Iron By Electrolysis

Electrolysis, rather than smelting, for extracting iron from its ores is being developed by the Ford Motor Co. Reason: conventional smelting is not economical in the U.S. for ores which assay less than 40%, and Ford owns great deposits of low-grade (20-30%) ores near unused water power in Upper Michigan.

Thomas Edison once tried magnetic concentration of low-grade iron ore, as Henry Ford discovered in the records of Edison's Menlo Park Laboratory while rebuilding it in his Greenfield Village. So Ford gave this line of research in 1929 as a first assignment to Robert Boyer, who worked off & on at it while developing his famed plastic auto body (TIME, Nov. 11, 1940).

Of many attempted methods of using low-grade ore simple electrolysis proved best. Ore is dissolved in hydrochloric acid; the iron oxide dissolves to become ferric chloride; and when an electric current passes through the solution, the positively charged iron atoms migrate to the negative electrode. Advantage of electrolytic iron over smelted iron:

P:In powder metallurgy (TIME, Sept. 29) it is superior because its extreme purity makes it soft and ductile, almost like a plastic, producing a sort of welding action between the particles.

P:It resists corrosion better.

P:It is not permanently magnetized when an electrical current flows through it. Hence, in the core of a distributor coil, it allows a high spark output at all engine speeds. This solves a problem which has troubled engineers as high-speed motors have demanded ever higher spark efficiency.

P:Because a lot of water power is going to waste near the Upper Michigan deposits, says Henry Ford, "we could process the poor-grade ore right at the source and ship a pure product instead of shipping bulky ore all the way to our blast furnaces [at Dearborn]."

P: "A plant of this kind can be started with very little expense--nothing, in fact, compared with the cost of a blast furnace," says Boyer.

The most important point about the process: the cost of electrolytic v. smelted iron has not been revealed by Ford. But if the process, now in its pilot-plant stage, is economic it will give Ford Motors a return on its investment in its low-grade Lake Superior ore beds. And more than that, it may bring back some prosperity to Upper Michigan, now a desolate peninsula of worked-out copper mines, abandoned iron workings, ravished forests, poor soil.

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