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Bubbles & Better X-Rays. Nearly all of these new products, like most of those coming out today, are as carefully plotted in advance as the building of an ocean liner. Many come at enormous cost. When Du Pont decided it wanted a "poor man's nylon," it experimented for twelve years, spent $50 million before it found Delrin, a formaldehyde plastic with many of the properties of nylon that can be made at considerably less cost. Put on the market about a year ago, Delrin has already started to take a big bite out of the metal industry. In 1961 Chrysler Valiant will sport a Delrin instrument panel, the biggest single automotive use of unreinforced plastic. Several oil companies have bought Delrin pipes for oilfield use. It has already been incorporated in some 270 products, from aerosol bottles to zippers. Manufacturers' requests for its use are pouring in at the rate of one a day, and Du Pont is rapidly expanding production.
Sometimes inventors draw a bead on one target, score a bull's eye on another. Sacramento's Aerojet-General Corp., prime contractor for the Polaris missile's propellant, found that when the solid fuel was molded, bubbles tended to form, caused trouble in firing. To find the bubbles, the company had to haul the finished rocket motor to a giant X-ray laboratory, spend two to three weeks taking pictures. Aerojet's radiation experts went to work, found they could do the job in hours by slipping in a radioactive cobalt pill, using photon-counters to measure the rate of radiation. If it was steady, no bubbles. They kept improving their photon-detection equipment, now have a device that promises X-ray pictures with %o the radiation exposure of the most modern X-ray equipment.
Many a new product spawns other new products as it jolts older competitors into fresh efforts to improve their lines. When the textile industry threatened to turn to the new synthetic fibers, the cottonmakers developed resin treatments to make cotton wash-and-wear. Polypropylene, one of the newest and cheapest of the petroleum plastics, is now putting the pressure on more expensive cellophane. Produced as a fiber, it promises to make the best no-ironing blend of cloth. Laverne's "invisible" chairs are made of the plastic, make any room look bigger, less cluttered. Esso is experimenting with colored highways made from a blend of asphalt and tinted polypropylene. With the routes of a cloverleaf indicated by color and with highway signs to match, U.S. motorists would lave less trouble finding their way through superhighway mazes. Hercules Powder Co., pioneer producer of polypropylene, has developed a new glass-and-plastic material for a third-stage shell for the Minuteman missile. It is trans lucent, as light as magnesium and stronger than steel.
Guns Galore. A shower of new products and processes is augmenting man's age-old efforts to get in out of the rain. Minnesota's Schjeldahl Co.'s polyester plastic balloon structures can be built in half a day, need only an ordinary building fan to keep them inflated, will last five to ten years. Quonset-shaped, the Schjel-dome will work in the arctic or the tropics, can be used for garages and greenhouses, swimming pool covers and grain warehouses, is repaired with a hot iron.