we called it mag-nificent dow chemical and magnesium, 1916-1998

Then came the Depression of 1920 and a fire that destroyed Herbert Dow’s magnesium plant, and he closed down his magnesium business for more than a year while he rebuilt his plant, openi

MAG- NIFICENT

MAG- NIFICENT Dow Chemical and Magnesium, 1916– 1998

E N Brandt

Michigan State University Press

East Lansing

Copyright © 2013 by E N Brandt

iThe paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/ NISO Z39.48- 1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

Michigan State University Press

East Lansing, Michigan 48823- 5245

Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978- 1- 61186- 075- 7 (cloth : alk paper)— ISBN 978- 1- 60917- 363- 0 (ebook) (print) 1 Dow Chemical Company— History 2 Magnesium industry and trade— United States I Title.

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Friend and Mentor

1 Star Shells 1

2 Dowmetal Pistons and the Indy 500 13

3 Willard and the Gondolas 27

4 Dow Goes Down to the Sea 37

5 How to Make Magnesium out of Seawater 49

6 Two- Faced Government 55

7 The Hanawalt Era 71

8 The Hazards of Coastal Texas 81

9 Hot Stuff 91

10 Mag Mountain 105

11 The Nineteen- Seventies 111

12 Havoc in the Marketplace 121

13 A Non- Event 131

Notes 139

Sources and Acknowledgments 149

Index 155

— FROM A CHEMISTR Y TEXTBOOK

1Star Shells

While he was pondering what he read in his

newspa-per, one day during the grim early days of World

War I, before the United States entered that

con-flict, Herbert Dow hatched out an idea Dow, founder of The

Dow Chemical Company, had a new idea just about every day,

so that wasn’t unusual, but this idea was special, and it was

to play a major role in the life of his company for the next

eighty- three years

Magnesium metal was suddenly and unexpectedly in heavy

demand because of the war, the newspaper said A new kind of

war was going on in Europe It was called “trench” warfare, in

which each of the belligerents dug a deep trench in which it

sheltered the troops on its side of the battle line, and the war

ground to a standstill for weeks and months while the two foes

glared at each other across “No Man’s Land,” as they called

the area between the opposing lines of trenches Occasionally

one side or the other would leap from its trenches and charge

“over the top” in a murderous and often suicidal assault on

the opposing trenches It rained steadily, and the terrible deep

mud that resulted bogged down the opposing forces on these

fronts even more The newspaper noted the growing use of

pyrotechnics to light up the corridor between the two lines

of trenches, the better to prevent surprise attacks in the

night-time Some nights, the newspaper said, “No Man’s Land” was

lit up with the eerie light of star shells for hours at a time

It was the pyrotechnics that sparked off his thinking These

were magnesium flares incorporated in a rocket device

com-monly called a star shell A star shell would be fired into the sky

from the trenches and would burst at a given height, igniting

a magnesium flare and activating a parachute, usually made of

fine Japanese silk The burning flare would slowly drift back to

earth under the parachute, taking about six to ten minutes

to do so, and lighting up a portion of No Man’s Land as it

descended

He also read about the introduction of tracer bullets, which

showed where your bullets were going in the darkness, and

about the invention of the Very pistol, used to pass

pyrotech-nic signals along the often extended reaches of the trenches,

Chapter One

both of which also employed magnesium With all of these devices using magnesium, it became clear to him that if, or when, the United States entered the war (as it eventually did in April 1917), or even if it didn’t, there was a rapidly escalating demand for magnesium metal as a result of this war

“We have more magnesium chloride than we know what to

do with” he told E O (Ed) Barstow, one of his top lieutenants, explaining his idea It was one of the chief components of the brines underlying central Michigan, which were then the main source of his chemical raw materials “If we could separate out the magnesium metal we could provide one of the things this country is going to need for the war, and we could use the chlorine we liberated in doing so to make other products.”1

Barstow was immediately enthusiastic about the idea, and the two men began to puzzle out how they might go about produc-ing magnesium metal in Midland from the liquid brine they were pumping from the ground

They knew that the renowned German chemist Robert Wilhelm Bunsen, Baron von Bunsen, had succeeded in pro-ducing magnesium metal by electrolysis— the first to do so— in Germany, back in 1852.2 Barstow, who was in charge of the Dow cell buildings— the buildings that housed the electro-lytic cells— began to put together a cell that might duplicate Bunsen’s achievement, but it was slow work and turned out not to be a spare- time job Indeed, it turned out that Barstow would spend twenty- seven years working on magnesium and

be remembered as “the father of magnesium,” but they didn’t know that at the time

Herbert Dow’s first recorded experiment with a sium compound went back to February 1896, when he worked out a method for making magnesium hydrate— “milk of magnesia”— from the brine stream at Midland By 1914 and the onset of World War I, he was manufacturing four different magnesium compounds from the brine— magnesium sulfate,

magne-or Epsom salts; magnesium hydrate, magne-or milk of magnesia; nesium oxychloride, used in flooring and stucco work; and magnesium chloride, used in cement and also the potential source of magnesium metal

