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Last year horrified reports cropped up that liquid oxygen was being used to fill bombs of dreadful killing power. An article in Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Review pooh-poohed this bogey, on the ground that liquid oxygen explosives are so sensitive that they cannot safely be transported from place to place, and that they deteriorate rapidly, losing their explosive power in an hour or two.
From the Spanish war came rumors of a new air bomb expressly designed not for demolition but to kill personnel. These German-made bombs were said to be light (6 to 60 Ib.) and relatively cheap; even a small bomber could carry and release a great many. The casing was criss-crossed with grooves like a bar of chocolate so that a 10-pound bomb would fly into 800 small, jagged fragments of uniform shape. Many of the fragments fly out horizontally, giving the burst an effect like the circular sweep of a machine gun.
In military metallurgy, beryllium is rated a new wonder metal. The element beryllium was discovered by a Frenchman in 1797, but during World War I and for years afterward there was no known use for it; in 1923 its price was $5,000 per pound. But beryllium ores are scattered widely over the world and last week the price of the metal was down to about $11. Not quite twice as heavy as water, beryllium is one of the lightest of all metals. It is a third lighter than aluminum. Chemically wedded to copper or nickel, it makes an extremely hard, tough alloy. Nickel with only 2% of beryllium in it has a tensile strength of 260,000 pounds per square inch, as against 90,000 for stainless steel. Moreover, this nickel-beryllium alloy maintains high tensile strength and resistance to "fatigue" up to temperatures around 1,000° C. For some time Germany has used beryllium for bushings, valve springs and other airplane and automotive engine parts which must combine strength with heat-resistance. In the U. S., Beryllium Corp. of Reading, Pa. is licensed to manufacture the metal under German patents. Used in airplane structural parts for lightness and in engine parts for durability at high temperature, beryllium, according to this company's predictions, will make possible airplanes capable of flying 500 to 600 m.p.h.
For resource-poor nations like Germany and Italy, a large part of war science is concerned with the invention and manufacture of Ersatz or substitute foods and synthetic materials. Germany's brilliant chemist, Friedrich Bergius, 54, who a quarter-century ago conceived the hydrogenation process for making gasoline from coal, is likely to be one of the most useful men in warring Germany, and one of the most hated by those who have to eat his Ersatz foods. From sawdust Bergius has extracted a digestible sugar, equal in food value to barley. Of the sawdust 60% to 65% becomes sugar, 5% acetic acid, 30% lignin which can again be used to make charcoal or wallboard. The sugar can be converted into protein by treatment with yeast; into fat by feeding it to pigs. Apparently, up to the outbreak of World War II, food-from-sawdust in Germany was fed only to animals.