Word: hansgirg
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Dates: during 1941-1941
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...about a year Kaiser and Reilly have been interested in making magnesium by a new "carbothermic" process developed by Dr. Fritz Hansgirg, an Austrian scientist now living in California. They bought up the U. S. rights to the patents, started plugging for an RFC loan to start production. For $9,250,000 to get things going, they offered to put up a plant that would produce at the rate of 12,000 to 15,000 tons within a year. Since total U. S. production last year was only 6,500 tons, their proposal sounded fantastic. But they had Kaiser...
Three weeks ago it was clear that even hardheaded Federal Loan Administrator Jesse Jones was impressed. Dr. Hansgirg, asleep in his California home, got a 1 a.m. telephone call from Kaiser: get to Manhattan right away and start drawing up plans. In Manhattan a suite of offices was knocked together on the ninth floor of the RCA Building. There Dr. Hansgirg and Reilly started getting their plant on paper. Kaiser shuttled back and forth between the office and Washington, always a half-hour late for appointments that extended all the way around the clock. When the loan was finally approved...
...Hansgirg's process, already in use in England and Japan, differs from the electrolytic method covered by the Dow-Alcoa patents, is claimed by Dr. Hansgirg to be better and cheaper. Brucite clay (magnesium hydroxide) from Nevada will be baked in rotary kilns to form magnesium oxide. The oxide then will be mixed with carbon and heated electrically into gas at 4,000° F. When this is cooled suddenly (from 4,000° to 380° in about 1/1,000 of a second) by blasts of cold natural gas, metallic magnesium is recovered...
...Hansgirg has developed some 35 patents covering fabrication as well as extraction of the metal, and the new plant will be an integrated setup including fabrication units. With the ground-a-clearing, Kaiser had a new goal at week's end: he wants to (and probably will) get the plant into operation inside of six months instead of the year it ought to take...