METALS: The Busy Plumbers

Surveying the wonder world of titanium, most U.S. businessmen have kept their eyes fixed on the sky. The lightweight, heat-resistant metal was obviously just the thing for high-speed, high-flying jet aircraft. But Chicago’s Crane Co., No. 1producer of valves and pipe-fittings, and one of the three biggest U.S. manufacturers of plumbing equipment,† has been looking closer to the ground. From the moment he heard about titanium’s resistance to corrosion, Crane’s President John L. (for Lindesay) Holloway began thinking of titanium as the ideal material for industrial valves and fittings.

Last week the Defense Materials Procurement Agency gave Crane a contract which will make it the biggest single U.S. producer of titanium, topping both its chief rivals, Du Pont and Titanium Metals Corp. of America. DMPA will advance Crane up to $24.9 million to build a plant (possible sites: Nashville, Chattanooga) big enough to make 6,000 tons a year, about six times the total U.S. production last year.

Early Bird. Crane’s President Holloway started following up his ideas on titanium shortly after Du Pont produced the first small batches of titanium metal in 1948. Then, as now, the best process for getting the metal out of the ore was the Kroll one, which extracts the titanium “sponge” as a clinker by using magnesium to drive it out of a solution. By 1951, Crane’s researchers had improved this process to a point where Holloway was willing to gamble $2,000,000 on a pilot plant in Chicago. The plant worked so well that DMPA says Crane’s method is the most advanced technique yet developed. It produces titanium sponge that is packed tighter than any other.

Totting up the balance sheets on titanium, Holloway thinks the wonder metal’s future is just beginning. He thinks that titanium now is about where aluminum was when it was selling for $28 a Ib. Titanium now costs $20 a Ib. in sheetmetal form, 50 times as much as aluminum. But Holloway says: “In a few years we should be able to cut that price in half,” and eventually get it down to where it could have a wide civilian use. Holloway himself already has begun to use it in small key parts of valves, soon will be making special valves entirely of it. He has sent geologist scouts around the continent hunting deposits of rutile and ilmenite, the chief sources of titanium. They have already staked out some promising claims in Quebec.

Long-Range Bet. Canadian-born John Holloway, 55, who joined Crane as an accountant in 1935, inherits a down-to-earth tradition left by Chicago’s Richard Teller Crane, who founded the company in 1855. Long after he had made his fortune in fittings and valves, Crane liked to shock Chicago hostesses by booming that he was nothing but a plumber.

But Holloway, who has spent $45 million on expansion since World War II, is a good deal more than a plumber. Crane, with 13 plants scattered across the U.S., Canada and England, now makes or distributes everything from colored bathroom fixtures, which it was the first (1928) to pioneer, to diffusion valves for atomic-bomb plants, from air-conditioning units to radiant heaters. Since Holloway became president in 1946, sales have risen four times over the prewar level to 1951’s record $322.9 million and a $16 million net after taxes. Last year sales dropped off slightly to $319 million, and higher break-even costs cut the net to $9,800,000. But President Holloway is banking on wonder metal titanium as his long-range bet to keep Crane expanding.

† American Radiator & Standard Sanitary is first, and Kohler Co. second.