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play chess?"
    Steve Edmond had come out of the harsh mining camps of Ontario, joining the Royal Canadian Air force in 1938 to escape the unemployment of the mining industry when the world had no use for its nickel. Later that nickel would be part of every aero-engine that kept him aloft. Lucas had come from the New England top social drawer, endowed with everything from the day of his birth.
    The two young men were sitting on the lawn with a chess table between them when the radio through the refectory hall window, speaking in the impossibly posh accent of the BBC news readers in those days, announced that Field Marshal von Rundstedt had just signed on Luneberg Heath the instruments of unconditional surrender. The 8th of May, 1945.
    The war in Europe was over. The American and Canadian sat and remembered all the friends who would never go home, and each would later recall it was the last time he cried in public.
    A week later they parted and returned to their respective countries. But they formed a friendship in that convalescent home by the English coast that would last for life.
    It was a different Canada when Steve Edmond came home, and he was a different man, a decorated war hero returning to a booming economy. It was from the Sudbury Basin that he came. And to the Basin that he went back. His father had been a miner and his grandfather before that. The Canadians had been mining copper and nickel around Sudbury since 1885.
    And the Edmonds had been part of the action for most of that time.
    Steve Edmond found he was owed a fat wedge of pay by the air force and used it to put himself through college, the first of his family to do so. Not unnaturally he took mineral engineering as his discipline and threw a course in metallurgy into the pot as well. He majored in both near the top of his class in 1948 and was snapped up by INCO, the International Nickel Company and principal employer in the Basin.
    Formed in 1902, INCO had helped make Canada the primary supplier of nickel to the world, and the company's core was the huge deposit outside Sudbury, Ontario. Edmond joined as a trainee mine-manager.
    Steve Edmond would have remained a mine-manager living in a comfortable but run-of-the-mill frame house in a Sudbury suburb but for the restless mind that was always telling him there must be a better way.
    College had taught him that the basic ore of nickel, which is pentlandite, is also a host to other elements; platinum, palladium, iridium, ruthenium, rhodium, tellurium, selenium, cobalt, silver and gold also occur in pentlandite. Edmond began to study the rare earth metals, their uses and the possible market for them. No one else bothered. This was because the percentages were so small their extraction was uneconomical, so they ended up in the slag heaps Very few knew what rare earth metals were.
    Almost all great fortunes are based upon one cracking good idea and the guts to go with it. Hard work and luck also help. Steve Edmond's cracking idea was to go back to the laboratory when the other young mine-managers were helping with the barley harvest by drinking it. What he came up with was a process known now as 'pressure acid leaching'.
    Basically, it involved dissolving the tiny deposits of rare metals out of the slag, then reconstituting them back to metal.
    Had he taken this to INCO, he would have been given a pat on the back, maybe even a slap-up dinner. Instead, he resigned his post and took a third-class train seat to Toronto and the Bureau of Patents. He was thirty and on his way.
    He borrowed, of course, but not too much, because what he had his eye on did not cost much. When every excavation of pentlandite ore became exhausted, or at least exploited until it became uneconomical to go on, the mining companies left behind huge slag heaps called 'tailing dams'. The tailings were the rubbish, no one wanted them. Steve Edmond did. He bought them for cents.
    He founded Edmond Metals, known on the Toronto Exchange simply as