A Cut Above the Rest Read online

  It was a convenient argument, in reality he had no intention of admitting that he wanted no one to get sight of his research notes – particularly the clandestine stuff, and not while he was trundling towards a breakthrough. The fact that all his lab notes and papers were locked in an under desk cabinet wasn’t any reason to be forgiving.

  For a pregnant few seconds he watched Ellis wrap himself in wretchedness, and as he watched Ellis’s reaction it gave rise to a measure of sympathy. After all, his own background had been full of nasty encounters with dictatorial academic seniors and it had definitely left scars.

  ‘Okay, now tell me what it was that was so important for you to come in here. I take it that whatever it is or was, I was not expected to find out until Monday – yes?’

  Ellis seemed to compose himself. ‘My thesis, a copy of my PhD thesis, it’s on your desk there. When they told me you were looking at new types of Stellite alloys I was fascinated. I did my PhD on very hard, high temperature alloys and I had the…er’ temerity…to believe that perhaps some of my work might be useful in yours.’

  He looked around and saw a thick bound volume on his desk. He walked back and looked at the cover. It was entitled ‘Advanced Cobalt Based Alloys and Amalgams. Nathanial Ellis. PhD 2017.

  For a second he was struck by the coincidence - if Ellis was that well up on the subject then he could be an ally – likewise, a threat.

  ‘Any of this published Ellis?’

  ‘No, my supervisor thought some of it merited a paper or two but I never got round to writing them up.’

  He looked at the first few pages of the thesis, finding the acknowledgements. One caught his eye; Ellis’s supervisor was a name known to him, one Professor Gerald Napier.

  ‘I see you worked under Napier, he’s very well respected. Pity his advice to you fell on deaf ears; you realise, don’t you, that now you are immersed in a commercial research environment your chances of publishing anything are slim. Your only recourse would be to quit, go back to academia and start composing your papers from scratch.

  Ellis nodded, ‘Maybe I should, it seems my chances of a career here have regressed enormously.’

  He looked hard at Ellis. ‘What are you saying; that you think that because you offended me I would deliberately screw up your progress here. You’ve instantly come to think that badly of me?’

  Ellis said nothing and simply gave a slight shake of his head.

  ‘Listen to me Ellis, If you think I have no experience of meeting hard headed prima donna academics who would betray you without a thought, or as soon cut your throat in order to climb above you, or make you the scapegoat for some fuck up they had done, you are mistaken. I know all about professional jealousy and I expose it when I see it. The university of hard knocks abounds – here and everywhere else, but I’m not a party to it. That said, you have nothing to fear from me. Give me a few days to read through your thesis and I’ll get back to you. If we have some common ground we’ll meet again and we’ll have a chat. Then we’ll see where it leads us – okay.’

  Ellis seemed to restore his stature, straightening his shoulders and coming back to his full height. ‘Oh, that would be very… marvellous. Thank you.’

  As Ellis turned to leave he asked him one more question. ‘As a matter of interest Ellis – besides your leaving your thesis for me, what else were you doing in the centre tonight?’

  Ellis looked embarrassed, ‘Just getting my samples and papers into my new office – haven’t had a chance over the last few weeks, most of it only turned up by courier very recently - I had no idea I had collected so much stuff over the years.’

  He offered Ellis a conciliatory smile – perhaps any threat he might have posed had now evaporated. As he had said, he would see.

  2

  He spent the evening sitting at his desk and scanning through Ellis’s thesis.

  Ellis was conspicuously absent while he read and he was relieved when he heard the exhaust note of a car outside and, looking through one side of his window, saw the tail lights of Ellis’s MX5 disappear down the exit lane towards the security barrier. It meant he was now alone in the complex other than Ed’ Rowe the security officer, someone he would inevitably encounter over the next few days. His office had a well-padded armchair that for all intents and purposes appeared to be nothing more than an office chair intended for a short period of comfortable sitting. It wasn’t obvious that it was actually designed as a fully adjustable recliner and allowed him to sleep fairly comfortably as and when required.

