Word: resinous
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...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...
...process was born in 1935 when Basil Albert Adams and Eric Leighton Holmes of the British Department of Scientific & Industrial Research (which has no counterpart in the U.S.) prepared L, phenol-formaldehyde resin which was more useful for its chemical properties than as a plastic. When immersed in "hard" water, which contains salts of calcium, it entered an exchange: it took calcium atoms from the water, replaced them with sodium, thus softened the water...
This was not new, for natural "green-sands" and artificial zeolites have long been used for such softening. But a slightly more complex resin of the same type proved able to draw even sodium atoms out of solution, replace them with hydrogen. This merely substituted acid for salt, but still another resin, made with amines instead of phenol, extracted the acid intact, leaving pure water. Both resins were gradually used up but could be revived by reverse treatment with stronger solutions...
...salts can thus be taken out of any water solution. When the dissolved salts are small in amount, the process is cheaper than distillation. For strong solutions, such as sea water, distillation is cheaper, but the resins can be used where stills and heat for distillation are impossible. When valuable materials are thus taken out of water solution, they can be recovered by washing the resin...
...Paper pipe, which needs no priority number, may replace steel casing in oil drilling. Made like a mailing tube of resin-filled paper, it is hard, stiff but not brittle, so light a man can carry 70 feet of the three-inch size under...