Three weeks ago the neighborhood kids found a kitten abandoned by its mother in the bushes and brought her to my wife, who has a gift of mercy and took her in. A week later we were at the vet bawling while saying goodbye to a very sick kitty. (Bye-bye Cupcake--God bless you!) The next day, we visited the Humane Society and had two more kittens, a little older and a lot more healthy. When we got them home, Alex could not get them to play with her as they explored the house, and was distraught. So, when I picked up a litter box at Petsmart, I also bought a feather on a string and a boa on a stick. I thought nothing of it when I left them in the living room with my very sad 7 year old daughter.
After teasing the kittens out of hiding and then playing heartily with them for twenty minutes, she ran into my office and screamed, "Daddy, you have a brilliant mind!" and leaped into my arms!
Well, lets dispel that notion right now.
So What? Part I
A couple decades ago, I heard from a business manager that they wanted better adhesion from polyester yarn to rubber for tires. Milliken had big business in this, and the business manager wanted better performance. What I failed to realize at the front end was that, for twenty years, most tires had been reinforced with polyester yarn, so it must already be good enough. And good enough is, well, good enough, isn't it? But, eager to please, I came up with a way to use plasma (think the glowing gas inside a fluorescent light bulb) to first chemically activate the surface of the fiber, then to polymerize a vinyl polymer onto the chemically active surface, but leave it only partially polymerized. When the adhesive coatings that would adhere to the rubber were applied, the partially polymerized vinyl would react and create a really tight bond. This is the patent, and this is another one. It is a terrific piece of technical work that involves an interfacial adhesion with three binder layers linking the polyester to the rubber--fantastically complicated, difficult to control, and makes a real difference...to something that worked well enough when I started. Oh well.
So What? Part II
As if I couldn't learn, a decade later, I was working to try to find something to do with Milliken's additives in fiber, and found a customer that colored their yarn in the extrusion process, and had over 6000 colors in their pallet, handling over 1500 colors in any given month. Because the pigments affected the yarn process, they had 6000 different production set ups. They bemoaned the trouble and difficulty and inconvenience...but alas, they managed to continue shipping every month and had a large business (which has since gone bankrupt...). However, we ran huge trials and made thousands of pounds of resin because we believed (and it turned out to be true that) Milliken's additive would make these yarns run more uniformly, potentially all with the same production setup. Here is the patent. At the end of the day, the business people were not willing to pay even one penny to relieve their production folk's inconveniences, and so even though the problem was solved, it turned out to have zero value.
I Can't Breath!
I joke that I am one of the world's foremost experts in chaos, and it is true--my dissertation is entitled "Disorder in Molecular Magnets," and I know the theory, practice, simulation, modeling, and science of disorder better than nearly anyone. One application of disorder is that it can be used to create certain properties in magnetic materials, and one of those properties allows one to block a magnetic field, keeping it from passing through to the other side. So as part of my dissertation, I helped a group of brilliant chemists to optimize a material--Vanadium tetracyanoethylene--to have better magnetic shielding properties. (If you ever have three or four hours to spare, feel free to ask me about this. ;-) The material is very light weight, has terrific magnetic properties, and really is a good shield--about as good as iron, even. However, it reacts violently with air, and so can only be used in very high vacuum environments like deep space where there are very few, very small magnetic fields. However, it was my first patent!
Enough--we all learn, don't we? Next time I'll talk about The Disappointments.
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