ABSTRACT
The clergyman who first smelted American tin, Edward Hitchcock, believed that there was a relation between the amount of useful metals and the wants of society as could have resulted only from divine benevolence. During the nineteenth century Great Britain controlled most of the world's tin output in Cornwall and Malaya, and held a near-monopoly on the production of tinplate. The American civilian industries were likewise dependent on tin for a wide variety of purposes, such as tinplate, alloys, babbitts, solders, foil, collapsible tubes, and the production of tin chemicals. Tin, or to be more specific, American tin', became a strongly symbolical issue as the leaders in Washington attempted to forge a complete American value chain. The tinplate trust, like many other American enterprises, invested time and resources in looking for American tin. The first decade of the new century saw a steady growth of the American tinplate industry.