Dow and Barstow discussed the problem of making

mag-nesium metal from the brine many times in those days before

the United States entered the war, and they decided this

would be a great challenge to put before Prof W R Veazey,

of the Case Institute (now Case- Western Reserve University) in

Cleveland Veazey was in the habit of coming up to Midland to

do chemical research during the summer term, when the Case

school was mostly closed down, and when he came in 1916,

Dow and Barstow had already told him what they wanted him

to work on that summer— the production of magnesium metal

from magnesium chloride via electrolysis

The basic problem, Veazey soon found, was that when

subjected to electrolysis in the rather crude cell they had put

together (made of welded boiler plate and soapstone slabs),

they got small globules of magnesium to bubble up from the

magnesium chloride cell feed, but could not get them to

coalesce, or join together, in a mass Herbert Dow, looking at

the problem, told them he wanted to see not those globules,

but “one pound of magnesium in one piece.”

Prof Veazey, who later became a full- time Dow employee,

had brought a Case student with him that summer, William

R Collings (who later became founding president of the Dow

Corning Corporation), and they were joined by Edward C

Burdick, who had been working with Barstow on the problem,

and I J (Charley) Stafford, a veteran of Dow’s cell operations

Veazey was in charge of operations, Stafford prepared the cell

feed (anhydrous, or dry, magnesium chloride), and Burdick

was in charge of running the cell

The first cell, Burdick said, was a square box “welded out of

boiler plate about 8 inches by 12 inches by 6 inches, lined with

slabs of soapstone, and a soapstone partition divided the box

into two halves at the top, leaving the lower part of the interior

cavity open for the whole length An iron plate was inserted in

one half of the box and a graphite electrode in the other, and

the two electrodes connected with a source of direct current

from a low voltage generator.”3

“This crude cell was heated up in an improvised brick

arch by a charcoal fire until it was thoroughly hot, then some

Chapter One

6

molten magnesium chloride was poured in and the current turned on.”

The first run of the cell was started late one afternoon on

“one of the hottest days of the hottest summer he had ever experienced in Midland,” Burdick said “Much to our surprise, the cell actually ‘ran’ when it was first started and began to pro-duce some magnesium metal which, after a time, appeared as those small globules floating around in the molten salt bath.” The salt bath was maintained in molten condition “at about a bright red heat.”

“After having got this cell started we kept it going all night and the next morning when Mr Barstow appeared we were able to present him with a flat pancake of magnesium which had been dipped out of the cell weighing about one pound This was practically the first magnesium made in the Dow Plant.”That left the main problem to be solved, getting the glob-ules to coalesce, and they set to work on it

As Veazey described it later, success came rather edly on July 28, 1916, another scorching hot day in Midland, two months after they had started It was the “night shift” (Veazey and Burdick) who hit the jackpot They decided to try electrolyzing a fused salt bath that evening, and it worked.4

unexpect-The globules joined together in a mass “We had been ing at such a determined pace on the problem of getting the small pieces of magnesium to coalesce that when we finally succeeded in getting one whole piece, we suddenly realized nobody had thought about how to cast it or get it out of the cell,” he said “Somebody grabbed the first thing he could find, which was a piece of sheet iron It was heated and bent into the shape of a crude ladle A piece of pipe was attached for a handle and the piece of magnesium metal was scooped out of the magnesium bath There was no mold, so we set the ladle

work-on the floor to let the magnesium cool And that’s how we got the first ingot of magnesium.”5

That afternoon, Herbert Dow dashed off a note to his close friend Prof A W Smith at Case (They had been fellow stu-dents at Case, and Smith was now the head of the school’s chemistry department and a member of Dow’s board of

directors.) “Dr Veazey brought in a nugget of metallic

magne-sium this noon weighing about six ounces,” he wrote “He said

they worked last night until one o’clock and he thought at that

time that he wouldn’t get down today until about noon, but he

couldn’t stay away They refined the metal this morning and

obtained a nugget of which this is the outline.” The nugget

was about the size of a small hamburger patty, three inches in

diameter and an inch- and- a- quarter thick.6

Herbert Dow took this first sizable lump home to show his

family, even though it didn’t weigh a pound “Someday this will

be the biggest thing we have,” he told them He put another

piece on display in the window of Bert Carter’s Dry Goods

store on Midland’s Main Street a few days later, where it was

billed as the latest achievement of Herbert Dow and his

chem-ists In the meantime, Veazey and his crew continued to work

on perfecting their process, and a few days later they produced

a great massive chunk weighing 100 pounds Dow was in the

magnesium metal business

“Ever since the war started The Dow Chemical Company

has been shipping magnesium chloride to various firms in the

United States and Canada, where the metal has been extracted

from the magnesium chloride,” it was reported in the Midland

(Michigan) Sun newspaper of August 10, 1916, “and very recently

the Dow Company have themselves succeeded in extracting the

metal from the chloride, and some of their first output is now

on display in the window of B H Carter’s store It consists of a

bar of white metal about an inch in diameter and a foot long

and is remarkable for its lightness, it being decidedly lighter

than aluminum In all its other properties it is very similar to

aluminum We trust that magnesium will be another one of the

products made in this chemical center.”

