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Short Stories of Science and Invention

A Collection of Radio Talks by
Charles F. Kettering

INDEX

32.  The Crown Jewels


Pan     In 1888 they produced 50 pounds of aluminum to be sold at $2.00 a pound. In 1890 the first aluminum cooking utensil was made. Today something like 400 million pieces of aluminum ware have been made.

     Charles Hall did not discover aluminum, he did something that was probably more important, he made it commercially available. It is no longer a precious metal, it is a commercial material that has thousands of everyday uses - from thimbles to airplane wings. When we read of a thousand airplanes today we are reading of thousands of tons of aluminum, a far cry from the few pellets in Hall's hand 58 years ago!

     Down in the Severance Chemical Laboratory is an aluminum statue of Charles Hall, nearby is a large photograph of Frank Jewett - pupil and teacher - boy and man.

     Jewett did not make the discovery but, I believe, he was of great help to Hall. That combination has a striking parallel in many of the things we do today - the guiding hand of Experience coupled with the fire and enthusiasm of Youth. In the new world of tomorrow that lies just over the horizon, we shall, as never before, need both.    
   


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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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