Word: mica
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Everybody gets physical exercise by helping to run a 146-acre college farm. Recently the college opened on the campus a little mica mine from which the students are producing for the U.S. Government. The students and faculty built Black Mountain's only notable building, the local stone-and-transite study hall in which each Mountaineer has a private study cubicle. Bedrooms hold three or four students each. Food is simple and self-served. Except on Saturday nights, everybody wears work clothes...
...mess. Even before she entered the war, the U-boats had smashed the vital shipping routes along her 4,899-mile coastline. She was starved for imported manufactures. Buyers were scarce for her coffee, cotton, cacao. The Allies were screaming for unheard-of amounts of manganese, rubber, bauxite, mica, other strategic materials...
When burly Robert E. McConnell moved in as board chairman-president of ex-German-controlled General Aniline a year ago (TIME, April 20, 1942), he had two problems at the top of his list: 1) to create a research staff; 2) to needle them into finding a mica substitute...
Polectron, Promika. Bob McConnell's new scientists had one big advantage over all the other men in the U.S. struggling with the same problem: they had Ani line's bulky file of German experiments on synthetic mica. With the aid of this know-how, last summer they came up with Polectron - a resin made from plentiful materials including coal, tar, water and limestone. General Electric tested Polectron for a while, at length evolved from it a finished mica substitute which it named Promika...
Promika has not yet successfully supplanted mica except for most types of radio condensers. But with literally billions of those needed for radar, walkie-talkies, inter-communicators, etc., this is a huge step forward. Natural mica "fails" at lower temperatures than Promika. Moreover, 1 lb. of Polectron replaces 10-15 lb. of natural block mica (on which rejects and wastage are very high), thus costs less than Indian mica...