Word: metalized
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...that his new metal-plating system is all polished up and promises to revolutionize many industrial processes, Physicist Donald M. Mattox of Albuquerque's Sandia Corp. is faced with a persistent question. "People keep asking me why no one thought of it before," he says, and he has quit trying to find an answer. His best guess is that prac tical metallurgists knew too little theory to tackle the problem, while basic research scientists, who know enough theory, were unconcerned with such practical work...
Hard-Hitting Ions. Mattox supplied just the right combination of theory and practicality to handle a problem that has grown as steadily as expanding modern technology. Nowadays, nearly every metal gets plated for one reason or another-for beauty, against corrosion, to guard against wear, or to reduce friction. But all too often the plating does not stick tightly enough. The substrate (the metal to be plated) covers itself with a film of adhering gas or oxide that cannot be cleaned away; the plating material is deposited on the film, not on the underlying metal, forming a weak bond that...
After detailed study, Mattox decided that all present plating methods have the same weakness: as they are applied, the atoms of plating materials do not hit the substrate hard enough. Mattox gets around this difficulty by using a chamber filled with argon gas. Inside it the piece of metal to be plated is hooked up as the cathode (negative pole) of an electrical circuit. The plating material forms the anode (positive pole). When a high-voltage direct current is passed through the circuit, positive argon ions fly across the gap and smack the substrate so hard that they blast...
...helps when I need someone to hold the other end of something or lift something," says Gwinn. "She also helps with the painting and fabric work." But forbearance is perhaps the cardinal virtue of a woman whose husband has an airplane in gestation. "When you're working with metal, it gets pretty noisy," says Shewmaker. "And then, of course, you have to give your garage to it, even if you assemble the wings separately. That means you have to park your car out in 'the street. My wife gave me the dickens about that...
...Metallic inserts in tires are not brandnew. In the early days of the automobile, motorists sometimes fastened metal nuts to the tread, producing tires that gave good traction but ripped up highways and brought on many of the early anti-metallic-tire laws. Several years ago, metallic stud tires were developed in Sweden; they have since come into widespread use in Scandinavian countries, where they constitute as much as a quarter of all tire sales...