Platinum Still Restricted

From The American Horologist magazine, June, 1945

Platinum Still Restricted

Military needs for platinum for the war against Japan will prevent early restoration of platinum use in jewelry, the War Production Board said today.

To meet essential needs, it· has been necessary for the Government to purchase platinum and to release it to industry. Requirements must decline to a point where use in jewelry would not jeopardize war programs before the metal can be released for general use, WPB said.

Officials of WPB's Miscellaneous Minerals Division disclosed that throughout 1944 and in 1945 to date, it has had to exert strict controls to hold even essential uses to the level of available supplies.
Some jewelers still hold quantities of platinum, which they would like to use in jewelry, WPB reported.

Such use cannot be permitted until platinum is released to jewelers generally, division officials explained, inasmuch as persons holding idle platinum do so in spite of requests that they turn it in for use in the war effort.

Misunderstanding exists in some quarters because of the fact that the Government does not requisition the inventories of jewelers, and consequently some believe that platinum is not needed in the war effort. WPB emphasized that Government requisitioning has not been used because the assaying of many lots involving small quantities of metal is extremely difficult and it has had to rely upon voluntary cooperation from jewelers.

The use of platinum in jewelry was forbidden at the end of 1942 when military needs crowded out jewelry 

requirements. These military uses include electrical contact points in airplane magnetos, catalysts in chemical plants, general chemical equipment, electrodes in airplane spark plugs, radio and radar tubes, spinerettes for rayon and bushings for glass wool.

* * *

Recent and proposed defections of states from war TIME is serious and deplored by War Production Board of officials, who estimate that daylight saving TIME has saved nearly 5,000,000,000 kilowatt hours of electricity since 1942. Bills to revert to prewar TIME have been passed in Ohio and Michigan, are pending in some other states and are appearing in Congress as a national measure despite W. P. B. opposition. Chief attackers of earlier TIME come from rural areas, contending it hampers farm work.

* * * 

There was quite a shine to the shoes donated by Mrs. A. H. Ziegler to the United Nation's Clothing Drive.

Mrs. Ziegler lives at Ketchikan, Alaska. But the shine was gone from the shoes when Mrs. Ziegler reclaimed the two diamond rings and wristwatch "worth several thousand ;dollars" which she had hidden in the toe of one of the shoes for safekeepmg.