Hello everyone, and thank you for joining us for today's webinar. This is the final in your 8-part series in complement to the Seattle Heritage Responders Training. These programs have been made possible through the generous grant and in support of the National Endowment for the Unities. Since today's program is the final session before our in-person meeting on November 1 and 2, I'll email you all following this webinar with an update on your attendance record. Please be sure to finish viewing all 8 programs before you meet again in person. And before we begin the presentation, just a quick and final reminder of technical notes. On your screen you'll see several boxes, including one labeled chat on the left-hand side. You can use this chat box to say hello, ask questions, share any information or resources that you'd like. If you post a question in the chat box, you'll receive a response from me. Just a note that today I am showing up in the chat window as Eric foreshows. I'm out of the office and connecting this remotely, so that's why. But Eric will respond to your questions, they'll be noted, collected, and then I will verbally ask them of our presenter at the conclusion of this presentation. Today our presenter is shared a PDF with us that is available in the files box at the bottom of your screen. So just click on the title to highlight it in blue and then click on the download button to send coffee to your computer. And with that, I'm very pleased to introduce you all to today's presenter, John Brandon. John is the owner and principal conservator at East Point and Furniture Conservation. East Point is nationally recognized for providing conservation services to individuals and institutions that place a high value on their furniture. John is certified by the Smithsonian Institution to work on objects ranging from national treasures to family airlines. With 35 years of experience, he has worked on major collections of American and European furniture for museums, U.S. government, and private collectors. As an NHR team member, John has responded to large and small disasters, including both superstorm sandy and hurricane hardwood. And with that, I'd like to turn things over to John for his presentation on wooden and upholstered furniture salvage. Thank you, Jess. And hello to everybody. And just to sound check, I want to make sure everyone can hear me okay. I'm speaking at a normal level. And I hope you can all hear me. I noticed that we have a... Okay, good. Thank you, Jess. We have a large group today. That's wonderful. And so I see that we have a wide cross-section of people's working backgrounds. So that's good. This will be a general presentation that is specific to furniture. And I hope I can prepare you for salvaging furniture. My goal is to make this as practical as possible. And I think you'll find it straightforward. So in the beginning here, I'm going to show you some pictures of an historic village museum that experienced a flood. And I've been involved in several disaster responses. But this doesn't mean that I know everything there is to know. What it does mean is that I have experience. And what that experience has taught me is to be ready for anything. And when you run into a situation where you don't know what to do, you can consult with a colleague if you need advice or call somebody on the phone. And that's just what our team leader, Dennis, is doing here during our response to the Houston disaster. We had discovered some taxidermy that none of us knew anything about. So Dennis called a friend who happens to be a taxidermist. So it's not unusual to find yourself in unfamiliar territory. Just to be clear, salvage is the initial response to a disaster aimed at saving the object. We're not talking about conservation treatment. That will come later when the salvage operation is over and the disaster is behind you. You're probably familiar with this list and could include many more items on it if you thought about it. In my experience, the most frequent kind of a disaster involves water. Even if it's a fire event, there's usually a heavy water component because of the fire department blasting everything with their water hoses. Or the sprinkler system in the building has soaked everything. Most of the furniture you encounter, the primary material will be wood. But it often includes other materials. So you may have to call on your training for those types of materials, even though you're dealing with furniture. And by the way, the handout that I have posted down for you to all have, it includes almost all of these notes that I'm showing in the slides. So don't feel like you need to take copious notes during this presentation. I think you'll find that handout is complete. So here's an example or one example of a non-wood piece of furniture. While there is probably some wood underneath the seat that holds the frame together, the chair is primarily leather and horn, plus the upholstery foundation. Upholstery foundation materials include everything but the show cover. In this case, the show cover is the leather. And the foundation gives it shape and provides the strength for sitting. But we're going to talk more about upholstery in a moment. So wood is a relatively durable material. It falls somewhere in the middle range of durability of objects. And we can prioritize furniture based on how it's constructed, such as having veneers or materials that are attached to it, such as the gold leaf or the upholstery. So in terms of high priority items, when you're looking at furniture, and as I said, typically we're dealing with a wet event, veneered furniture will be a very high priority. And that's because of the adhesives that hold the veneer to the substrate. So you may find detached veneers, gilded objects, which can be very susceptible to water, upholstered pieces because they really soak up water, a lot of fabric and a lot of