It was a turning point in the Dow Company’s history, Barstow

felt “Here we were,” he recalled later, “a chemical company

used to producing and selling chemicals, and we had gotten

into the field of metallurgy, which is as big a thing as chemistry

itself, or almost so, and one in which we had no experience

There was no know- how on magnesium available in this

coun-try Nobody knew anything about it, and we had to go ahead

When the United States did enter the war in 1917, Barstow and Dow decided to go ahead and build a magnesium plant in Midland immediately, as fast as they could, skipping the pilot plant stage entirely With a war going on there was no time for it, Herbert Dow said This first Dow magnesium plant cost

$225,000, a large sum in those days, and was designed to duce 3,000 pounds of magnesium per day

pro-When it was completed, Veazey and Ralph M Hunter, recruited at the last moment because neither Burdick nor Staf-ford was available, and assisted by thirty- two Dow workmen, started it up Unfortunately the brand new plant was a disaster, and only ran a total of about 36 hours No one could stay in the place very long without a mask of some kind because the chlorine lines kept plugging up and spilling chlorine gas into the atmosphere at a rate of three or four tons per hour One by one the thirty- two Dow workers took as much of the chlorine as they could and left Finally, when Veazey and Hunter were the only ones left in the place, they decided to close it down, and they did, and it never ran again Veazey said the plant was not a complete loss, because they learned a lot they needed to know from the experience.8

In fact, they were not discouraged at all by this setback Dow and Barstow set about designing a new plant, and they rede-signed the cells And by the end of the war this second new plant, with Hunter at the helm, was producing 1,500 pounds of magnesium metal daily The new cells used an anhydrous (i.e., dry, containing no water) magnesium chloride obtained by

an ingenious new process worked out by the Dow researchers Hydrated magnesium chloride was partly dried in the air and

then further dried, but not completely, in an atmosphere of

hydrochloric acid gas With this treatment it became cell feed

As Willard Dow observed twenty- five years later, “A lot of

brilliant work went into this research The process developed

is fundamentally the same as used by Dow today [1944] and

was one of the most important factors in establishing the Dow

leadership.”9

By the end of World War I, Dow was the leading

manufac-turer of magnesium in the nation

Dow was not the only company that responded to the

sud-den wartime demand for magnesium with which to make star

shells and other weapons Half a dozen other U.S firms also

entered the field— General Electric at Schenectady, NY;

Nor-ton Laboratories at Nashua, NH, and later at Lockport, NY;

the Electric Reduction Company in New York City; Aviation

Materials Company and American Magnesium Corporation,

both at Niagara Falls, NY; and Magnesium Manufacturing

Cor-poration at Rumford, Maine— plus, in Canada, Shawinigan

Electro- Metals Co., Ltd

All seven of these firms had serious problems of one sort

or another, technical or financial or both, and most of them

promptly closed down their magnesium operations when the

war was over and the wartime demand for the material vanished

By 1920 only two U.S firms were still producing magnesium—

Dow and American Magnesium Corp., a subsidiary of Alcoa

(Aluminum Company of America) Alcoa used the magnesium

it produced primarily as an ingredient of its aluminum alloys

Alcoa soon discovered that it could purchase magnesium

from Dow at a lower cost than it could make it in its own

facili-ties, and it began buying its magnesium from Dow By 1927 Alcoa

was Dow’s biggest customer for it, and in that year Dow and

Alcoa reached an agreement whereby Dow would supply all

of Alcoa’s needs for magnesium, and with a contract to this

effect in hand, Alcoa closed down the American Magnesium

Corp That made Dow the only magnesium producer in the

country, which it was for the next dozen years until World War II

It was a rocky road all the way, but the Dow Company

con-tinued to explore the ways and means of making magnesium

Chapter One

10

useful, betting that sometime in the future it would turn out

to be, as Herbert Dow had told his family, “the best thing we have.” Dow continued for all those years to invest heavily in the lightest metal In the years leading up to World War II, the company lost money on magnesium in every year except four

In 1918 the company sold 3,852 pounds of magnesium, but almost none— 859 pounds— in 1919, when the war was over Its net losses to that point— its investment in magnesium— amounted to $60,000 Then came the Depression of 1920 and

a fire that destroyed Herbert Dow’s magnesium plant, and he closed down his magnesium business for more than a year while he rebuilt his plant, opening up again in 1922 This new start was immediately successful In 1922 his production was 59,179 pounds, more than he had ever made before

Until his death in 1930, Herbert Dow’s confidence in the future of magnesium never wavered He knew it was a valu-able metal, and that properly managed it would be a useful and beneficial addition to society Willard Dow, his son, who succeeded his father as head of the Dow Company in 1930, sustained that same faith and continued to support the com-pany’s heavy investments in the metal until his death in 1949

