Word: lithium
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Lithium, lightest and most active of metals, has been put to work. Its new job: snatching oxygen from the atmosphere in furnaces for toughening steel gun parts, aircraft propeller blades, tiny altimeter gears and other tools...
...treating (controlled heating and cooling) is a necessary step in steel working to soften or harden the metal. Ordinarily, steel oxidizes rapidly at furnace temperatures (around 1,600° F.), forming a scaly surface. This must be cleaned off mechanically or chemically, thus altering delicate dimensions. But with a lithium atmosphere in the furnace, steel parts come out bright, all ready for assembly...
...soft, whitish metal, like silvery cheese, lithium is not only the lightest metal but the lightest known solid: it will float on gasoline. (Cork and balsa wood only seem lighter: they are pocketed with air.) Long known in the laboratories for its instability, lithium tarnishes almost instantly in air, decomposes water at ordinary temperatures. It owes its new usefulness to this chemical alacrity, and to the dogged research of a small company (The Lithium Co., Newark, N.J.) which now has some big customers...