I/EC POINTING
Forecast THE E D I T O R I A L
FINGER
Expansion Spree Over —for a W h i l e The economy continues to recover, but the chemical industry is slowing its expansion plans. If it seems paradoxical, it's not. The industry has been building so many plants for so long that it temporarily has all it needs. It is probably just a breathing spell, though (page 65 A). Chemical men feel that in the not-too-distant future, growing demand spurred by research-spawned new products will send them off on a new expansion spree. Although the plastics industry too, has felt the effects of the recession, the over-all decline in production has not been severe. Part of the reason is that the plastics industry has been getting a bigger slice of the $50 billion building materials market. A Cobalt Gyroscope? Cobalt atoms may one day replace gyroscopes as the guiding instrument in missiles moving in outer space. Henry Eyring, Dean of the Graduate School, University of Utah, reports that, when cobalt is placed in a magnetic field at low temperatures and the cobalt atoms are oriented as a result of their nuclear magnetic, moments, betaparticles arc emitted in a fixed direction in space independent of the orientation of the vehicle in space. This direction can be established using a Geiger counter (page 5). Coming: Automatic Libraries The time will soon come when a chemist or chemical engineer will be able to walk into a library, feed a fat technical paper into a machine, and have the machine analyze it word by word, select the most important sentences, and reproduce them on a printer. At least that is the forecast from IBM Corp., which demonstrated the technique at the recent International Conference on Scientific Information held in Washington, D. C. IBM thinks that the new process, when perfected, will provide answers to serious communication bottlenecks now facing many fields. Company scientists foresee the time when technical libraries will be linked in a vast communications network. A researcher could automatically get information wherever it existed within this network. The Younger the Better In studying research and development groups in 21 different companies, it has been found (page 10) that the lower the "age" of the group—that
AT T O M O R R O W ' S
PROGRESS
is, the number of months the average group member had been in the group—the more creative the group. The findings may suggest to research directors that planned rotation of group membership might mean a faster flow of ideas from the research lab. Novel House First, aluminum houses, by Alcoa, appeared on the scene. Now the plastics industry is going Alcoa one better—a house siding made of vinylcoated aluminum. The coating is a special formulation made with Geon vinyl resin supplied by B. F. Goodrich Chemical Co., and is applied before the sidings are fabricated. The manufacturer of the sidings, Hastings Aluminum Products, Inc., Hastings, Mich., warrants the finish against blistering, cracking, or crazing for 10 years. It could be that, in the future, all the exterior maintenance your house will require is an occasional washdown with a garden hose. Going M y W a y ? The high cost of going it alone along the road of basic research is catching up to a number of companies. They are discouraged, in that after many months and dollars spent to find the answer to a particular problem, the sought-for information was available from another source but did not have much circulation outside of company circles. L. G. Bliss of Foote Mineral Co. has suggested that the chemical industry consider the possibility of undertaking cooperative basic research to avoid this wasteful duplication of effort. Standing in the wings, nodding their collective heads in approval, are the independent research laboratories who have long felt that this approach was needed to give American scientists a distinct advantage over their foreign counterparts. Fertilizer Caking — N o More Caking of fertilizer under adverse conditions of storage may be a thing of the past. Monsanto Chemical Co. has developed a new type of ammonium nitrate which, according to the company, can be stored indefinitely without caking and is also dust-free. The product has a higher density than regular ammonium nitrate fertilizer and consequently takes up 2 0 % less space in storage and farm machinery. The new fertilzer, which the company calls Lion E-2, is manufactured under a new processing technique (patents applied for). V O L 5 1 , NO. 1
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JANUARY 1959
31 A
