Fugen eBooks

After the wreck I picked up a little
valve strip stem. It was very light and very strong. I asked what it was
made of. Nobody knew. I gave the stem to my assistant.
"Find out all about this," I told him. "That is the kind of material we
ought to have in our cars."
He found eventually that it was a French steel and that there was
vanadium in it. We tried every steel maker in America--not one could
make vanadium steel. I sent to England for a man who understood how to
make the steel commercially. The next thing was to get a plant to turn
it out. That was another problem. Vanadium requires 3,000 degrees
Fahrenheit. The ordinary furnace could not go beyond 2,700 degrees. I
found a small steel company in Canton, Ohio. I offered to guarantee them
against loss if they would run a heat for us. They agreed. The first
heat was a failure. Very little vanadium remained in the steel. I had
them try again, and the second time the steel came through. Until then
we had been forced to be satisfied with steel running between 60,000 and
70,000 pounds tensile strength.


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