nickel which is used in making jackets for small-arms bullets, but the metal has no commercial use. The Government was able to secure not a single bid for any of its large surplus of cupro-nickel. The alloy is too tough for ordinary metal-working machinery. The ordnance salvers first proposed that this metal be used at the Mint in making five-cent pieces, but the surplus of it was so large that it would have taken many years to consume it all in this use. The experimenters then took hold and found that, by melting cupro-nickel and further alloying it with zinc, they could produce German silver, a commodity for which there is extensive industrial use. This fact was demonstrated to the market, and the first result was a bid for 5,000,000 pounds of cupro-nickel at a favorable price.