A NEW METAL

Wairarapa Times-Age, 3 August 1940, Page 8

A NEW METAL

SILVER STAINLESS STEEL. USE IN INDUSTRY PREDICTED. First pieces of a new metal, silver stainless steel, were exhibited at the Exposition of Chemical Industries at New York, says the “Christian Science Monitor.” The silver steel is the usual stainless steel, to which is added onequarter of one per cent of silver, in a way that permeates the entire metal with silver particles so fine that one of them has to be magnified about 500 times to be visible. Discovery of the process for making the silver stainless was announced last May. The original discovery was that silver-impregnated stainless steel was immune in the laboratory to saltwater pit corrosion, the one kind of natural rust to which stainless steel was known to be susceptible. It now appears the new metal resists also various chemical corrosives that attack stainless steels. One is a wool dye chemical which in four hours ate away four per cent of the weight of ordinary "eighteen eight” stainless steel, and when molybdenum, the usual protective metal’, was added, still dissolved five-hundredths of one per cent of the steel.i The new silver stainless steel, m the same period, was completely untouched. It also showed not the slightest corrosion with immersion in muriatic acid and ferric chloride stainless steel, which in the same period of time was nearly eaten through. It was explained these chemicals-resistani properties promise new facilities foi greater varieties of colour and faster colours in dyeing dress goods. The coming of stainless steel a few years ago made possible vats which could be cleaned quickly, and speeded the col-our-making. But now chemists are inventing better and faster dyes which have begun to eat away even some of the stainless steels.