Silicon Carbide & Aluminium Oxide: “Jewels Of Industry” circa 1920 Carborundum Company
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“Silent film about the manufactured abrasives factory, Carborundum Company, and how their products help in our everyday lives.”
Public domain film from the Library of Congress Prelinger Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.
The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).
Silicon carbide (SiC), also known as carborundum /kɑːrbəˈrʌndəm/, is a compound of silicon and carbon with chemical formula SiC. It occurs in nature as the extremely rare mineral moissanite. Silicon carbide powder has been mass-produced since 1893 for use as an abrasive. Grains of silicon carbide can be bonded together by sintering to form very hard ceramics that are widely used in applications requiring high endurance, such as car brakes, car clutches and ceramic plates in bulletproof vests. Electronic applications of silicon carbide such as light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and detectors in early radios were first demonstrated around 1907. SiC is used in semiconductor electronics devices that operate at high temperatures or high voltages, or both. Large single crystals of silicon carbide can be grown by the Lely method; they can be cut into gems known as synthetic moissanite. Silicon carbide with high surface area can be produced from SiO2 contained in plant material…
Wide-scale production is credited to Edward Goodrich Acheson in 1890. Acheson was attempting to prepare artificial diamonds when he heated a mixture of clay (aluminum silicate) and powdered coke (carbon) in an iron bowl. He called the blue crystals that formed Carborundum, believing it to be a new compound of carbon and aluminum, similar to corundum. In 1893, Henri Moissan discovered the very rare naturally-occurring SiC mineral while examining rock samples found in the Canyon Diablo meteorite in Arizona. The mineral was named moissanite in his honor. Moissan also synthesized SiC by several routes, including dissolution of carbon in molten silicon, melting a mixture of calcium carbide and silica, and by reducing silica with carbon in an electric furnace.
Acheson patented the method for making silicon carbide powder on February 28, 1893. Acheson also developed the electric batch furnace by which SiC is still made today and formed the Carborundum Company to manufacture bulk SiC, initially for use as an abrasive. In 1900 the company settled with the Electric Smelting and Aluminum Company when a judge’s decision gave “priority broadly” to its founders “for reducing ores and other substances by the incandescent method”. It is said that Acheson was trying to dissolve carbon in molten corundum (alumina) and discovered the presence of hard, blue-black crystals which he believed to be a compound of carbon and corundum: hence carborundum. It may be that he named the material “carborundum” by analogy to corundum, which is another very hard substance (9 on the Mohs scale).
The first use of SiC was as an abrasive. This was followed by electronic applications. In the beginning of the 20th century, silicon carbide was used as a detector in the first radios. In 1907 Henry Joseph Round produced the first LED by applying a voltage to a SiC crystal and observing yellow, green and orange emission at the cathode. Those experiments were later repeated by O. V. Losev in the Soviet Union in 1923…
Aluminium oxide is a chemical compound of aluminium and oxygen with the chemical formula Al2O3. It is the most commonly occurring of several aluminium oxides, and specifically identified as aluminium(III) oxide. It is commonly called alumina, and may also be called aloxide, aloxite, or alundum depending on particular forms or applications. It occurs naturally in its crystalline polymorphic phase α-Al2O3 as the mineral corundum, varieties of which form the precious gemstones ruby and sapphire. Al2O3 is significant in its use to produce aluminium metal, as an abrasive owing to its hardness, and as a refractory material owing to its high melting point…
