Back in 1928. Kansas City Chemist J. C. Patrick stirred up a gummy mess of sulphur, carbon and hydrogen in an attempt to find a better, cheaper antifreeze. What he got was not antifreeze but one of the first types of synthetic rubber. He named it Thiokol (after the Greek for sulphur and glue), and with friends formed Thiokol Chemical Corp. As a rubbermaker, Thiokol did not go very far saleswise (one reason: it smelled so foul that it was dubbed "synthetic halitosis"). But since the age of space, the company has rocketed because Thiokol is a chief component in most solid rocket fuels. Thiokol powered the second, third and fourth stages of Explorer I and III into orbit, supplies the propellant for a whole family of missiles. This week word leaked that Thiokol is the hottest candidate for the whopping contracts to produce the propulsion systems for the Army's Pershing missile (TIME, April 7) and the Air Force's Bomarc, which will be converted from liquid to solid fuel.
Thiokol sales have gone from $4,800,000 in 1951 to last year's $31 million, which brought net profits of $1,452,000 (but still far behind the $162 million sales of its chief competitor. General Tire & Rubber Co.'s Aerojet-General Corp.). Though Thiokol's first-quarter sales are off a bit because some of its military contracts ran out and one plant was damaged by fire, Thiokol expects a 50% gain for all of calendar 1958. Reason: solid fuels are far simpler and safer to handle than liquid fuels that require a maze of tanks, valves and pumps, and they show the greatest promise for powering missiles until the atom-powered engine comes along.
"We'd Like to Try." Thiokol got into missiles in the same way the rubber was invented—by accident. Its researchers had found a way to process solid Thiokol into a liquid, and during World War II the armed services used it as a sealant for aircraft-carrier decks, pipelines, and the wing tanks of planes (the average commercial plane today carries about 300 Ibs. of Thiokol sealants). Then in 1946 Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, working on a radically new solid rocket fuel, tried mixing an oxidizing agent with rubber. But it had trouble combining the oxidizer with solid rubber, tried liquid Thiokol by happenstance (a Shell Oil Co. salesman recommended it to a Jet Propulsion lab technician). When Thiokol's management found out what was going on, it decided to try producing Thiokol-based solid fuels.
President Joseph William Crosby, 61. a greying, jowly hustler who had joined the company as a salesman in 1936 and became boss in 1944, "started ringing every Army doorbell we could find in Washington. We told them what we had, that we didn't know anything about rockets, but we'd like to try.''