Is Production A Crime?

A friend of mine who has the good luck to be flying jets for American Airlines has sent me a clipping from a San Antonio newspaper, a story broadcast by the London Observer Service. According to this story, the adventurous Howard Hughes had a serious reason for moving to Nicaragua last year, and it wasn’t to learn Spanish. It seems Hughes and Anastasio Somoza, el jefe, have joined forces to harvest the mineral riches of the ocean blue. A triangular patch of the Pacific, lying between Panama and Hawaii and southern California, contains the densest concentration of “nodules” of metal lying on the ocean floor —potato-sized lumps of copper, nickel, manganese, and cobalt, formed by precipitation of ions. The potatoes lie sleeping at a couple of thousand fathoms (for the nonsailor, that’s about a third of a million centimeters; glad you asked). They can be harvested quite simply if you are Howard Hughes. All you do is borrow the skills that were developed in the government-sponsored Glomar Challenger program ($80 million), improve upon them at your own expense ($umpteen), and launch a 618-foot vessel called the Glomar Explorer, complete with a submersible barge of truly Nixonian magnitude.

The average ratio of capital outlay to yearly gross revenue is 4 to 1 in land mining operations. Hughes is attracted to the sea because that ratio drops to a small fraction of the land figure. At sea, according to estimates, one dollar of capital outlay brings home three dollars in yearly revenues. It is possible that Hughes, with his ability to reach decisions quickly, has once again stolen the march on corporations that think by committee and stands to make a tremendous fortune by getting there first and bringing in the harvest while prices are sky high.

WR

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William F. Rickenbacker

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A friend of mine who has the good luck to be flying jets for American Airlines has sent me a clipping from a San Antonio newspaper, a story broadcast by the London Observer Service. According to this story, the adventurous Howard Hughes had a serious reason for moving to Nicaragua last year, and it wasn’t to learn Spanish. It seems Hughes and Anastasio Somoza, el jefe, have joined forces to harvest the mineral riches of the ocean blue. A triangular patch of the Pacific, lying between Panama and Hawaii and southern California, contains the densest concentration of “nodules” of metal lying on the ocean floor —potato-sized lumps of copper, nickel, manganese, and cobalt, formed by precipitation of ions. The potatoes lie sleeping at a couple of thousand fathoms (for the nonsailor, that’s about a third of a million centimeters; glad you asked). They can be harvested quite simply if you are Howard Hughes. All you do is borrow the skills that were developed in the government-sponsored Glomar Challenger program ($80 million), improve upon them at your own expense ($umpteen), and launch a 618-foot vessel called the Glomar Explorer, complete with a submersible barge of truly Nixonian magnitude.

The average ratio of capital outlay to yearly gross revenue is 4 to 1 in land mining operations. Hughes is attracted to the sea because that ratio drops to a small fraction of the land figure. At sea, according to estimates, one dollar of capital outlay brings home three dollars in yearly revenues. It is possible that Hughes, with his ability to reach decisions quickly, has once again stolen the march on corporations that think by committee and stands to make a tremendous fortune by getting there first and bringing in the harvest while prices are sky high.