stuffing material is present in upholstered pieces. And any other kind of composite piece. Since wet events are the most common, let's cover that first. So wood is a hygroscopic material and there are consequences for that. Here's just one example. These are before and after pictures of a flooded church interior. The water level rose about halfway up the windows, so it was very deep water. And this is another picture of a flood aftermath inside an historic schoolhouse. The furniture, if a room like this gets flooded, wooden furniture floats around the room in the deep water. And then when the water recedes, the furniture drops in place wherever it is. You'll notice the two desks in front didn't move and that's because they're bolted to the floor. Just to go back to this church scene, the same thing happened with the pulpit and the pews. All of those items floated in the water and when the water receded they just dropped right where they were floating. So I mentioned that wood is hygroscopic and that means that it will absorb water. And we need to be aware of this when you encounter wet wood. So to illustrate this, we're looking at three boards. These are oak boards and we're looking at the end grain. Let me get my pointer here. So this is the end grain of each board here and the same on the bottom. And all of these boards started out about the same width from this point over to this string about eight inches wide. So the bottom board is fully saturated with water. The middle board is at about 12% moisture content and the top board is essentially oven dry and has no water content. As I said, they all started out the same width, eight inches. And you can see that they have changed dimensions. In fact, the board on top, because it's so dry, it's shrunk about a half of an inch.  So things to look for with wet wood. It's going to take on the weight of the water it absorbs. High humidity will activate mold growth. Veneers and joinery may delaminate because of water-soluble adhesives. And veneers can become deformed or warped. Very similar to if you stick your hand in a bucket of water and leave it in there. Your skin becomes fully soaked with water and then it looks wrinkled. And veneer can do the same thing when it gets soaked up with water. So they can become deformed as they get wet or as they dry out. And as we just saw, wood will expand when it gets wet and this can cause doors and drawers to get stuck shut. Blanching of coatings means that the water has penetrated into the finish and caused a disruption of the finish, which impairs the transparency of the finish and it turns white. And I'm going to show you some examples of these conditions and then we'll look at salvage procedures. Here's an example of a phone operator switchboard and it's contained in a wooden cabinet. This piece was almost completely submerged in water and you can see that waterline on the left side of the cabinet. What you see on the surface as a hazy white layer is a combination of blanched coating and active mold growth. This is an extreme case, but you'll run into varying degrees of this. Here's an example of active mold on legs of a table. You may be more familiar with seeing mold like this. And this is an example of a veneered panel on a chair leg that's delaminating as a result of water exposure. Another example of veneered furniture. This one is extreme with every inch being covered in veneers. And here's that same desk showing one side in raking light, which demonstrates how extensive veneer delamination can be. So these are parts of the table that are detached because of exposure to water. Some structural pieces and some veneers. And when you encounter loose elements, they should be gathered up, labeled and placed in some kind of container for safe keeping so that they don't get lost. You might be tempted to place them in a plastic bag, which is standard museum practice for those of you in collections care, but if the items are wet, it's not a good idea to enclose them in plastic because then they won't be able to dry out and it will promote mold growth. So in this example, I'm showing the pieces stored in a drawer that's part of the table with an identifying label placed inside the drawer. A small cardboard box could work just as well as this little drawer. When you need to move an object that has damaged veneers, you'll need to take some precautions before wrapping it in padding or a padding blanket. The front of this clock case is covered in a variety of different kinds of veneers. And in this case, a water pipe in the ceiling burst and sprayed water on these veneers. But before we look at the damaged veneers, I want to say a word about moving objects like this. In the right hand photo, you can see that it's wrapped fairly snugly in a furniture pad. And be aware that tall case clocks like this should be disassembled before moving. In fact, they're built such that they are intended to be disassembled. The bonnet or the top piece of the clock slides forward and off the case. And then the clockworks can be removed. And the clockworks includes the dial, pendulum, and the weights. So on the right, you can see that the bonnet is removed. And the backboard is sticking up at the top of the blanket. The backboard is a continuous piece of wood from the top to the bottom. And it makes the case rigid. So you can feel comfortable lifting and carrying the case by the backboard. Now let's take a closer look at the bottom panel where most of the veneer damage occurred. So here's that bottom panel. And you may notice a couple of horizontal cracks. And I'll point those out for you. Those would be here. And there's another one here. These are very old cracks. And you can tell that because the cracks are dark and they have darkened with age. If these were new splits, you would expect to see fresh or light colored wood along the edges of the cracks. Remember that this