Word: aluminum
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Aluminum, one of the lightest and most malleable of metals, traditionally has been a cyclical business. But today its producers, almost alone among metal manufacturers, are exulting over prosperous stability. Makers of steel, zinc, nickel and copper are ailing because of surging costs and rising cheap imports, but the aluminum industry cannot keep up with demand...
Since 1973 the price of aluminum has jumped from 25? per Ib. to 53?. The gap between supply and demand, some industry leaders assert, will drive the price considerably higher, at least to 60? by the early 1980s. Earnings of the big four, Alcoa, Alcan, Reynolds and Kaiser, which control nearly three-quarters of the U.S. market, have climbed sharply. With considerable understatement, W.H. Krome George, chief executive of Alcoa, says, "For once in our life we have been fairly lucky. Things are rolling along pretty good...
Luck actually has very little to do with the industry's cozy stance. Until 1975 the biggest producers acted as if it was more important to expand capacity than to make money. Even though the Government stood ready to buy aluminum for its strategic stockpile, an excess supply overhung the market, depressing prices. As Duncan Campbell, vice president of Montreal-based Alcan, which sells more than a quarter of its production in the U.S., puts it, "We went through our garden of Gethsemane in most of the 1970s basically because of oversupply. We were gouging each other...
...keeps in touch with Mary Lyn. He is still a senior patrolman at Winter Park, and he skis there every Christmas and every spring, taking injured skiers gently down the mountain, cradled behind him in an aluminum toboggan that whispers as it rocks through the snow. Mary Lyn and Jim talk late into the evening in his cabin sometimes, then hug and say goodnight. Mary Lyn drives off in her Vega. Jim trudges through the snow to his Jeep and connects an extension cord to the plug sticking out of the grille, starting a heater which will keep the engine...
...gases loaded with "dopants." Like oil stains in a concrete driveway, these impurities soak into the underlying silicon. Since chips usually contain as many as ten layers, all these steps-"rusting," photomasking, etching, baking, etc.-must be repeated for each layer. Then the entire wafer is coated with an aluminum conductor, which also must be masked, etched and bathed in acid. Finally, an eagle-eyed computerized probe scans the wafer for defective circuitry and marks the bad chips in red. The wafer is then separated by a diamond cutter, the bad chips are discarded and the good ones externally wired...