Colorado, United States. Molybdenum was highly coveted by the war industry, especially in Germany, since cannons like Big Bertha suffered from warping at high temperatures, a defect that disappeared when the steel was molybdenum-based (which melts at 2600°C, compared to 1500°C for iron). The only known source of molybdenum at the time was Bartlett Mountain, Colorado. The mining rights were sold to a certain Otis King, when extraction cost much more than the eventual revenue. With an entrepreneurial spirit, King adopted a new technique, which nearly cost him financial ruin, but led him to extract 2.6 tons of molybdenum in a short time, an amount that exceeded global demand by 50%! Among the few interested parties was Metallgesellschaft, a German company with a branch in New York, which instructed its representative, Max Schott, to acquire the mine. Schott began to harass and then threaten King, who hired a bodyguard, a crippled prison sergeant nicknamed “Two-Gun” Adams. The Germans managed to get their hands on King, pushing him down a slope. He was saved only by the providential soft snow. In 1916, the British managed to get their hands on a German cannon and discover the metal of Molly-be-damned (as King’s miners called it). In 1917, the United States entered the war, but it was only in 1918 that the American government began to pry into the affairs of Max Schott and his associates at American Metal (the American subsidiary of Metallgesellschaft), by which time King had already given in to pressure and sold the mine to the Germans. The US government quickly seized the assets of Metallgesellschaft and nationalized Bartlett Mountain. But it was too late to silence the Big Bertha made of molybdenum steel. Schott’s company went bankrupt in 1919. King became a millionaire after convincing Ford to use special steels in his car engines. And molybdenum in the war industry was soon replaced by tungsten (the element below it in Mendeleev’s Table), which was supplied to the Germans by Portugal during the following World War…
