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Short Stories of Science and Invention

A Collection of Radio Talks by
Charles F. Kettering

INDEX

17.  There is Always a Frontier

    These blacksmiths were not metallurgists or steel experts in the modern sense, yet they obtained very good results. When they discovered a good thing, they treasured it and passed it on to their sons. In this way, the art of working steel progressively was improved.

     When the Machine Age came along and such things could be done quickly, it became the custom to make steel parts with highly polished surfaces. And out of this grew a theory that a part which had been highly finished would give much better service than one with a rough surface. Indeed, a highly finished surface became a symbol of superior quality.

     A few years ago, our Research Laboratories received a simple, flat spring, that was nicely polished, but was giving trouble. In fact, it would break regularly when flexed only about 2,000 times. So we were asked to design a new spring to fit into the very limited space where it would have to work. In a similar problem we had done some experimenting, and had developed a treatment for increasing the life of such parts. It consisted of bombarding or hammering the surface with thousands of little steel shot. In that way we simply substituted thousands of such little blows for the blacksmith's hammer. But in this process, we lost the mirror finish.


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- 100 -
Sophie Germain
Gertrude Elion
Ernest Rutherford
James Chadwick
Marcel Proust
William Harvey
Johann Goethe
John Keynes
Carl Gauss
Paul Feyerabend
- 90 -
Antoine Lavoisier
Lise Meitner
Charles Babbage
Ibn Khaldun
Euclid
Ralph Emerson
Robert Bunsen
Frederick Banting
Andre Ampere
Winston Churchill
- 80 -
John Locke
Bronislaw Malinowski
Bible
Thomas Huxley
Alessandro Volta
Erwin Schrodinger
Wilhelm Roentgen
Louis Pasteur
Bertrand Russell
Jean Lamarck
- 70 -
Samuel Morse
John Wheeler
Nicolaus Copernicus
Robert Fulton
Pierre Laplace
Humphry Davy
Thomas Edison
Lord Kelvin
Theodore Roosevelt
Carolus Linnaeus
- 60 -
Francis Galton
Linus Pauling
Immanuel Kant
Martin Fischer
Robert Boyle
Karl Popper
Paul Dirac
Avicenna
James Watson
William Shakespeare
- 50 -
Stephen Hawking
Niels Bohr
Nikola Tesla
Rachel Carson
Max Planck
Henry Adams
Richard Dawkins
Werner Heisenberg
Alfred Wegener
John Dalton
- 40 -
Pierre Fermat
Edward Wilson
Johannes Kepler
Gustave Eiffel
Giordano Bruno
JJ Thomson
Thomas Kuhn
Leonardo DaVinci
Archimedes
David Hume
- 30 -
Andreas Vesalius
Rudolf Virchow
Richard Feynman
James Hutton
Alexander Fleming
Emile Durkheim
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Hooke
Charles Kettering
- 20 -
Carl Sagan
James Maxwell
Marie Curie
Rene Descartes
Francis Crick
Hippocrates
Michael Faraday
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Francis Bacon
Galileo Galilei
- 10 -
Aristotle
John Watson
Rosalind Franklin
Michio Kaku
Isaac Asimov
Charles Darwin
Sigmund Freud
Albert Einstein
Florence Nightingale
Isaac Newton


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