By that time the Dow Company as a whole had absorbed this same steadfast faith, and magnesium had become a staple of Dow’s panoply of products

Herbert Dow had expected that the people who bought magnesium would build up a business in which they alloyed

it, and cast it, and molded it, and did all the things that could

be done with metals This was turning out not to be true at all And it was becoming clear that if it were to be done, he would have to do it himself

As Willard Dow explained later, “The Dow intention had been to make magnesium metal and to sell it as such to pro-cessors who would do their own alloying and fabricating, for Dow had neither the personnel nor the means to engage in the new kind of business involved in the making and fabrication

of alloys The American Magnesium Corporation, their only remaining competitor in the production of magnesium, had gone into both alloys and fabrication There was little hope

for Dow to sell any metal unless there were processors to buy

the metal It became evident by 1918 that the processors would

not grow of themselves and would therefore have to be grown

Dow knew nothing about making either alloys or castings and

they had access to no body of knowledge Therefore they had

to start from scratch.”10

Dow continued to work on expanding the market for

mag-nesium while steadily bringing down the price, in the hope

of being able to compete price- wise with aluminum, its closest

competitor in many uses In 1919, at the end of the war,

mag-nesium was selling for $1.83 per pound, as against aluminum,

which was selling for 32.2 cents per pound By 1941, at the

beginning of World War II, magnesium was down to 18.2 cents

a pound and aluminum was at 16.5 cents a pound

Aluminum had gone through its growing pains without a

serious competitor in the light- metal market some forty years

before magnesium entered the field As has been observed, if

magnesium had been developed first, aluminum would

prob-ably never have become more than a minor commodity It is a

third heavier than magnesium But aluminum had a forty- year

head start, and magnesium never caught up

2 Dowmetal

Pistons and the Indy 500

If he was in the magnesium business to stay, Herbert Dow had

to develop some large- volume uses for the metal quickly, or

he could forget about it That much he recognized clearly

at the end of World War I He and Barstow looked at many

pos-sibilities, and debated until late in the day how to crash the big

time with magnesium Selling the metal to the big automakers,

the biggest user of metals, was not going to work, they soon

discovered, unless they could sell it at a price competitive with

that of aluminum, its principal rival as a light metal, which they

couldn’t do unless they could sell great quantities of it

The only form of magnesium with which most of the

auto-mobile people (and the rest of the general public too, for

that matter) were familiar was its use in the then ubiquitous

photographic flashbulb Anyone who owned a camera knew

that flashbulbs were triggered by burning magnesium

Conse-quently, they believed magnesium was an extremely dangerous

metal and that it would catch fire or explode into flame when

exposed to an open fire One of the peculiarities of

magne-sium is that in extremely fine filaments, as in a flashbulb, it

burns explosively and brightly, but in a solid metallic form you

cannot make it burn On at least one occasion, Dow engineers

went to Wright Field in Ohio and, before the General Motors

researchers there, tossed a bar of magnesium into a flaming

bowl of gasoline to prove their point; it didn’t burn But most

of the car people remained convinced that it would

It was believed by old- timers in the magnesium business that

the winning idea for cracking the magnesium market came

from Tom Griswold, a car buff and a first- rate engineer, who

had married Herbert Dow’s younger sister, Helen, and who was

one of the first people Herbert Dow had hired for his new

com-pany in 1897 Tom and Helen often took Sunday night supper

with the Dows, after which Tom and Herbert Dow frequently

played a game or two of checkers or chess Griswold heard or

read somewhere that General Motors was switching to

alumi-num as the basic material for its automotive pistons, because it

was so much lighter than the other metals The lighter piston

would require less power to operate, and the engine would go

faster

Chapter Two

16

“If aluminum pistons are better because they’re lighter, magnesium pistons would be even better, because they’d be another third lighter,” Griswold told his brother- in- law “Why not magnesium pistons?”

The more they thought about it, the more this made sense

to Herbert Dow and Ed Barstow They decided to talk to one who knew how to make pistons, and that led them to a chap named J R Searight in downtown Detroit Searight was quite receptive to their ideas, and ran some tests with what was then called “Dow Metal” on a die- casting machine his com-pany had developed, and it all worked out very smoothly They could make pistons out of magnesium On August 13, 1919, Dow signed an agreement with Searight, as president of the Searight- Downs Manufacturing Co., by which Searight would manufacture magnesium pistons “and other articles of com-merce that can be successfully and profitably made from Dow Metal” for Dow in Midland The jointly owned company that would do this would be called the Aircraft Parts Company.1

some-In the meantime, Herbert Dow was gathering all the mation he could find on magnesium, from wherever it could

infor-be found Veazey spent several days in the Cleveland- area libraries at his request and put together an extensive bibliog-raphy on the subject John Gann, head of Dow’s Magnesium Laboratory, assembled from a variety of sources what he even-tually believed was the world’s most complete documentation

on the subject Dow asked business acquaintances who had worked with the metal what they knew about magnesium, and carried on an extensive correspondence with several of them One of them was E E Keller, in Rochester, New York, whom

he described as “an intimate friend of mine.” Keller, who had been vice president and general manager of the Westinghouse Machine Co., had run tests on the various alloys Gann was pro-ducing back in 1919, and he became Dow’s closest business confidant on the subject

