Technology Notes

Recent news of invention and engineering:

-- "Lamps of tomorrow will mood-condition our homes, paint pleasing and ever-changing pictures or designs on our walls. kill bacteria, and so guard us against disease, provide us with health-giving radiation and sun tan while we sleep. . . . Heating lamps may warm our homes in cold weather." So prophesied Lamp Engineer Samuel Galloway Hibben of Westinghouse Lamp Co.

-- Geophysical prospecting for oil (recording the underground travels of artificial, explosion-made earthquakes) is relatively new in petroleum technology; geochemical prospecting is newer still. The geochemists pick up samples of the surface soil at spaced intervals, e. g., every tenth of a mile, and analyze them for significant hydrocarbons. An American Chemical Society publication declared that geochemical prospecting shows promise of being a more certain test for underground oil than artificial earthquake analysis.

-- A new method of exploring for metal-bearing ores, described last week at the American Institute of Mining & Metallurgical Engineers, is based on the discovery that plants growing over a metallic ore body contain more of the metal in their tissue than plants growing elsewhere. To smoke out hidden ores, leaves and bushes are burned to ash, and the ash is examined under spectroscopes for significantly high metallic content.

-- Metallographer Oscar Edward Harder of Battelle Memorial Institute (Columbus, Ohio), working with Inland Steel Co.'s research staff, has developed a lead-steel alloy (one part of lead to 500 parts of steel) which is just as strong as leadless steel, but can be machined 30% to 50% faster for mass-production parts. The soft, tiny particles of lead in the alloy serve to lubricate the point where the tool cuts; the tool stays sharp longer, the machine runs faster.

-- General Electric's laboratories in Schenectady announced a new world's magnetic record. A piece of Alnico (aluminum, nickel, cobalt, iron), housed in a brass and iron assembly air-gapped for maximum magnetic efficiency, lifted 4,450 times its own weight.

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