Science: Aluminum Plating

Electroplating stout metals with aluminum was described at the Chicago Institute of the American Chemical Society last week. If the process should become practicable commercially, housewifery and industry will benefit by inestimable billions. Pots, pans, vats, machines exposed to corrosives will be protected by a skin of aluminum, metal highly resistant to mos.t acids and alkalies.

Professor Donald Babcock Keyes of the University of Illinois told the chemists at Chicago that the process is practicable. He invented it, although other scientists academic and industrial have worked on the problem and made reports in scientific journals. Professor Keyes’ pronouncements always carry weight. Onetime (1924-26) director of research for the U. S. Industrial Alcohol Co., he is generally listed among the 175 leading chemists of the U. S. His assistant in the aluminum research was Dr. Sherlock Swan Jr.

Other chemists as learned as Professor Keyes, however, doubt the practicability of his electroplating with aluminum. He takes an aluminum salt (like aluminium bromide), dissolves it in an organic solution (ordinary electroplating uses metal salts in water), submerges the object to be coated, and through both solution and object passes a direct electric current. The procedure is very difficult to carry through, is expensive—and so probably not generally useful. Aluminum Co. of America is not using it.

Nor is Aluminum Co. of America using three other suggested methods of shielding base metals against corrosives with aluminum. One of these is mightily to press thin sheets of aluminum against sheets of steel. Workability here is limited. Germans are using this process in a semi-commercial way. Another is to heat iron and steel in contact with aluminum. This calorizing process (exploited by Calorizing Co. of America at Pittsburgh, a General Electric offshoot) helps prevent oxidation, but reputedly little else. Lastly there is spraying objects—of wood, paper, metal, etc.—with aluminum particles. An aluminum wire is fed through an electric arc whence an air blast blows the melting aluminum against its carrier object, just as paint or lacquer is blown. This (a Swiss method) produces a porous aluminum coating little protective against acids.

Aluminum Co. of America prefers to refine metallic aluminum and sells its product as sheets, tubing, wire and rods for manufacturers to machine. Persuading artificers to adopt aluminum has always been difficult. So the company has been obliged to pioneer, to prove to others that aluminum things are saleable.

The latest difficulty has been with aluminum furniture. Furniture makers, materially conservative, refused to listen to Aluminum Co. technicians. Sheet metal fabricators might be shouting success about their metal office and home furniture. But the public really wanted wood, declared the furniture men. So Aluminum Co. simply went into furniture manufacture. First products to be exploited are office chairs—”easy chair comfort when you need it most.” The material (upholstered) is as stout as mild steel and much lighter. The chairs, and other furniture already on sale, are coated in the exact grain of wood—mahogany, walnut, oak. When professional furniture manufacturers adopt aluminum (bought from Aluminum Co.) the company’s executives will be happy. They do not want to fabricate goods—cooking utensils, motor casings, furniture, or anything else.