Yet if it had not been for vanadium steel we should
have no Ford cars. Tungsten, too, was relegated to the rear, and if the
student remembered it at all it was because it bothered him to
understand why its symbol should be W instead of T. But the student of
today studies his lesson in the light of a tungsten wire and relieves
his mind by listening to a phonograph record played with a "tungs-tone"
stylus. When I was assistant in chemistry an "analysis" of steel
consisted merely in the determination of its percentage of carbon, and I
used to take Saturday for it so I could have time enough to complete the
combustion. Now the chemists of a steel works' laboratory may have to
determine also the tungsten, chromium, vanadium, titanium, nickel,
cobalt, phosphorus, molybdenum, manganese, silicon and sulfur, any or
all of them, and be spry about it, because if they do not get the report
out within fifteen minutes while the steel is melting in the electrical
furnace the whole batch of 75 tons may go wrong. I'm glad I quit the
laboratory before they got to speeding up chemists so.
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