Word: lithium
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With Ash Can & Grater. Lithium's industrial champion is chunky, soft-spoken Harold J. Ness, who began experimenting with the restless metal during the depression, when his work as a metallurgist with a forging company slackened. His first laboratory was his coalbin, and the first lithium furnace was made from ash cans. The lithium was powdered with a common kitchen cheese grater...
...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...
While testing his metal in alloys (lithium had been used to harden lead, purify copper), Ness noticed that the little furnace did not burn out as soon as expected, discovered that lithium vapor was preventing oxidation of the steel. Then it was found that a little lithium lasted a long time because it was being chemically regenerated from its own oxide by the carbon monoxide present in the fuel gas. This discovery the Patent Office refused to believe until U.S. examiners went to the little brick laboratory in Newark, saw with their own eyes how lithium worked. Then they granted...
There are other controlled-atmosphere processes using pure nitrogen, ammonia gas, etc., and eliminating oxygen, water vapor and carbon dioxide. But the lithium system provides a neutral atmosphere so simple to handle that little skill is needed. Air and fuel gas are automatically circulated, picking up lithium vapor from a small, renewable cartridge about the size of a tin cup, which lasts for eight hours. As long as the exhaust gas burns with the bright scarlet flame characteristic of the spectrum of lithium salts, any workman not color-blind can see that the furnace is working properly...