One of the possibilities Herbert Dow seems to have tained seriously, but never actually pursued, was to set up a Dow subsidiary company to manufacture and sell magnesium, with Keller at its head.2

Some of the uses proposed for the metal were rather far-

fetched George E Collings, a Dow board member, wrote Dow

from Cleveland that “Last evening a friend of mine informed

me he had been to the dentist to have some teeth filled and

the dentist filled them with Dow Metal, stating that it was the

coming thing for filling teeth Did you know it was being used

for this purpose?”3 (No, Herbert Dow didn’t know, and that

was the last he heard of it.)

Then, suddenly and without warning, in February of 1920,

his magnesium business was almost wiped out— again

“Yester-day noon,” Dow wrote to Keller, “fire completely destroyed our

magnesium cell building and practically all its contents.”

“One Sunday morning when two operators were alone in

the building one of the salt fusion kettles broke open on the

bottom and let the charge of hot salt run out onto the floor,” Ed

Burdick remembered “This salt reaching some of the wooden

posts supporting the roof set them on fire and the flames rapidly

climbed to the roof, and in a few minutes the entire building

was on fire This was probably the hottest fire ever experienced

in the Dow Plant and the most extensive The building was

gut-ted from end to end and the only thing salvaged after the fire

was a pile of magnesium ingots which had been covered up by

debris when the roof fell This fire occurred on February 1,

1920, a date which has always remained in the writer’s mind.”4

“Almost at the start [of the fire],” Herbert Dow wrote,

“some heavy electrical conductors fell to the ground in a

place where they interfered with the operations of the

fire-men, and the fire made considerable progress before they

knew that the power had been shut off Up to two or three

years ago, we had no voltage on our premises above 300; and

practically everybody in town was sufficiently familiar with

our low voltage so that there would have been no trouble, but

now that the town is being lighted by high voltage current

from the AuSable river and our plant has also been supplied

at times with more or less of this high voltage current, it has

created a fear of the wires that probably caused us very much

more loss than would otherwise have occurred This is a new

danger from high voltage that we never anticipated It will

magne-to him He brushed the incident aside and again ordered full speed ahead for Dowmetal (Indeed, Herbert Dow was merely the first in a long line of Dow chief executives who had ample reasons to abandon magnesium, but never saw fit to do so.)

A year later, in the spring of 1921, he was back in production, and started afresh by formally establishing a separate depart-ment of the Dow Company to make and sell magnesium At first it was called the Piston Department, but sometimes it was also called the Dow Metal Department Eventually it would sim-ply be called the Dow Magnesium Department He appointed

Ed Burdick as its manager, one of the foursome who had first extracted magnesium metal from the Midland brine in 1916 and who had worked with it ever since

One of his correspondents, E B Amole, in Cincinnati, told Dow the metal needed a catchy, “snappy” new name if it were

to sell, and suggested “Dowco.” Dow tried out the name, but

“Dowco” never stuck In later years it was sometimes used as

a code name for new or experimental products at the Dow Company— Dowco 231, for example— but in relation to mag-nesium it struck out on three pitches At first it was Dow Metal, then Dow- Metal, and finally, and more lastingly, Dowmetal The word “Dowmetal” formed in the shape of a Dow diamond became its advertising symbol and signature

In the midst of all this, in March of 1920, Dow received a Certificate of Merit from the U.S government honoring the company’s activities during World War I The certificate said:

“The War Department of the United States of America nizes in this award for distinguished service the loyalty, energy, and efficiency in the performance of the war work by which the Dow Chemical Company aided materially in obtaining vic-tory for the arms of the United States of America in the war with the Imperial German Government and the Imperial and

