1942 - Technology

Technology

A tire-rationing plan issued in January by the OPA is insufficient, experts warn. Far Eastern sources have supplied all but 3 percent of U.S. crude rubber needs, but they are now cut off by the Japanese and the nation's stockpile of rubber is only 660,000 tons. Civilian consumption has been running at the rate of between 600,000 and 700,000 tons per year, and U.S. synthetic rubber plants produced only 12,000 tons last year (see 1940). "Unless corrective measures are taken immediately [to conserve rubber], this country will face both a military and a civilian collapse," say Wall Street sage Bernard Baruch, Harvard University president James Bryant Conant, and Chicago University physicist Arthur Holly Compton.

Procter & Gamble chemical engineer Victor Mills receives a call from his onetime University of Washington mentor (and vinyl inventor) Waldo Semons, who is working with B. F. Goodrich Co. to develop synthetic rubber for tires (see 1926). Semon has been using Ivory Soap as an emulsifier to help speed up his process, but something is disrupting that process. It suddenly occurs to him that Ivory Soap is not 100 percent pure, Mills has the P&G factory make up a batch without any perfume, it works, and the company will supply Goodrich with special Ivory flakes for synthetic rubber production throughout the war.

Mexico agrees in September to sell its entire production of guayule for U.S. rubber production until the end of 1946.

Hewlett-Packard cofounder David Packard designs a voltmeter more reliable than anything on the market and priced lower than any competitive product (see 1939). The company will enter the microwave field next year with a radar-jamming device and signal generators for the Naval Research Laboratory (see 1951).

Engineer-industrialist Robert Bosch dies at Stuttgart March 9 at age 80, having advocated industrial arbitration and free trade while producing precision machines and electrical equipment in plants worldwide; chemist Francis Irenée du Pont dies of a streptococcal infection at New York March 16 at age 68, having received more than 100 patents for contributions to explosives, petrochemicals, and synthetic rubber.