Word: magnesium
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...acres of Michigan land, their chimneys, tanks, furnaces, conveyors, cranes sprouting into the cold Michigan sky, men were beating ploughshares into swords-$122,000,000 worth. Already rolling off the bus assembly line were ugly, buglike reconnaissance cars ("Blitz Buggies") for the Army. Already in limited operation was a magnesium alloy foundry, turning out lightweight castings for airplane engines...
When last week began, the U. S. was worried about a bottleneck in magnesium -a metal invaluable, since it is one-third lighter than even aluminum, for lightweight airplane parts. At week's end the bottleneck was smashed. The way it was smashed was a lesson in speed. To a nation which needs speed above all else, it was proof that time is no obstacle to men of energy and purpose...
...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...
...present, only U. S. producer of magnesium is Dow Chemical Co., indicted last month with Aluminum Co. of America and three other firms for conspiring with Germany's I. G. Farbenindustrie to hold down U. S. production through patent control (TIME, Feb. 10). Dow produced the nation's 6,500 tons last year from Michigan brine wells, is now building a plant at Freeport, Tex., to extract another 6,500 tons a year from the Gulf's salt water. When the Freeport and Kaiser-Reilly plants are going full blast, U. S. production will jump...
...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...