Royal Austro- Hungarian Government.” It was signed by

New-ton D Baker, secretary of war, and Benedict Crowell, assistant

secretary of war, director of munitions.6 Herbert Dow had it

framed, and it hung in the front office of the company for

many years

The piston business lent itself well to auto racing for

promo-tion and publicity purposes, and Dow found himself dealing

with automobile races and racers almost as soon as he got into

the piston business For several years Herbert Dow and his

col-leagues were big fans of auto racing in the United States and

abroad Magnesium pistons, an immediate big hit with the

auto- racing fraternity, soon became known as “racing

pis-tons” and were quickly adopted for race cars, and in the

early 1920s most of the big- name auto races were won by cars

equipped with Dowmetal pistons Their biggest triumph came

on May 31, 1921, when Tommy Milton won the Indianapolis

500, the biggest of the U.S auto races, with a car featuring

them Milton averaged 89.62 miles per hour for the 500 miles

to win a race in which only nine of the twenty- three racers who

started in it actually finished the race Drivers at the race tracks

in Owosso and Saginaw, Michigan, were familiar with the

pis-tons and had won regularly there, driving what were called

“racing Fords” for the most part, but this was the first really

“big” race won with Dowmetal pistons

As soon as he heard about the Indy win, a jubilant

Her-bert Dow sent a telegram to the members of the Dow board of

directors announcing this victory: “Dow metal pistons won first

and third Indianapolis race,” it said (It should be noted that

this wording qualified him for the lower rate that then applied

to telegrams of fewer than ten words Herbert Dow’s telegrams

invariably qualified.) It was probably the biggest publicity coup

that Dowmetal ever got, and as it turned out, the high- water

mark of Dowmetal piston success.7

The next day he followed up his telegram with a detailed

letter to the directors describing the company’s

arrange-ments with Louis Chevrolet, proprietor of the Frontenac

automobile, which was built in Indianapolis and equipped

with Dowmetal pistons Chevrolet had had six cars in the Indy

Chapter Two

20

race that year, and three finished— first, third, and ninth

“Our Mr [Elbert J.] Jenkins, who is chief push in introducing Dow Metal pistons, attended the race, as did our head drafts-man for this class of work, Mr [George] Best,” Dow wrote his directors, “and they state that had there been no trouble with water, gas and oil pipelines, the chances are that they would have had first, second, and third place in the race.”

“We are arranging to capitalize on this victory by putting

a half- page ad in the two leading Detroit newspapers for one issue,” Herbert Dow wrote, “and will also circularize the auto-motive engineers, so that there will be no doubt that the leading motor men will know that Dow Metal pistons will stand the ter-rific strain imposed by this race This advertising expense will

be about $1,600.00.”8

The relationship with Elbert J Jenkins, the “chief push,” was brief but stormy, and consisted largely of long, rambling letters of invective and advice from Jenkins to Dow, some of them quite insulting in tone

Jenkins, who seemed to know everyone of any consequence

in the automobile business, styled himself as a “consulting automotive engineer,” and was engaged by Dow because of his broad knowledge of the automotive industry and its people

At the time, Jenkins was also working with Ransom E Olds (of Lansing, Michigan, proprietor of the Oldsmobile automobile)

in developing an Oldsmobile tractor that was to be tured at a place called Oldsmar, Florida

manufac-“With the proper advertising your company should be working day and night, after what was done with Dow- Metal at Indianapolis on last May 31st,” Jenkins told Herbert Dow in a typical missive “You and all the rest of the bunch did not have the faith in your product to attend the races Ye of little faith— and we won— and decisively, and less than 30 days ago I wrote

Mr [G Lee] Camp [Dow Company director of sales] telling him that Louis Chevrolet had written me he doubted whether

he would use Dow Metal again this year I told Mr Camp to get after him Have you done this? If he doesn’t use it [the Dow-metal pistons], it will be a bigger bump to Dow- Metal than the winning of the race was for it.”

“If you get [Dowmetal pistons] in any cars this year [1922]

at the [Indy] races, don’t be pikers like you were last year,”

Jenkins scolded “Come across and give them a guaranteed

amount of $1,000.00 to drive them— and $2,500.00 if they win

with them Do you know that the least offered last year [for this

kind of tie- in] was $1,000.00?”

Jenkins, surely one of the most verbose persons Herbert

Dow ever had to deal with, generally concluded his letters

to Dow with an apology “I do not mean this in an offensive

manner,” he would say “You really need someone to tell you,

however, and I think I have Back of it all is the desire to see

you have the success with this wonderful metal that you should

have If this makes you sore, yet you do something to help put

Dow- Metal across, I have accomplished what I wanted to do.”9

Jenkins did make at least one useful contribution during his

time at Dow This was his notion that piston rings could and

should also be made of magnesium He worked the idea out in

actual practice, and received a patent for it.10

Dow, in a letter to Keller after a meeting with Glenn Martin,

the pioneer aircraft manufacturer, in which they discussed

put-ting Dowmetal pistons in aircraft, was uncharacteristically glum

about Dowmetal’s prospects “Yes, Dowmetal pistons were used

at the Indianapolis race on the cars that won first and third

positions,” he wrote, “and Edsel Ford is having us make some

pistons for him for a motor boat to beat the Gar Wood We are

getting some advertising but haven’t got the dividends

“Glenn Martin told me that the aluminum piston heads

were just as heavy as the iron ones used in airplanes Their

mas-sive construction is evidently required for removing the heat

rather than for strength Our pistons passed the test at Dayton,

which made them acceptable for use in Liberty Motors, a year

or more ago, at which time the Metal was not in the same class

with the Metal we are now producing The only serious

objec-tion that has ever been raised to the Metal is that the pistons

will make a perceptible slap when they are cold, but no one

here in Midland who has a car equipped with Dow Metal

pis-tons is able to detect this so- called slap In any event, this is not

an objection to its use in airplanes

Chapter Two

22

“England, France, and Holland would appear to be the countries in which this material should be exploited for air-plane use We have no one in view to do this work In fact, we turned down an inquiry from the United Alkali Company of Great Britain on the ground that our product was in a state

of evolution and we did not care to consider any business deal until it was more nearly perfected This remark might apply

at the present time to some extent, but the Metal has now got beyond the questionable stage, although it will never be so good that there will no longer be a prospect of improving it somewhat.”11

