President Obama on Private Enterprise

    Pres. Obama recently told business owners that they had not been successful based on their own efforts, but rather by building on the successes of others. He said this in the context of "government research", mentioning that government had invented the Internet. The President's comments caused a real hubbub, and this is steel being discussed by television news several days later. In fact, I just heard it again on Fox News.
    When Pres. Obama made his remarks, I also happened to be reading the latest issue of Chemical Heritage. This is a magazine published four times per year by the Chemical Heritage Foundation and basically contains stories involving chemical history.

    The latest issue contains two interesting stories. The first is "The Story of Neon". Henry Cavendish found in 1785 that when he removed nitrogen and oxygen from a sample of air, a small residue was left. Ramsay and Strutt repeated the work and named the residual gas Argon. By fractional distillation, Ramsay and Travers found that the residual gas was actually a mixture of neon, krypton, and xenon. They also found that when a glass tube of neon was energized with high voltage, they obtained a crimson light.
    Simultaneously, William Hampson in England, Carl von Linde in Germany, and Georges Claude were working with liquid air. Claude ramped up the distillation process to produce 10,000 m³ of liquefied air per day. He established a company with Paul Delorme and named it L'Air Liquide. After separating the nitrogen and oxygen, which were sold, he conducted further research on the residual gas, but found nothing new. However, large quantities of neon, krypton, and xenon were then available as byproducts from the liquid air distillation process.
    In the late 1890s, Daniel Moore, a former Edison employee, filled glass tubes with nitrogen or carbon dioxide, which gave a white light, when subjected to high voltage. The business was commercially profitable, until tungsten filaments were used in incandescent light bulbs.
    Adapting Moore's concept to neon, Claude filed his first patent for neon lighting in 1910. with subsequent demonstrations at the Paris Motor Show. Claude formed a second company selling neon lighting franchises at $100,000 plus royalties. In the US, Earl Anthony founded the first California dealership for the Packard Motor Car Company and advertised with Claude neon signs. Corning Glass Works supplied class tubes and Egani Neon Glassblowing School in New York taught sign construction.
    Neon also became useful as a switching mechanism for electronic devices, although there is no record in Chemical Heritage as to who first recognized the application. Airco neon was used in early computers, because the neon switches ran cooler than vacuum tubes. The ANITA calculator was a commercial success at $1000, but neon switches were replaced by transistors in the 1970s.
    Harold Edgerton was a professor of electrical engineering at MIT and specialized in high-speed photography. His first flash lamps used mercury or argon but he later switched to xenon in the 1940s.
   
    THERE IS NO INDICATION THAT ANY OF THESE INVENTORS OR DEVELOPERS WERE GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEES OR RECEIVED TAXPAYER FUNDS TO SUPPORT THEIR WORK.
      
    The second story is entitled, "The Rocks at the Top of the World" and involves vanadium.
    Vanadium was first discovered by Mexican Andrés del Rio in 1801, but he could not obtain confirmation from Paris that it was a new element. Vanadium was rediscovered by Nils Gabriel Sefstrôm, a Swedish chemist, in 1830. It was isolated by Sir Henry Roscoe. John Arnold discovered that adding a small amount of vanadium to steel made the steel alloy stronger.
    In Peru, Eulogio Fernandini owned a lead, silver, and copper mine and a smelter high in the Andes. He and Rizo Patron, manager of the smelter laboratory, were searching for fuel to operate the smelter. They collected various samples on their horseback trip, and on a cold night decided to burn one of the samples that looked like coal. It produced a large amount of obnoxious gas. Patron analyzed the sample on his return to the lab and decided that he discovered a new mineral, which contained vanadium.
    In the US, Joseph Flannery manufactured stay bolts used primarily for steam locomotive boilers. He needed a high-strength steel alloy and knew about the vanadium findings in Peru and the strength of the steel alloy from vanadium addition. He sent two geologists to Peru. Their report to Flannery convinced him to purchase the Minas Ragra mine from Fernandini. Flannery established the American Canadian Company. By 1910 the company was producing 700 tons of vanadium pentoxide, which changed the face of stainless steel production. In 1907, vanadium steel-alloy production was less than 1000 tons per year. In 1919, the annual production rate was 1,100,000 tons. Henry Ford used it for the crankshaft, axles, gears, and springs in the Model-T. Ford. It was used in parts of the Panama Canal lock gates and in the first plane-mounted cannon in World War I.   

    THERE IS NO INDICATION THAT ANY OF THESE DISCOVERERS OR DEVELOPERS WERE GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEES OR RECEIVED TAXPAYER FUNDS TO SUPPORT THEIR WORK.

    Pres. Obama's claim that business owners owe their success to others who have not had a direct part in the present operations, is correct. This is obvious, from the above recounts. However, it is incorrect to imply that significant developments must come from government research in various departments, such as the National Science Foundation, with its grants to universities. There is no doubt that some occasional advantages will be made through this mechanism, but it is a generally inefficient process, because the researchers involved lack motivation equivalent to those persons described in the above stories.
    Pres. Obama later tried to explain his position by switching to a discussion of infrastructure. This was a weak attempt, since it is obvious that his original intent was to promote big government and expensive taxpayer research projects by castigating private enterprise.