  He decided to complete his reading with a coffee at hand and made his way out of his office to the vending machine at the end of the dimly lit, rather sterile, corridor. His eyes took a little time to adjust to the light from the corridor’s overhead miniature blue white fluorescents; he had to blink a number of times as he exited his brightly lit office. A the end of the corridor the coffee vending machine stood out, it too blindingly lit, with multi-coloured light radiating out through the translucent plastic door, retarding the gloom and providing a far better illumination of the corridor floor as one got closer.

  As he selected a black coffee with sugar and waited for the cup to be delivered he heard a sound behind him.

  At the moment the polystyrene cup dropped and the machine nozzles started to deliver the coffee concentrate and hot water, Ed’ Rowe’s familiar voice interrupted his thinking.

  ‘Dr Caplin, good evening to you sir, everything okay?’

  He turned to see Rowe’s familiar but diminutive figure behind him. Rowe was in his fifties, an ever-increasing waistline making his well-worn uniform close to bursting.

  ‘ Very well thank you Ed’. I trust all is well with you – care for a coffee?’

  Rowe shook his head, ‘No thank you, I’ve got tea and sandwiches waiting for me in my room – wouldn’t want to spoil it. By the way, you’ve heard the rumour, we’re going to be amalgamated with the labs at Maunton, New Jersey.’

  He had heard the rumour, and it was twaddle.

  ‘False news I’m glad to say Ed’. Maunton doesn’t do what we do, they’re only an ore quality unit – quality control that is, not research like us.’

  Rowe smiled ‘Glad to hear it Dr. Caplin, especially from the horses mouth.’

  He gave Rowe an appreciative smile and picked up his coffee from the machine, ‘I’m here for the weekend Ed’ – you haven’t seen me okay.’

  Rowe smiled a conspirator’s smile, ‘You couldn’t be more invisible if you were the invisible man Dr. Caplin – and while we are on the subject, you never saw me either, so they can’t accuse me of falling down on the job.’

  ‘Absolutely not Ed’ – you are the most painstaking of security men and, I’m glad to say, the sole of discretion.’

  Rowe gave a slight bow for the compliment, and turned away.

  As he made his way back to his office Rowe’s words came back to him, particularly the word ‘amalgamate’. Something in Ellis’s thesis regarding ‘amalgams’ rang a bell, and he hurried back to see what it was.

  He spent another few hours reading Ellis’s report on his efforts to apply mercury amalgams to his work on Stellite alloys. Stellite was at the centre of his own work and had been for some time. These alloys were essentially based on cobalt, nickel and chromium but in the past had been fabricated with other metals such as manganese and molybdenum. It was the American engineer and polymath Elwood Haynes who had first developed super hard, negligible wearing and corrosion resistant Stellite alloys in the early part of the twentieth century.

  Haynes came to form alloys from cobalt, tungsten, chromium nickel and iron and became a multi-millionaire during the First World War as his Stellite and Stellite like alloys became essential for US war industries manufacturing machine gun, rifle and artillery barrels. His patent of 1912 on super hard and high temperature cobalt, chromium and nickel alloys had also allowed him to massively improve the durability of car engine valve seats (called valve seat hardfacing). He had early on become a broa
d industrialist with interests in car manufacturing natural gas, foundry technology and metal casting. In the present day Stellite has a very wide application in machine tools and high speed cutting tools.

  However, its disadvantage was, and still is, that it had to be cast while molten to form its final shape – it was, and still is, too hard to machine in any economic way even with diamond grinders and cutters. That was a problem a certain Dr. Caplin had set out to solve, and by using plasma sintering he had started to see malleability in his samples. He had successfully pressure formed some of his samples and he was beginning to see progress. But what he wanted was to create not only the ability to pressure form and machine his samples into usable shapes prior to hardening, but to produce malleability and ductility so as to form rods, wire and filaments. He had to find a way of easily forming malleable and ductile samples into fully hardened Stellite alloy after it had been formed.