Herbert Dow had become aware a year or so before this that

he had a serious competitor in the magnesium piston business These pistons were the product of the Elektron Griesheim firm in Germany, which began making them from its “Elek-tron metal” (an alloy of about 87 percent magnesium and 13 percent copper) In addition, Griesheim began to put them

in racing cars, and entered them so equipped in the big auto races in Europe

Racing cars with Elektron pistons soon were winning the Targa Florio hill- climbing race and other major auto races in Europe, and the Griesheim company quickly invaded the U.S market and began vaunting its Elektron metal as the superior material for automobile pistons

Herbert Dow obtained samples of Elektron metal and had his staff test it against Dowmetal He emerged from these tests confident that Dowmetal was superior to this new competi-tor in just about every test the Dow Magnesium Laboratory could devise

But Elektron metal remained a serious rival It was being sold in Germany at as low as 10 cents a pound, a price well beyond Herbert Dow’s reach In any bidding contest for U.S automobile (or other) business, it could swoop in— and occa-sionally did swoop in— and capture a juicy contract with a low bid This was a favorite tactic of the big German firms.12

At the 1922 annual meeting of Dow shareholders, held as usual in Midland, Herbert Dow asked a couple of the younger executives in the company to talk about some of the bright

new developments in the firm, and Ed Burdick (who was then

thirty- one) was one of them

“In establishing the Dowmetal Department a year ago we

really set out to accomplish four things,” Burdick told the

stock-holders “In the first place we had to learn the business itself

The manufacture of pistons was a considerable departure from

the kind of manufacturing The Dow Chemical Company had

ever done before, and we really hardly knew how to go ahead

with it at the time But during the past year we have found out

what we believe to be the most practical tooling and machining

practice for making pistons We believe we know as much about

the proper way to make pistons as any other manufacturer,

and complete equipment has been established in our machine

shop for making pistons on a production basis Of course the

production is not very large now, but our present layout would

really form a unit which could be expanded in keeping with

the volume of business which we are able to obtain.”

“A year ago,” he said, “we were making one kind of piston

only; we made Ford pistons At the present time we have on our

list replacement pistons for 80 different makes and models of

motor cars.”

The second objective, he said, was to find out just how the

product would “take” on the market “We thought we had a

pretty good product,” he said, “but people on the outside did

not know anything about it and they might not agree with

us— perhaps we were just fooling ourselves So by marketing

replacement pistons and securing piston sales agencies in all

parts of the country we were able to find out just what the opinion

of the men outside was as to their actual value We are at the

present time preparing some new advertising copy, and this

includes a reproduction of several testimonials We feel that

the results we have obtained in putting these pistons on the

market has justified our own faith in their value and that we

have really as good a piston as we thought we had a year ago.”

Typical of the “testimonials” they were collecting was one

from the Chevrolet Bros Mfg Co., Inc., of Indianapolis,

Indi-ana, signed by Ralph D Ormsby, chief racing driver for the

brothers “After using your pistons in six races without having

Chapter Two

24

any trouble whatsoever, I am going to do as you suggested,” it read “I am building a race car for myself this winter and would like to have you ship me four of your Pistons to 1316 McCull-och St., Fort Wayne, Ind., where I am having my car built I must say for the Dow Metal Pistons that they are the best and fastest Pistons that I have driven while in the racing game.”13

The third objective was to build up Dowmetal piston sales throughout the country “Last year,” Burdick said, “we had

no dealers or distributors, but at the present time we have on our list over 100 jobbers and distributors who are handling our pistons, and we have on our list of dealers who have actually bought from us during the past year over 500 names.”

These objectives were all subsidiary to the fourth of them,

he said, “the big end in view,” which was “to push for the big manufacturers’ business.” “By establishing a reputation for Dowmetal pistons, we will more easily interest the manufac-turer and get him gradually to the point of making use of the pistons themselves Our accomplishments this year have only just led us up to this further accomplishment, in which we hope

to see greater results during the next year We have, however, made a beginning in this direction The Stearns Motor Manu-facturing Company, at Ludington, Michigan, who manufacture

a very high grade marine motor, is now using these pistons for all its motors The Union Truck Company of Bay City is also installing Dowmetal pistons in all its trucks The value of busi-ness from this source is small, of course, but it is a beginning.”Burdick said the Dow Company at that moment had “active tests” under way with about fifteen prominent manufacturers

of motors and motor cars “Some of these tests have been ceeding for several months with very satisfactory results,” he said, “and the manufacturers are coming to the point where they are very much interested in getting Dowmetal pistons in connection with their product.”

pro-He admitted that the product still faced major problems

“I am frank in saying that at the present time the principal stumbling block is price,” he said “If we could compete [price- wise] with cast iron [pistons], we would not have any trouble, but that would be about the same as giving them away and

would be poor business It is our task now to persuade the

manufacturer that not only is the piston what he wants and

that its use would be a great improvement in the motor he

manufactures, but also to convince him that he can afford to

pay a higher price than he does now for Dowmetal pistons.”

