American Scientist

To the Editors:

I greatly enjoyed Ainissa Ramirez’s informative article on the early history of tungsten filaments (“Tungsten’s Brilliant, Hidden History,” March–April). She ends her story with a quote from Thomas Edison in 1922.

Had she continued the story, she could have described the effect that demand for the previously obscure metal had on the world economy and on colonialism, as well as, incidentally, on world literature. The major deposits, as with many elements, were in the Bolivian and Peruvian Andes (although today China is the main source). The conditions in those mines led the Peruvian national poet, César Vallejo, to pen in 1931 his one true prose novel, El tungsteno. A work of social realism, it exposed the horrible conditions in foreign-owned tungsten mines.

Michael Geselowitz
Hoboken, NJ

To the Editors:

I read Ainissa Ramirez’s article on William Coolidge with interest. Because I started my career at General Electric, his name is well known to me. The lore was that Coolidge once said that if he’d known anything about metallurgy when he started, he would have known that making ductile tungsten was impossible. This sentiment became the battle cry for projects at GE when people wanted to start projects that seemed impossible.

There was another famous fable around the invention of particularly durable plastic. The inventor had been failing in his efforts to create a hard, durable plastic formulation. One day, being lazy, he didn’t clean up his lab mess and left a stir rod in a flask with his new test compound. The next day he was unable to remove the stir rod and had to break it out of the flask. There is a picture in the halls of GE’s research and development center with the “lollipop” thus formed. That plastic became a very big product for GE.

Bob Black
Chapel Hill, NC