No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Eye-Dropper Technique Proves Effective Method of Testing Steel.-Science has removed the eye-dropper from the family medicine cabinet and put it to work sampling molten steel at 2700 Β° F.
The "eye-dropper," as now used industrially in the G. E. Schenectady Works Laboratory, is a heat-resistant glass tube, about the diameter of a lead pencil and 18 in. long, with a rubber bulb at one end. Liquid steel fresh from the furnace is drawn up into the tube by squeezing the rubber bulb, just as an eye-dropper draws up medicine. The steel hardens into a smooth, homogeneous rod within 5 rain., the glass is cracked from it, and the rod is ready to be checked for quality.
Eye-dropper samples may be prepared for analysis in a few minutes. Older techniques required long hours and involved such laborious operations as cuttMg a block from a hardened steel mass, machining it into a rod, and buffing it to a high polish.
Three men, wearing gloves and goggles, form a highly co-ordinated testing team. In a sequence that must take no more than 60 seconds, the first man removes a puddle from the heart of the furnace with a ladle on the end of a 10-ft. pole. A.second worker skims away the slag forming on the surface as the metal approaches the solidifying point. The third man then steps forward with the "eye-dropper" to suck up a glowing sample.
Cut in two and fitted into sockets before a spectrograph, the sample forms two electrodes of a high-voltage arc. An electric spark jumps between the two, giving off a light which varies with the makeup of the electrodes. By breaking up this light into its component colors with a prism, trained observers are able to judge the quality of any given batch of steel sampled by the "eyedropper." R. H. O.
π SIMILAR VOLUMES
Newport, Delaware, plant of the Pigments Department. This, so far as the company knows, is the first time ductile titanium metal has been produced for commercial exploration. The U. S. Bureau of Mines has been producing the metal for research purposes. Reports of the Bureau of Mines and other organ
CURRENT TOVlCS
Among the better known steroid hormones they listed vitamin D, morphine, bile acids, and cholesterol. It is cholesterol, the most abundant of all steroid compounds in animal tissue, which is the parent substance for all other steroids, they said. Most of the work done thus far, the symposium of 600