Technology Notes

Recent developments of applied science:

P: A chemical extinguisher which puts out burning magnesium, chief ingredient of incendiary bombs. Hitherto magnesium incendiaries have had to be smothered under buckets or sand heaps (water and common extinguishers only make them burn better). The new chemical, a secret of Pyrene Manufacturing Co., blankets the white-hot magnesium with dense, inert gases. Demonstrated last week before witnesses from the U.S. Army Air Corps, it may be of great value in Britain.

P: Optical glass made without silica (sand or quartz)--"almost as revolutionary," says Eastman Kodak Co., "as if someone had discovered how to make steel without iron." It is compounded of three rare metals: tantalum, tungsten, lanthanum.

Since its light-bending power is greater than that of ordinary glass, it makes wide-angle lenses which do not demand longer exposures.

P: Machine parts made of powdered metals. Says Electrochemist Colin Garfield Fink of Columbia University: "The basic idea is simple. Fill any mold with a metal powder. Apply pressure, and increase the temperature to a certain point. ... A hard metal object is promptly produced." Advantages: speed, economy and the opportunity to make parts of a single object out of different metals, molded together.

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