entire panel, this whole thing, is a thin layer of veneer glued on to a secondary wood substrate. And the old dark cracks are stable. And by that, I mean the veneers are still well adhered to the substrate. What's happened here is that the substrate would split or crack many years ago. And the veneer, being very thin, followed the substrate and split at the same time as the substrate. Also notice at the top right corner and the bottom left corner, there are veneer losses. So that would be right up here, that light spot. And right down here, this light spot. Each one is about an inch long. So these are veneer losses. And the pine wood substrate is visible here as lighter colored wood. So these things I've just pointed out, the cracks and the previous veneer losses, are not of great concern in terms of wrapping the object in a pad. And that's because these areas are stable and they're still well adhered. But when we view this panel from a different angle, you'll see a condition that should be a red flag in terms of wrapping the object. So here you can see, we're looking at it from the side now. It's the same panel.  They are definitely unstable. But by some miracle, they're still in place. And this is another section further down the panel. So you can see the lifting veneers. And you can also see one of these old cracks right along here. That's one of those old stable cracks. But everything else is unstable and delaminating. So it's not hard to imagine the danger and the damage that can happen if this is wrapped in a padded blanket. Because the fabric of the pad can easily catch on the protruding pieces and the sharp edges and rip the veneers off the object. The solution to this is fairly simple by using a barrier layer between the object and the blanket. In this case, glassine paper is used. Two or three layers of it, actually. But anything will work that is smooth and will slip across the surface without catching on the veneers. So the glassine is wrapped around the area that needs protection. And in this case, it's tucked under the lower edges so that no tape or attachment is necessary for the glassine. And then it can be wrapped in the blanket, and it's now safe to move. Here's an example of joinery that is separating. Even old repairs may come apart. OK, we're talking about this joint right here. That's a dowel joint that had been repaired previously. And it got wet, and it's coming apart again. And this is almost always due to water-soluble adhesives that get wet. Here's an example of what blanching looks like. In this case, the whole table got wet, but it was quickly dried using towels, which saved most of the finish, except the spot where a book was laying on the surface. Water seeped under that book, and the book was never moved. So the water was trapped there for a long time. And this is a close-up of that blanched area. Notice the paper along the edge that is stuck to the tabletop. And I'm talking about right along here, along this edge of the blanching. Those are little remnants of paper. This is a caution to be careful when you separate objects from each other that have been wet, even if they have subsequently dried out, because they could be stuck together. I'm not going to recommend that you attempt repairing the blanched area. That's a tricky maneuver that should be left to a conservator, but beyond drying the piece, there's no urgency in fixing this blanched finish. It can be taken care of at a later date. OK, so let's talk about salvage actions. And here are the most important actions to be considered. If the furniture is in a wet room or is exposed to elements, then hopefully you can relocate it to a dry storage area where you can take the furniture for drying it out. If you don't have a dry location, then dehumidifiers can be used to dry out a room. I can't emphasize enough that wet furniture needs to be handled carefully. It will be heavy, and you need to be careful about handling the loose joinery and the veneers. Here's an example of a dry storage area where wet objects have been moved. You'll notice the stacks of chairs, which is not the best thing to do, but you won't always have the perfect dry storage area, so you need to make do with what you can in terms of space. And as I mentioned earlier, have helpers to move large objects and make a plan for safe moving. By far, most damage occurs to furniture during moving and transportation. So make sure everybody knows and understands the plan before moving the object. In this case, this large bench was disassembled into two pieces before transporting. And this was particularly large object that required many hands. So this is the upper section, going down the stairwell, and the lower section. So we just made sure we had plenty of people so that it made light work of this. Perhaps you can't move objects to a dry location for whatever reason, or maybe only the floor is wet at the site. In which case, raising the object off the floor using blocks may be the most expedient solution. And by the way, this is a good strategy for normal storage of objects, to prevent them from getting wet during a minor flood event, especially if they're stored in a basement. And then air circulation is important to dry the furniture and to discourage mold. Air circulation speeds up the drying process, and you wanna be sure to stay away from using hot air or heated air. You may have seen commercial salvage companies using hot blowers to dry out a wet house. Those are not good for furniture. They dry the wood way too fast, which promotes distortion of wood and deteriorates finishes, glues, and adhesives, and causes rapid shrinkage of veneer. The idea is to dry the wood slowly and steadily to prevent distortion, cracking, or splitting. And if your furniture has been fully soaked with water, you should plan on at least a week or more for it to dry. Now, upholstered furniture deserves some special