Crodon

On a deserted stretch of ocean shore, in an empty house, on a kitchen table, in a glass of milk, stood a shiny spoon. For seven months it stood there, unprotected against the salt tang in the air, the dampness, the lactic acid of the milk.

Across the kitchen stood a gas stove, slowly rusting. In the living room, on the hearth, a set of fire-irons covered with aluminum and bronze paint, rusted slowly. Copper and brass bowls, candlelabras, ashtrays, spent the seven months covering themselves with verdigris. Still the spoon stood in its milk. The milk evaporated. Still the spoon stood. Still it was shiny as a bride's present.

The spoon's owner, an engineer of the Chemical Treatment Co., felt his heart cockles glow warmly when he reopened his summer home recently and found this state of affairs. He had covered that spoon with "Crodon," a new alloy containing chromium (next to diamond, the hardest of all substances), which had been perfected for electroplating purposes by Prof. Colin G. Fink of Columbia University and some associates, of whom the spoon's owner was one.

Last week, the experimenters made their discovery (all but the alloy formula) public for the first time. They had, said they, laid Crodon plating on copper, brass, and steel articles with notable success. The surfaces obtained were persistently lustrous, seemed never to need polishing, were almost as cheap to lay on as nickel, had 20 times the life of zinc. They resisted heat as well as electro-corrosion* and acids. They would be found valuable when applied to milled utensils (golf clubs, surgical instruments) that have now to be made of intractable alloys to render them long-wearing and stainless.

*Prof. Fink has also perfected a method of restoring corroded metal antiquities by reversing the destructive electrolytic action now known to be set up in metals by the conjunction of air and moisture upon them (TIME, Apr. 20).