New TTB paper up on my Academia.edu account.

[Jan Lundquist]

I have finally gotten around to documenting the bits and pieces that collectively make me think Jorg Fasting, and Georg Otto Erb were characters of some importance in Townsend Brown's life. The expanded and more detailed version of the story that I have told here , complete with sources, can be found at

https://www.academia.edu/129099023/Tows ... _1936_1939

[Paul Schatzkin]

.
Hmm.

Check the link?

This is what I got when I clicked on it:

[Jan Lundquist]

Thank you, Paul.

Working on the problem.

Jan

[Jan Lundquist]

This chapter of Townsend's life is on its way, I promise, with story creep trimmed to a minimum. But here is a bit of the trimmings, that seem too speculative to include:

In Nov, 1957, Townsend wrote to Jo of success in the Bahnson lab, comparing it to that in Zanesville when heavy electrodes were used. How heavy were those electrodes? What was the non-electrical medium they were interacting with? And what year was this?

It is unlikely to have been later than 1937. AFAICT. Brown never lived or worked in Zanesville after this year.

While digging in the very early history of the Atomic Age, I came across an account from a Westinghouse executive, who recalled that for the first few years, the company's uranium refininery only produced eensy amounts of it, until the Manhattan Engineering Project came along. When MEP ordered twenty tons of it, Westinghouse had to ramp up the size of their electrodes. The executive said that, as they were formed in industrial size garbage cans, they were the heaviest electrodes ever created

Would Townsend have been talking about electrodes that large? What might he have been doing with them? Were they part of his sidereal radiation recorders? But, looking from here, sidereal radiation does not seem related to his work at Bahnson. So, then, what was he doing with his heavy electrodes.

As I have revisited his Zanesville years, I have concluded that for at least part of the time, he was working with quartz sand, either to refine something from it, or to form a new compound with it, or both.

As I have recently learned., quartz sand is good for more than just making silicone. It is also a primary source for Beryllium. And why might Townsend be interested in Beryllium? Well, cherry picking from Wickipedia:

High purity beryllium can be used in nuclear reactors as a moderator,[118] reflector, or as cladding on fuel elements.[119][120] .... These layers of beryllium are good "pushers" for the implosion of the plutonium-239, and they are good neutron reflectors, just as in beryllium-moderated nuclear reactors.[121]

Beryllium is commonly used in some neutron sources in laboratory devices in which relatively few neutrons are needed... beryllium-9 is bombarded with energetic alpha particles from a radioisotope such as polonium-210, radium-226, plutonium-238, or americium-241...

Such alpha decay-driven beryllium neutron sources, named "urchin" neutron initiators, were used in some early atomic bombs.[121]

Acoustics

The low weight and high rigidity of beryllium make it useful as a material for high-frequency speaker drivers. Because beryllium is expensive (many times more than titanium), hard to shape due to its brittleness, and toxic if mishandled, beryllium tweeters are limited to high-end home,[125][126][127] pro audio, and public address applications.[128][129]

Electronic

Beryllium is a p-type dopant...widely used in materials such as GaAs, AlGaAs, InGaAs and InAlAs....

Cross-rolled beryllium sheet is an excellent structural support for printed circuit boards in surface-mount technology. In critical electronic applications, beryllium is both a structural support and heat sink.

The application also requires a coefficient of thermal expansion that is well matched to the alumina and polyimide-glass substrates. The beryllium-beryllium oxide composite "E-Materials" have been specially designed for these electronic applications and have the additional advantage that the thermal expansion coefficient can be tailored....[18]

Beryllium oxide is useful for many applications that require the combined properties of an electrical insulator and an excellent heat conductor, with high strength and hardness and a very high melting point....Beryllium compounds were used in fluorescent lighting tubes, but this use was discontinued because of the disease berylliosis which developed in the workers who were making the tubes[/b].[134]

We have assumed that Townsend's lung problems were aggravated by long exposure to ozone. but "chronic beryllium disease (CBD), or berylliosis, is a pulmonary...disease caused by inhalation of dust or fumes contaminated with beryllium; either large amounts over a short time or small amounts over a long tim...Symptoms of the disease can take up to five years to develop; about a third of patients with it die and the survivors are left disabled."

Objectively speaking, the evidence that connects Townsend to beryillium, in any way, other than that it is found in quartz sands and in high end speakers, is purely tangential. When Brown worked in the Clevite Brush facility for s brief few weeks, he was actually working in the labs of Brush Beryllium, the partner to Cleveland Graphite in the very recent merger that produced the Clevite Brush Co. (Graphite, like Beryllium and heavy water, was an excellent moderator of speedy neutrons, and would play a huge role in the development of nuclear energy.)

Also see

https://web.archive.org/web/20130526120 ... llium.html

[Jan Lundquist]

https://www.academia.edu/129896254/Thom ... =swp_share

[Paul Schatzkin]

God I hate the Internet....

[Jan Lundquist]

Let's try this the old fashioned way.Fingers crossed.

[Paul Schatzkin]

Looks like that worked!

[natecull]

Excellent work, Rose! ARMCO Steel (of Ohio and Pennsylvania) buying the Hawthorne Club is particularly interesting. They were very "fast movers" on the war production front, it seems.

https://www.butlereagle.com/20230912/fa ... ld-war-ii/

The American Rolling Mill Company retained as many employees as possible during the Great Depression and was able to ramp up quickly when war came. The ARMCO steel plant, located off Route 8 south of Butler, compiled a truly impressive record in producing wartime materials. Sheet and specialty steels were used in countless ways, including gas cans, radar equipment, armor plate, air raid shelters, corrugated sheets, motorcycle parts, propeller blades, oxygen tanks, and dozens more.

ARMCO also worked with the Army and Navy to develop substitutes for other vital metals, such as copper and zinc. As common metals became increasingly scarce, employees would spend countless hours searching for donations to the company scrap drive. They ultimately collected over 1.2 million pounds to help keep the plant operating at full capacity.

Women were hired to fill hundreds of jobs throughout the factory, with many of them recruited from ARMCO families. The company was careful to avoid taking women from other essential jobs.

In October 1942, ARMCO was presented the “Army-Navy E Award.” Of the 85,000 companies that produced wartime materials, 5% of them received this honor for “Excellence in Production.”

Regards, Nate

[Jan Lundquist]

Thank you, Nate! You are my "gold standard' reader, so I am honored that you thinkso.

I am sure there is more hinkiness to the whole Hawethorne Club story than we know. For example, buried in the newspapers is the note that Jo had recruited several members from other cities. That should have satisfied any curiosity about the comings and goings of strangers who boarded the bus to the club from a stop just outside the Brown's Zanesville home.

Jan