Word: silicon
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Rochow, an international authority on silicon compounds, is now a research chemist with General Electric, where he has been working chiefly on projects in organic chemistry...
...wide-brimmed, flat hat, who sported a tuft of beard under his lip and tugged at it gently when he was thinking up malicious dodges to discomfit his enemies. Whistler fought the world from the day he was kicked out of West Point for flunking chemistry. ("Had silicon been a gas,'' he is reported to have said, "I would have been a major general.") Between rounds, Whistler became instead an immensely solemn, self-absorbed artist, who turned his friends and the London fog into dim, delicate patterns and close harmonies of color...
Plastic Wedding. The silicones are a new type of plastic-an unusual wedding of organic and inorganic chemistry. Organic plastics have poor resistance to heat and cold; at extreme temperatures they become brittle or soft. This fault is overcome in the silicones by replacing the carbon atoms in organic compounds with a much tougher combination of silicon (basic ingredient of sand) and oxygen. The result is a material combining the flexibility of plastics with great resistance to heat, water and air. Some silicones can withstand temperatures from 60 below zero Fahrenheit to 575 above...
Adsorbing Gel. One of the most efficient adsorbent materials known, silica gel was first produced commercially (for use in gas masks) in World War I. It also has industrial uses as a dehydrator and catalyst. Made by drying a gelatinous form of silicon dioxide, silica gel looks like crushed quartz, is riddled with invisible pores so numerous that a cubic inch has more than 50,000 square feet of interior surface. By adsorption (sticking of moisture to the surface), silica gel can hold half its own weight in water without swelling, caking or developing a visible sweat...
...whole new family of plastics is based on the element silicon, rather than the element carbon which provides the chemical skeleton for the majority. These "silicones" are the result of research by Corning Glass Works (glass might be called a silicon plastic) and engineering by Dow Chemical Co. First uses, undoubtedly military, have not been disclosed. The silicones, solid or liquid, have one extraordinary property: an ability to stand extreme temperatures characteristic of their silicon parentage...