“I think in another year we will know more about the

vol-ume of business we can generate for Dowmetal pistons, and

confirm that they are practical, and that this will become one

of the important departments of our business.”14

Burdick and his colleagues devised a testing system for

Dow-metal that rapidly became quite sophisticated “Somewhat less

than a year ago we started a machine for measuring brittleness,

another for measuring fatigue, and another for measuring

wear,” Dow wrote to Keller, “and in a very systematic way we

have developed a whole series of alloys with every known metal

and now have a metal that in the fatigue machine has

under-gone more than nine million revolutions and is still operating,

as against 200,000 for Dow Metal B It has about the same

ten-sile strength as the old B Metal, but imposes very much greater

resistance to a hammer blow as measured on our brittleness

machine.”

Dow had sent three test cars equipped with Dowmetal

pis-tons from Midland to the Pacific Coast, he told Keller, with

one making the round trip, “and all gave satisfaction.” “One

of the Ford cars in the plant similarly equipped has run 19,000

miles, and when the pistons were taken out for demonstration

purposes they were in such shape that they were creditable for

this use.”

“The thing that we haven’t done with this Metal is to make

some money out of it,” he said, “although we have invested

considerably more than a quarter of a million dollars in it.”15

Nevertheless Dow continued to expand his production of

the metal, and to reduce the price Production rose to 72,250

pounds in 1923, and by 1926 it was more than 200,000 pounds

In 1922 it sold at $1.60 a pound, and by 1926 Dow was selling

it at 69 cents a pound

“In every year up to 1927, Dow lost money substantially,”

Willard Dow, Herbert Dow’s son and successor, said in 1944,

Chapter Two

26

“except in 1926 when the sales netted about five per cent and

in 1927 when they netted about one per cent.”16

The beginning of the end came in 1925, when the major automakers moved to high- compression engines, just as Her-bert Dow began to think he had a big winner on his hands Veazey, who probably knew as much about magnesium as any-one, said Dowmetal just wasn’t strong enough to withstand the high temperatures generated in high- compression engines, and this weakness forced it out of the race Aluminum pistons once more became standard

Veazey said that in retrospect Dow could hardly have sen a more difficult challenge than pistons for launching new uses for magnesium, because of the extremely fine tolerances needed in machining and manufacturing them, but “once the project was launched, Dow was stuck with it.”17

cho-In 1927 Dow disbanded the Piston Department and began

to drop out of the field, although Dowmetal pistons were still made and sold by the company as late as the 1940s One of their most faithful fans was the Harley- Davidson motorcycle, which incorporated them as long as they were made

Dow continued to make and sell magnesium for other uses,

of course Ed Burdick found himself temporarily without a job when the piston business folded, but quickly launched a new career with Tom Griswold, who had just been asked by Herbert Dow to organize and head up a company patent department Burdick became one of the charter members of the depart-ment Ten years later, when Griswold retired, Burdick became the second head of the Dow Patent Department.18

And Herbert Dow’s quest to make magnesium a major modity on the American market, not just a specialty, continued undiminished

com-3 Willard and

the Gondolas

In November of 1930, Herbert Dow died and was succeeded

at the helm of the Dow Company by his eldest son, Willard,

whom he had been grooming for the job since his

gradu-ation from the University of Michigan, eleven years before

Willard too had great faith in the future of magnesium, and

development of the metal by the Dow Company continued

under Willard without missing a beat The Dowmetal piston

campaign had acquainted the American public with the metal

in a general way, but the ultimate failure of that venture had

left the company, and Willard, with the same old problem—

finding a major use, a big- volume use, for the material Only in

that way could the price of magnesium be brought down to a

level where it could enjoy general use in the economy

So under Willard’s stewardship, the search for a large outlet

for magnesium continued Willard was so confident of

magne-sium’s future that he stepped up the research his father had

begun to find a way to extract the metal from seawater, and he

did this in the Depression years of the 1930s, when most

com-panies couldn’t find any money at all for expensive research

projects The Dow Company made canoes out of magnesium,

for example, and sold a few (one hundred were made), but

that venture eventually was also a failure Dow made skis out

of magnesium and also sold a few It tried making stepladders

and wheelbarrows and golf clubs and bridge tables and lawn

furniture and cooking griddles and baseball bats and dozens of

other items out of magnesium, but nothing clicked

In the 1930s the first serious explorations of the stratosphere

were also taking place, and as this race developed it pitted the

Russians against the Americans and set the stage for Sputnik

and the renewal of the space race between the two nations that

was to come about some years later, in the 1950s and 1960s

Dowmetal played a key role in this early chapter of the race,

and its role in the race probably generated more publicity for

the metal than it ever had before or since.1

The basic contest was to determine which of the two

pow-ers could reach the highest altitude above the earth, and the