Cans from Bubbles

RESEARCH & DISCOVERY

In scholarly off-hour bull sessions at M.I.T.'s faculty club, the clique of young research metallurgists pondered again and again one of metallurgy's most challenging riddles. Ever since the first can appeared 150 years ago, manufacturers have had to follow a costly and complicated twelve-step process of rolling tinplate or aluminum, then punching, curling and welding a three-piece can. Why couldn't the can, the Cambridge group asked itself, be blown from molten metal just as glass blowers shape bottles, or children blow soap bubbles?

Light Sockets & Square Cans. Molten aluminum, with which the metallurgists worked, behaves badly and unpredictably when combined with gases and other elements. But the M.I.T. group, forming their own company, kept at the problem. Finally they hit upon a revolutionary process that will produce a seamless aluminum can that is not only stronger than welded cans but also cheaper to produce. Now too busy for faculty club bull sessions, the researchers and their Ilikon Corp. (from the Greek word for material) have swiftly captured a promising toehold in the $800 million-a-year can market.

Ilikon lowers a die to the surface of a molten aluminum bath, uses a gas mixture under one-tenth-of-a-second pressure to shoot a stream of liquid aluminum into the die. When the die is raised and cooled, a seamless can drops out. This process, highly secret while patents are being gathered, has already been contracted to American Can Co. Canco will use it to produce cans for frozen citrus costing about $32 a thousand, two-thirds the old price of aluminum cans and below the price of competing tinplate. Ilikon will receive 7% of Canco's net sales of the new cans, also retains the right to license other kinds of blown aluminum to other manufacturers. "We can make Christmas tree decorations or hubcaps or light sockets," predicts young (32), handsome Ili-kon President Laszlo Bonis. "We can make square beer cans that pack without any waste space. We can make cans in the trademark of something like the Coca-Cola bottle."

Principally a Pioneer. Ilikon was formed less than three years ago by Bonis, who fled a university post in Hungary after the 1956 revolt, and two other metallurgists. The company, now headed by Bonis, gradually assembled a 30-man staff, moved into a building in the Natick, Mass., industrial center outside Boston. From an initial $5,000 in contracts, Ilikon expects to build sales up to $1,000,000 this year. The company has already developed thermal history gauges that can read and record temperatures in jet engines and self-lubricating alloys which will be used in space projects where ordinary lubricants disappear. But from now on, whatever its other accomplishments. Ilikon is apt to be known principally as the pioneer that solved the riddle of creating the first blown-up can.

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