Magnesium--Lesson in Speed

When last week began, the U. S. was worried about a bottleneck in magnesium --a metal invaluable, since it is one-third lighter than even aluminum, for lightweight airplane parts. At week's end the bottleneck was smashed. The way it was smashed was a lesson in speed. To a nation which needs speed above all else, it was proof that time is no obstacle to men of energy and purpose.

Bald, tight-lipped Henry J. Kaiser is one of those American industrial geniuses that average Americans are prone to take for granted until the country gets in a jam. A fabulously successful engineer, he refuses to believe in clocks or calendars. When he turned 50, he started counting his birthdays backwards; outside of his family, no one knows how old he is now. Within the limits of the day's 24 hours, he manages to be president of 15 companies and director of 20 more--and active in every one of his 35 jobs. Although his engineering feats are among the greatest of all time, his name is unlisted in Who's Who and rarely seen in the news--partly because he dislikes publicity but also because no one can make him hold still long enough for an interview.

Dynamic Engineer Kaiser does not recognize nature's other obstacles any more than he kowtows to time. He has headed companies which helped build the Grand Coulee Dam (largest in the world), the Boulder and Bonneville dams, the San Francisco-Oakland Bridge (longest in the world). When slides threatened to hold up work at Coulee, he froze a hillside solid to keep it in place. At Shasta Dam, which he is now building in northern California, he ran a ten-mile conveyor belt smack over a mountain when railroads refused to run a spur to his construction camp.

Under the defense program, busy Mr. Kaiser has been busier than ever. He is helping build the new $25,000,000 Naval Air Base at Corpus Christi, Tex. As an aide to his good friend John David Reilly, president of Todd Shipyards Corp., he is helping build 60 cargo ships for Britain, 87 freighters for the Maritime Commission, a fleet of destroyers for the Navy. His Permanente Co. put up a cement plant in California and snagged a big Government contract by underbidding other Pacific Coast firms by an average 18%.

For about a year Kaiser and Reilly have been interested in making magnesium by a new "carbothermic" process developed by Dr. Fritz Hansgirg, an Austrian scientist now living in California. They bought up the U. S. rights to the patents, started plugging for an RFC loan to start production. For $9,250,000 to get things going, they offered to put up a plant that would produce at the rate of 12,000 to 15,000 tons within a year. Since total U. S. production last year was only 6,500 tons, their proposal sounded fantastic. But they had Kaiser's record to prove that nothing was impossible, and among their attorneys they had Tommy ("The Cork") Corcoran, who knows as much about cutting Government red tape as Kaiser knows about foiling time and nature.

Three weeks ago it was clear that even hardheaded Federal Loan Administrator Jesse Jones was impressed. Dr. Hansgirg, asleep in his California home, got a 1 a.m. telephone call from Kaiser: get to Manhattan right away and start drawing up plans. In Manhattan a suite of offices was knocked together on the ninth floor of the RCA Building. There Dr. Hansgirg and Reilly started getting their plant on paper. Kaiser shuttled back and forth between the office and Washington, always a half-hour late for appointments that extended all the way around the clock. When the loan was finally approved by Jesse Jones last week, the plans were ready. Three days later the plant site was being cleared next to the Permanente cement works near Palo Alto. Dr. Hansgirg, who likes to wear slippers at work and think things over twice, was still bewildered. Said he of the blueprinting: "Somehow we did in three weeks what nobody can do in less than four months."

At present, only U. S. producer of magnesium is Dow Chemical Co., indicted last month with Aluminum Co. of America and three other firms for conspiring with Germany's I. G. Farbenindustrie to hold down U. S. production through patent control (TIME, Feb. 10). Dow produced the nation's 6,500 tons last year from Michigan brine wells, is now building a plant at Freeport, Tex., to extract another 6,500 tons a year from the Gulf's salt water. When the Freeport and Kaiser-Reilly plants are going full blast, U. S. production will jump to at least 25,000 tons a year, four times the U. S.'s 1940 output and about equal to Germany's.

Dr. Hansgirg's process, already in use in England and Japan, differs from the electrolytic method covered by the Dow-Alcoa patents, is claimed by Dr. Hansgirg to be better and cheaper. Brucite clay (magnesium hydroxide) from Nevada will be baked in rotary kilns to form magnesium oxide. The oxide then will be mixed with carbon and heated electrically into gas at 4,000DEG F. When this is cooled suddenly (from 4,000DEG to 380DEG in about 1/1,000 of a second) by blasts of cold natural gas, metallic magnesium is recovered.

Dr. Hansgirg has developed some 35 patents covering fabrication as well as extraction of the metal, and the new plant will be an integrated setup including fabrication units. With the ground-a-clearing, Kaiser had a new goal at week's end: he wants to (and probably will) get the plant into operation inside of six months instead of the year it ought to take.

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