  It was Ellis’s statement that when he was first able to employ mercury as a catalyst for sample softening, and had proposed dendritic (crystal) alignment as the reason it took place, that he began to see a pathway towards his own purposes. If Ellis was able to offer more than was written in the thesis, there was a good chance that a certain Dr. Caplin was close to successfully terminating his research.

  Monday morning found him weary but optimistic.

  He was already in his office as the various scientific and technical staff crawled in to begin their day’s work. Just after nine a.m. he found out Ellis’s new internal telephone number by asking the switchboard. Immediately after getting it, he dialled Ellis’ number.

  ‘Hello this is Nathaniel Ellis, who’s speaking.

  ‘Nathaniel, this is Michael Caplin, if you have a minute I’d like to see you. Come along to my office.’

  ‘I can come now if it’s important.’

  ‘It is. As soon as you can make it please.’

  The knock on his door came only a few minutes after Ellis had agreed the meeting.

  He beckoned Ellis to a chair.

  Ellis looked dishevelled, his face unshaven and his mauve tie hung loosely from a crumpled grey striped shirt. His corduroy jacket had seen better days. It occurred to Caplin that he too was unlikely to be anywhere near his sartorial best. After spending almost the previous two days in the lab, and getting little sleep in his recliner on Friday and Saturday night, he was matching Ellis crease for crease. Sunday night he had returned home, but was too excited to become fully rested.

  ‘Nathaniel, I’ve got a pretty good idea of where and why your doctoral research followed the path it did. I’ve learnt a lot from scrutinising your thesis. My only concern is that your supervisor, Gerald Napier, didn’t seem to push you where I would have pushed you had I been your supervisor. I can’t understand why you, or he, didn’t press home your idea that amalgams might be the key to creating machinable cobalt alloys like Stellite. I imagine your viva voce was a bit of an ordeal. What went on, and why?’

  Ellis gave a short, ironic, shake of his head.

  ‘I got the idea that while mercury formed amalgams with many metals except iron, platinum, tungsten, and tantalum, the typical Stellite components, that is cobalt, chromium and nickel, would definitely form amalgams and that depending on the amount of mercury employed there would be the formation of separate metal crystal lattices, physically ranging from liquid, paste or a solid. If I could then remove the mercury slowly, and break the metallic bonding, it would then expose the three metal components to each other again and by extreme heat-treating the matrix it would be possible to sinter the whole lot into a Stellite alloy. Prior to that of course, at certain temperatures, it would undergo different hardness and machinability properties - depending on the heat treatment. However, Professor Napier thought then whole idea was ridiculous and insisted I stuck to trying out different metal combinations and tabulating their physical properties.

  ‘As you can see, my thesis is packed with establishing hardness and thermal properties for a whole range of different alloying combinations. I only managed to get my preliminary data on the mercury amalgams into my thesis under protest from Napier, In the end we had a very uncomfortable disagreement and he wouldn’t speak for me during my viva. I only just scraped through - I was led to understand that my examiners were impressed by the competence in my analytical work and the rigorous approach to my data. As such they ignored any frostiness towards me from Napier and approved my doctorate. Nevertheless, they never mentioned the amalgam idea. As you’ll notice, the preliminary work I did on amalgams is confined to the appendix at the back of the thesis. I doubt my two examiners even read it – they certainly never queried any of it.’

  He felt a degree of sympathy as he watched Ellis’s face show a measure of resentment and anguish as; otherwise in control and in a monotone, he recounted his trials. After all, he too had battled against convention and rigid thinking during his own post-graduate period. He was sure that like himself, Ellis would love the chance to kick success in the face of his old supervisor or academic colleagues. How lovely it would be to unexpectedly confront them all and to shout ‘I was right, you were utterly wrong, see!’

  As his thoughts gave way to this fictional, final triumph, he gave Ellis a chance to compose himself.

