Engineering foundation

At a dinner at the University Club the evening of September 25, H. Hobart Porter, of Engineering Foundation signalized the beginning of the activities of the Iron Alloys Committee´s work to obtain basic data on iron and its numerous combinations with other metals and certain metalloids. Notwithstanding the rapid progress made during recent years, the committee feels that knowledge of the possibilities of iron alloys and steel alloys has scarcely more than begun. Much more information is needed and to meet this need, data must be collated from laboratories of industries, governmental bureaus, universities, and other institutions of several countries. These data have already found their way into many publications and a score of languages, but to many busy men, they are not yet available, and there has been a wasteful duplication of effort and loss of time. The Iron Alloys Committee has therefore accepted as its first duty the culling from present voluminous literature results obtained by researchers, technologists, and engineers, and putting the results of this review into monographic form. The second step will be to organize and promote researches for new basic information with regard to pure iron and its combinations with other substances, — not for commercial alloys, but simply for the underlying facts essential to all industrial metallurgical laboratories.