May/June 1997
By Si Wakesberg
Si Wakesberg is New York bureau chief for Scrap.
In my desk drawer, there’s a piece of black copper, a token from a remarkable trip to the so-called King Solomon’s mines in Timna, Israel. This memento reminds me that copper is one of the most ancient metals, one that was being mined thousands of years ago. According to oral history, the Timna mines were operating at the time King Solomon ruled over his desert kingdom.
I received the piece of black copper in 1966 during my first visit to Israel. A group of scrap executives, assembled as a United Jewish Appeal (UJA) metal mission, were planning to tour Israel that year. Since I was planning to travel there prior to their trip, they asked if I would check some of their arrangements during my visit. I agreed. And to my surprise, when I arrived at Lod Airport, I received a royal welcome from the UJA and its Israeli constituents.
Fortunately, 1966 was a quiet year in Israel. I remember one tour guide who told our group confidently, “There will be no war with the Arabs.” Though he was correct at the time, war broke out in 1967, which goes to show how much tour guides know about affairs of state.
At the time of our visit, Jerusalem was a divided city. From our vantage point in the King David Hotel, we could see Arab gunners on rooftops, their weapons pointed in our direction.
A labor government was then in power. One day, as we were waiting for an elevator, out stepped David Ben-Gurion, one of the state’s founding fathers, looking like the photographs we had seen in history books. It was a moment of shock and awe that left us speechless.
For all of us, it was a historic trip. One sunny morning, UJA representatives took us to the airport to witness a remarkable scene—the homecoming of the first planeload of Romanian Jews, who were among the first Jews to return to Israel from behind the Iron Curtain. It was a triumphant yet sad occasion as those battered people disembarked, clutching their belongings.
We traveled north close to the Syrian border to visit Kefar Blum, which had been colonized by our American friends and which boasted a large high school, swimming pool, and visitors’ residence. It also had bombproof shelters for children to safeguard them during shellings by the Syrians, who then controlled the Golan Heights to the north. It was a heart-stopping reunion with friends we hadn’t seen for many years, friends who had grown older as we had, who were still speaking English even though they were fluent in Hebrew, and whose children were already serving in Israel’s army. We stayed up late talking.
We also visited the Negev, Israel’s desert region. It was July and the heat was desperate. The area’s major hotel didn’t have air conditioning, but was instead “air-cooled.” It was so hot the first evening that we repaired to our air-conditioned car for comfort.
On the way back to Jerusalem, our car overheated. There we were in the Negev under a burning sun, waiting for someone to come along and offer help. A few cars stopped, but they had no water. Finally, in one of those great coincidents that occur only in the movies, we hailed a passing car that happened to be driven by some New York neighbors and friends. They had a bottle of water, which we happily poured into our car’s steaming radiator. Once cooled down, the engine worked, and we proceeded homeward.
The previous day we had visited the Timna mines, where we saw a facility that, amazingly, had operated in biblical times and was still producing copper.
Our visit occurred during a turbulent time in the metal markets. That summer, for instance, the price of No. 2 copper scrap tumbled 24 cents a pound. An article from that time described the market this way: “It was the morning after a long night of fantastic prices, tight supplies, incomprehensible shakeups and shakedowns in copper, government controls, international crises, rumors and excitement. ... After the champagne, one had to be content with drinking cups of black coffee.”
The copper market was a source of interest to officials of the Israeli ministry in charge of mining. They were affable, fluent in English, and well-versed in metals technology, though somewhat puzzled by the errant behavior of the copper market. They were proud of the Timna mines, their historic tradition, and their up-to-date production facilities, and they told us that the copper being produced was finding agreeable export outlets.
The Timna mines were producing black copper, an impure grade of copper that has to be refined in a smelting or blast furnace to eliminate sulfur and other impurities. This first step upgrades the material to about 77-percent copper. Next, it’s put through a converter to remove additional impurities to get it to a stage called blister copper, which is about 96-percent pure. The blister is then processed through an anode furnace to get it to a 98-percent-pure anode state. Finally, the anodes are electrolyzed to reach 99.9-percent copper as cathodes. Though this is the total process for copper, it can be sold at any stage to be smelted or refined elsewhere.
When we asked about scrap recycling, the Israeli officials told us they were beginning to look into the process. “As a small country, recycling will be very necessary for us,” one mine official said. Already, he noted, some government personnel had traveled to the United States to talk to metals executives and see what they could bring back to Israel to aid its metals development.
We mentioned the forthcoming UJA metal mission, and they appeared greatly interested in talking with the U.S. scrap executives who would be visiting Israel.
At the end of our mine tour, we were each given a piece of black copper as a token of our visit. We could have, of course, secured a similar piece of copper from one of our U.S. members, but it wouldn’t have been the same.
This particular piece of black copper was and is different. It’s a piece of history, it’s a representation of a special geography, it’s a story of a people. But it’s also a memory of the earliest days of the copper market and how this one metal—copper—has been there from the beginning, a force that has influenced the progress of world civilization. •
In my desk drawer, there’s a piece of black copper, a token from a remarkable trip to the so-called King Solomon’s mines in Timna, Israel. This memento reminds me that copper is one of the most ancient metals, one that was being mined thousands of years ago. According to oral history, the Timna mines were operating at the time King Solomon ruled over his desert kingdom.