attention because you're dealing with a combination of wood and lots of textile materials. Besides drying the upholstery, the next most important thing here is to decide whether to save the upholstery or to remove it. This is usually a curatorial decision and they should be involved in the decision-making process before it's removed. It might be obvious, but I want to remind you that once you remove the upholstery, it's unlikely that it will ever be reinstalled on the object. It just isn't technically possible. But removing it can speed up the drying process, so you'll need to make a choice about saving or not saving the upholstery. If you do decide to remove the upholstery or the show covers, be sure to document the original before removing it. You'll want to document the profiles, the techniques of upholstery and the materials before removal. So here's an example of a couple of sofas that were in a flood. Well, all of these chairs and the sofas were in a flood. And we ran into this very question, whether or not to remove the upholstery and it turns out that these are important sofas that belong to an important Civil War general. And this is the fabric that he actually sat on when it was in his house. It's the original upholstery fabric. Then here we have the curator and one of the collection assistants having a discussion about whether or not to save this upholstery. This is more of the same suite of furniture. This is a silk upholstery and let me get my pointer back. So around here we have wool, fringe and silk show covers here. And as I said, the question was whether or not to save this upholstery. And it was badly damaged, very wet and which created a lot of staining and tide lines on the fabric, which I'm sure there's ways to deal with this. It was considered, but when we took a close up look and removed a little bit of the fringe, we noticed here this bright blue color. That's the original color of the upholstery from 1867 approximately and it had faded to this dull, silvery, just beigy kind of color. So at this point, the discussion quickly turned to, oh, we're not representing this furniture correctly, we wanna re-upholster. And in this case, we decided to remove only the show cover and that means only the silk and then it also included removing these trims because they had also faded. All of the other foundation materials were left in place and this is what the chair looked like when the show covers came off. So we have the original tufting still in place. This is all 1867 workmanship and materials. We have the cotton batting. We have a cotton, this is called a, oh, it's just called the cover cloth. Underneath that are the springs, the webbing, the horse hair stuffing, more muslin and as I mentioned, the original tufting has been preserved and we're able to work on things even while this stuff is still in place and this was undergoing a cleaning treatment. So here's the chair after application of new silk show covers. So in this case, the decision was made involving the curator and the collections committee to remove just the show cover to preserve the original workmanship of the tufting and all the foundation materials and reapply new show covers. But in some cases, it might not be advisable to try and save the upholstery. These are chairs that were in a flood and are from a theater and they're used as props in production. The property manager for the theater advised us that the chair frames were worth salvaging but she didn't want to save the upholstery and in fact, they regularly get reappolstered depending on the production that they're used for. So in this case, the upholstery is considered expendable and so then you can get out your sharp knife and cut away the upholstery and this is a big help in allowing the wood to dry out. I'm gonna talk a little bit about removing mold. This is starting to get into the realm of treatment but it's pretty straightforward and I think it's within your capacity to attempt if you have the time and the inclination. So let's look at some examples. First thing you wanna do is let the mold dry. Remove the furniture from the wet environment, let the mold dry out on the surface. If you tried to clean this while the mold is still wet, you would end up smearing it over the surface and that's what we wanna avoid. So if the mold is dry or when it becomes dry, it can be removed by a HEPA vacuum in a brush and right here, we're just starting to vacuum away some of the mold in this area. Vacuuming may not remove all the mold. So for instance, this area has been vacuumed and you can still see those little white spots which are mold spores. In which case you can resort to wiping the mold using a cloth dampened with a solvent. What solvent do you say? Well, here's where I want you to pay close attention because it really matters what you use as your solvent. In this case, I'm wiping bare wood or an unfinished surface and in that case, we can use alcohol mixed with water at a ratio of one to one.  So bare wood has lots of pores in it. The mold spores are growing on the surface. They're also growing down into the pores. Just wiping it with a dry cloth wouldn't get all of that off. So we use this damp method and the alcohol penetrates into the wood and kills any mold spores that don't get wiped away. This is what you see on your rag after wiping aged bare wood. This is dirt and grime and nothing to be concerned about because you can't help but wipe up accumulated dirt. But the real purpose here is to wipe up the mold spores. In this photo, the mold is on a finished surface and that means it's growing on top of a coating or a varnish. In this case, the alcohol mixture I just showed you can damage the coating or the finish. So you can't use the alcohol when a finish is present. A safer alternative is to use straight mineral spirits. You can use a cloth or a paper towel dampened with mineral spirits to wipe