Abstract
THERE has been an enormous increase in the production of the most important metals, the output doubling itself in quite a short period: twelve years for copper, seventeen for pig iron, eighteen for tin. and so on. Along with this quantitative growth, the development of modern industry has brought with remarkable qualitative changes, elements which until lately were curiosities of the laboratory rising into industrial importance. Aluminium, which seventy-five years ago had only been obtained in quantities of a few pounds, had a world production t the beginning of the War approaching a million tons, while its later development on both sides of he Atlantic has been on a very large scale. Aluminium is not one of the rare metals ; it is in fact, the most abundant of all metals in the earth's crust, but at resent bauxite, a rich mineral of very local distribution, is alone used for its extraction. But elements of are occurrence, such as tungsten, molybdenum and vanadium, now occupy, in consequence of the ever-increasing demands of the engineering industries for materials of higher strength or other special properties, a key position out of all proportion to their abundance. This is largely due to the discovery that the properties of a metal may be profoundly altered by very small Additions of another element, metal or non-metal. Pure iron is even softer than copper, but less than 1 percent of carbon converts it into steel which nay be made so hard as to scratch glass. This fact had been discovered empirically many centuries ago, but now that the process is better understood there are many other instances of the same kind. Copper can be made hard enough to serve as springs and even as non-sparking mining tools by adding 2.5 percent of beryllium, while the soft metal lead may be strengthened, so as to offer a greater resistance to frost when used for water-pipes, by alloying with so little as 0.05 percent of tellurium.
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DESCH, C. NEW METALS AND NEW METHODS*. Nature 150, 419–421 (1942). https://doi.org/10.1038/150419a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/150419a0