This week, my grandfather lent me a metallurgy textbook printed in the 1940s: Elementary Metallurgy, by W.T. Frier. It wasn’t originally my grandfather’s. It belonged to an old friend of his; possibly a classmate. Grandpa re-discovered it while going through his library and thought that I might enjoy looking at it; I’ve expressed interest in his older books before.
I’m not an metallurgist, engineer, or geologist, but I enjoyed looking through it. It had been published in 1942, probably in support of the war effort. I enjoyed its size and the quality of the binding and the paper. In contrast with most textbooks that I’ve used, it fit in my hand and was not overly thick, making it easy to read while away from a desk. The fabric binding was both flexible and durable, and the pages were made with high-quality glossy paper. I’m not sure why more books aren’t published in this way any more; the only fabric-bound softcovers that I can think of that are published today are religious texts.
I think that the form of the book made the text more approachable; over the last week I found myself flipping through it and learning more about different ways to make and test iron and iron alloys. Some of this information might even be useful for me outside of trivia; the reasons for iron manufacturing being a major source of carbon emissions are much clearer, now that I know how carbon monoxide is used as a reducing agent in the iron refining process. I found the presentation of concepts like oxidation and tensile strength in this book more accessible than when I’ve tried to learn about them in more general textbooks or when browsing Wikipedia. I wonder if this is because Elementary Metallurgy was written with a clear purpose in mind for why these concepts would be introduced (to teach students how to make steel), while general resources for physics and chemistry attempt to present the entirety of the subject, occasionally reaching for “real world” examples. Of course, I would not have been able to follow many of the chapters in the metallurgy textbook if I didn’t remember notations and vocabulary from my high school chemistry course…
Reading the textbook also made me consider that even when dealing with substances with well-understood, reliable properties (like the melting points of metals), the categories used to describe differences at the human scale are very much approximations. Although materials can be tested to a high degree of tolerance (more so today than in the 1940s), the precise arrangement of microscopic structures in things like iron alloys can’t be perfectly predicted and can lead to major differences at the human scale. I don’t have a strong conclusion here, but the microscopy shown in the textbook was well-presented and I wanted the excuse to post an image.
Happy Father’s Day!
Emordnilap 