What Is the Most Usefully Valuable Metal?
If you were guessing you would naturally say that gold is, of course, the most valuable of the metals. But you would be wrong. The proper answer to this is iron. We do not mean the pound for pound value, for you could get much more money for a pound of gold than for a pound of iron, but we mean in useful value—iron is in that sense the most valuable metal known to man. This is so because iron is of great service to man in so many different ways, and it is very well that there is so great a quantity of it for man’s use.