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National Resources Planning Board 



individual research eflFort and its crude equipment to 

 the comnuinity of effort, the large personnel, and the 

 speciaUzed equipment and facilities of the research 

 laboratories of the Aluminum Company of America 

 today, and the pilot-plant set-up required to translate 

 the resultant research findings into practice. 



Whereas the large, strong organization can finance 

 long-tcnn projects, can bide its time to utilize the 

 results, and can insure, by sheer number of the inves- 

 tigations in hand, that some few of them will prove 

 money makers in time, the small firm must have more 

 immediate results. Conversely, the small finn is 

 usually in competition with a smaller number of other 

 finns (because it usually markets its products within a 

 smaller area), and is more flexible in its abdity to install 

 an improvement promptly. The small firm may not 

 be justified in building up a research staff of its own 

 with the equipment necessary for effective work. 

 Here a qualified consultant, an engineering experiment 

 station, or an independent specialized research labora- 

 tory, may be of service in providing the fundamental 

 information, and the impartial viewpoint that the small 

 organization often lacks, and may supplement these by 

 whatever measure of experimental work the specific 

 problems demand and justify. There are free-lance 

 metallurgists who came up through the ranks in 

 laboratories engaged in group research who now act as 

 consultants. Laboratory facilities and other men to 

 use them must be provided by the client to put the 

 research suggestions of such free-lancers into effect. 

 Because of the thousands of plants engaged in making 

 products out of metals, this problem of how the smaller 

 unit may enjoy the fruits of research is even more 

 pressing than it is in most fields outside of metallurgy. 



In view of the trend toward group attack on metal- 

 lurgical research problems, it may be asked whether 

 the uidividual investigator has become extinct. He is 

 becoming more rare, but is far from extinct. The 

 writer recalls with interest witnessmg early experiments 

 on the manufacture of steel automobile brake drums 

 centrifugally lined with wear-resisting cast iron, carried 

 on by an experimenter whose colleagues called him 

 "Angle-iron Joe." This was because he would not 

 wait, when struck with an idea, to have the drafting 

 room design and the machine shop construct his ap- 

 paratus, but would himself put together, from angle 

 iron and whatever else was handy, equipment that would 

 serve, and serve promptly, wlule the idea was hot, to 

 tell him whether it had merit. Within a period that 

 was amazingly short as most research projects go, Joe 

 had evaluated the compositions, temperatures, speeds, 

 and fluxing operations necessary for good bonding and 

 for the desired metallographic structure, and was able 

 to direct the draftsmen and mechanics in the con- 

 struction of apparatus which went into successful 



commercial production. The method and the product 

 are now standard. The development was put into 

 immediate use by Joe's employer, but the initial dem- 

 onstration was sufficiently convincing that, had he been 

 a free lance, it would not have been difficult to find 

 backing. 



Lessons From the Past 



The problems of how to insure that the stream of 

 metallurgical research shall continue to flow in steadily 

 increasing volume is not different in principle from the 

 broader one facing research in all industry. We may 

 expect to find the same general pattern for successful 

 research in every industry. However, there has been 

 enough experience with metallurgical research to make 

 a few of its case histories and certain generalizations 

 drawn therefrom worth considering here. The success- 

 ful research of the past should pouit the way for research 

 of the future. 



Machining and Machinability 



As epoch-making a metallurgical research project as 

 has ever been carried out was that of the engineers 

 Taylor and WTiite, who, with research equipment 

 advanced for its day, but so crude in the light of 

 modern practice as to make one wonder how they made 

 it work, developed for the Bethlehem Steel Co. tungsten 

 high-speed steels not very different from those used 

 today, and thereby revolutionized the art of cutting 

 metals. What this has meant in terms of increased 

 macliine-shop production and lowered cost is simply 

 incalculable. 



So vital did high-speed tools become in the manu- 

 facture not only of peacetime products, but also of 

 munitions, that tungsten became a strategic material 

 and its domestic scarcity and the necessity for its 

 importation became matters of great military concern. 

 However, domestic molybdenum had meantime ap- 

 peared on the scene. Its economical production from 

 the huge deposit of ore low in molybdenum would, in 

 earlier days, have been very difficult, but it was actually 

 made easy by virtue of previous research on the flotation 

 of copper ores. The flotation process had been the 

 key to the utilization of the great deposits of lean 

 porphyry copper ores, and to the maintenance of 

 copper in the class of relatively cheap metals despite 

 the depletion of rich ores. This also is a dramatic 

 story in itself. Interestingly enough, these lean copper 

 ores themselves contain molybdenum, though it occurs 

 only to about 1 one-hundredth to 5 one-hundredths of 

 1 percent of the weight of the ore, and its presence was 

 for a long time unsuspected. The application of 

 selective flotation, a further development of research, 

 now makes these lean copper ores an important source 

 of molybdenum as a byproduct. 



