Word: metalized
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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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...
Heat 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...
...mouth organ, or harmonica, has been a great comfort to U.S. soldiers in past wars. But priorities in metal have already put a serious crimp in the U.S. harmonica business. This war's comfort is more likely to come from two easily portable and nonmetallic instruments : the "sweet potato," or ocarina, and the tonette...
...Glass-fiber yarns, once woven into decorative fabrics, are now limited to war uses only. Fireproof, rotproof and impervious to salt air, Fiberglas curtains Navy doorways to save weight and metal. Glass fabric is also used as a lampshade on million-candle-power reconnaissance flares to keep the glare out of observers' eyes and camera lenses...