Beryllium, the Final Frontier: A Letter to My Grandson
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Beryllium, the Final Frontier: A Letter to My Grandson Loren A. Jacobson Dear Nathan, I realize that you have only just turned three years old, but I thought it might be interesting for you at some time in the future to read about some of the things that concern your Grandpa Jake today. In recent years, episodes of a populär television program opened with this Statement, "Space, the Final Frontier!" I have worked for many years on the development of structural metals, putting most of my atten tion recently on the metal beryllium. And I
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have been feeling lately as though we need something similarly dramatic to be Said about this metal, such as "Beryllium, the Final Frontier," or perhaps more appropriately, "Beryllium, Stairway to the Final Frontier!" I want to share these thoughts with you because of fwo important truths about structural metals. One is that Metallurgy is like Mediane: They only call you up when something goes wrong. And the other truth is that structural materials, when they work, are invisible. So we have
to work harder in order to gain the atten tion that structural materials deserve. Beryllium is truly the last structural metal that has outstanding properties that have not been fully exploited by society in order to meet the needs for greater structural efficiency and the savings in energy and effort that result from meeting these societal needs. So, on with "Beryllium, the Final Frontier!" Someday soon, you will learn that beryllium is the fourth dement in the peri odic table. Only hydrogen, helium, and lithium atoms are lighter than beryllium. One useful structural metal, magnesium, actually has a lower density than solid beryllium, but its other properties are not nearly so useful (nevertheless, magnesium has received a lot of attention over the years). Beryllium is the 19th most abundant element, and is present in the Earth's crust at about half the percentage of lead. So beryllium is not a truly rare metal, and even if it were much more widely used, we still would not face the danger of running out of it. I should teil you that today by far the largest number of beryllium atoms used in products are in alloys of
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