Air Conditioned Blast Furnace.--( Refrigerating Engineering, Vol. 3 8, No. 2.) Construction of an air conditioned blast furnace is under way at the Woodward Iron Co., Woodward, Alabama, in a move watched by iron and steel manufacturers throughout the United States to determine if this method of producing better pig iron is successful from an economical and practical standpoint. H. A. Berg, president of the iron company, said the object of the experiment is to control the amount of moisture in the air in an effort to obtain greater uniformity in pig iron. The Carrier Corporation of Syracuse, N. Y., will air condition a blast furnace now being modernized. The installation calls for refrigeration and air conditioning equipment to control the amount of moisture in the air handled. Twenty-seven hundred tons of air per day are cooled to a constant predetermined dew point, then heated to a temperature of IOOO ยฐ F. with no water added. A daily average of twenty tons of water is removed from the air. R. H. O.
New Mineral.--Discovery of. a new mineral, officially named "shortite" was announced recently by the Geological Survey, Department of the Interior. Composed of a double carbonate of sodium and calcium, the new mineral was found and identified by J. J. Fahey, chemist, in the Geological Survey laboratory. It was discovered as disseminated well-formed crystals in sections of core from the John Hay oil and gas well, drilled by Mountain Fuel Supply Company on leased Government land in Sweetwater County, Wyoming, at depths of 1,25o to 1,8oo feet below the earth's surface. Shortite was named in honor of Dr. M. N. Short, a former geologist of the Survey who now is Professor of Optical Mineralogy at the University of Arizona. Although the commercial value of "shortite" is not yet definitely known, the new mineral is associated with considerable quantities of trona, sodium carbonate-bicarbonate, which does have potential commercial value. Trona was identified in a sample from this same well in 1938 by R. C. Wells, chief chemist of the Geological Survey. The new find probably will be one of the few mineral discoveries for the year. So thoroughly has the earth been combed that, during the past two years only about twenty new minerals were discovered in the entire world.
R. H. O.