  ‘Nathaniel, okay – you were diverted from your real objectives by Napier. Now tell me, what else could you have added to your thesis about amalgams had you been given the chance?’

  ‘If you must know, I was going to take a leaf out of the work that A.A. Griffith and Lockspeiser did in the 1920’s. They spent a long time in clandestine experiments on the theoretical strength of materials and gained unmistakable insight by drawing fine glass filaments. The more they drew them down the stronger they got. I started by dipping a platinum needle into the amalgamating mix and drew out what clung to the needle. I was hoping that I could boil off the mercury leaving the three metals behind and then heat the needle so as to form a cylindrical whisker of Stellite. I assumed the whisker would be made of striated crystal molecules - dendritic alignment if you will. Unfortunately, I made no progress.’

  He waited while Ellis took on a wishful look. His eyes dropped so that he was looking at his hands, as if to have them complete the work he was unable to do.

  ‘Nathaniel, I’ve spent a long time reading and re-reading your thesis, and I was particularly struck by the promise inherent in your idea about amalgams. However, I took the thought experiment a bit further. What say we take parts of your idea, add mine and stitch them all together and add all the other bits you mention? As example, a little amalgam, a vacuum extraction, an incandescent filament to control heating and a way of drawing off mercury from the resultant filament. If we can do that, if we succeed, it leads the way to lots of other ways to form and profile Stellites. I believe your departmental head is Nick Gordon…yes? I propose contacting him and asking him if I can borrow you for a week or two. Then you and I will lock ourselves in my laboratory and we do what Edison used to do; we don’t come out until we have some solid results. Are you willing?’

  Ellis suddenly looked animated, a huge, amiable, smile on his face. ‘Christ, am I willing? I’m not sure of precisely what you are proposing but just try to keep me away.’

  3

  It took three days to get any progress.

  At first they used a hard vacuum to draw up the amalgam mix and pass it through an incandescent filament creating a temperature of some 2700C. It didn’t work because the platinum tube failed to allow the mercury to boil off. They needed a better way and it was only on the Wednesday morning that the redesign of the apparatus offered a result. Instead of using a vacuum to draw up the amalgam they inserted the sample into a 500 ml syringe and by increasing the pressure from the plunger the mercury could be fed out at a fixed rate into a length of atomically porous ceramic tubing.

  The ceramic tube consisted of two halves and when coupled together the length of tubing it formed was immersed inside a tight coil of Nichrome wire. A controlled
current through the Nichrome caused the coil to become incandescent, raising the temperature of the ceramic tube up to 2500C. Using less current they raised the coil temperature to 385C and allowed the ceramic tube to reach the same temperature; it was well above the 366C boiling point of mercury. After testing for mercury vapour in the large vacuum chamber in which the apparatus was immersed, they found all the mercury had boiled off after three minutes. Then they raised the coil temperature to a white hot 3500C using another coil made of Osmium/Tungsten and waited for the three metal components left behind to begin to sinter and then melt.

  They were deeply disappointed; on splitting the two halves of the ceramic tube they found no sign of a Stellite filament or wire. They tried again with the same result. They assumed that there had to be some kind of residue left behind, so Ellis illuminated the inside of both halves of the ceramic tube with a wide spectrum ultra-violet source in an attempt to determine where the cobalt, nickel and chromium that should have melted and fused had gone. The result was equally disappointing. By early afternoon they were both nearing a state of exhaustion and disillusionment.

  Ellis took his frustration out of the lab and made his way to the coffee vending machine. He spilled the first cup of coffee it delivered as he hastily snatched it from the delivery alcove without keeping the clear plastic screen pushed up. The screen lifted and fell back, striking his hand and jarring the cup. By the time he had successfully retrieved two cups of coffee and was returning to the laboratory his mood had collapsed.

  ‘Oh – thanks Nathaniel, just what I wanted.’

  Ellis gave a weary nod of thanks.

  ‘Coffee I can provide, but not an answer to these inexplicable results we are getting. We’ve gone wrong somewhere but its hard to say exactly where.’