off the mold. Mineral spirits is safe for most coatings and it's not as effective at killing residual mold spores but usually when mold is on top of a finish there is not deep penetration of the spores and the wiping action should be effective at removal. And when I'm talking about these solvents I'm just talking about your regular old hardware store variety mineral spirits and I always go for the odorless kind of mineral spirits. This is a homemade mixture of water and alcohol mixed up in my hot and spicy jar and again, just your hardware store variety denatured alcohol. It doesn't have to be pure ethanol. This alcohol will work just fine. Or you could go to the pharmacy and buy 50% isopropyl alcohol. It's already diluted 50% with water. So this you can use right out of the container. No mixture required and that might be the most expedient thing to do during a salvage effort when you're in a disaster mode. Here's another example of mold on furniture particularly on the leather seat. You may recognize this as a Gustave Stickley oak chair and there's a paper label from his workshop on the underside of the seat. But here the mold is growing in the cracks in the aged leather seat. In this case the mold is removed by vacuuming and using a small brush in one hand to sweep the mold toward the vacuum nozzle. The nozzle itself never comes in contact with the chair and I wanna remind you that the mold must be dry before you try this. If you do this while the mold is wet or damp you'll spear it on the surface and drive it further down into the cracks. Notice that the vacuum hose is draped over my shoulder and this prevents the hose from knocking against the furniture. So in previous presentations it's been pointed out that I should be wearing a mask during this operation and that's absolutely right. A mask is essential when working around mold and I'll confess that when this photo was staged I forgot to put on my mask. Here's an example of the brush that I used. It's one of these cheap welding brushes with like china bristle and you can trim these with scissors to make them pointy so that you can get down into a crack and so the picture on the left is before any cleaning and on the left is halfway through the cleaning procedure. So no solvents, just a vacuum and a brush. Now on the underside of the seat this is the original Gustave Stickley paper label that I mentioned and it's glued to the underside of the seat. It's glued to the fabric on the underside of the seat and this label has mold on it. It's those white spots that you see on it. And since this is adhered using a water-based adhesive you wouldn't want to use anything damp to wipe the mold away. And besides that the paper is way too fragile to withstand any sort of wiping action. Okay I'm jumping ahead a little here. This is it after it's been cleaned but this is the technique used for cleaning it. Using a vacuum and a protective cover. So this is a piece of fiberglass screening for plastic screening and I've taped the edges, I cut this screening to about a foot square and I taped the edges so that all of those cut edges are not exposed.  So that's what the action would look like working over a screen. So now let's look at a fire situation. The main thing here is careful handling to prevent further damage. Picture of a client's house having a house fire. This is a very dramatic photo but luckily the fire was contained just to the kitchen where you see the flames jumping out the window. It was primarily a smoke event in the rest of the house. Smoke and soot. And this is what you'll see in the aftermath of a fire. It's always a mess and not only is there smoke, soot and ash but everything is soaking wet from the fire department. Dealing with fire is actually similar to dealing with a wet event. It includes drying, vacuuming and air circulation and what I want to impress on you is the first item on the list to avoid touching the surface of soot and ash. That can cause a real problem when it comes time to clean the object because touching soot causes it to become embedded in the surface. So if you need to pick something up try and get it from underneath or from a non-presentation surface. I'm not going to go into cleaning soot and ash very far because it's tricky and I think it's best left to a conservator. Or possibly a conservator could consult on your particular situation to develop the best cleaning protocol and then train some volunteers how to do it but it can be a risky treatment. One thing you can do is removing smoking odor using activated charcoal deodorizers and circulating the air. This is an example of carbonized wood. It's a four foot tall wood sculpture and in terms of salvage there's not a lot to be done except not to touch the charred wood if you need to move it. As you can imagine, carbonized wood is very fragile. After salvage is complete. After the salvage operation is over then a conservator can consolidate the wood and restore the finish. This is a small painted box that was in a house fire and has soot on the surface. So again you want to be careful how you touch something like this. This was cleaned using a dry eraser technique and dry cleaning methods are usually best because wet cleaning can actually drive the soot further down into the surface. Especially on aged painted surfaces. And just so you can appreciate why this is so important. This is a close up view of an aged paint surface showing an alligator texture. And you can see how easy it would be to trap excess soot in the texture of this surface. And that's why careful handling is so important. Now I want to give you an idea of how smoke and soot can penetrate an object. This is a cabinet with a fitted interior. And the outside really doesn't look too bad for having been in a fire. Just, I'll just point out on the surface you'll see these, get my pointer going here. These little defects, those are normal, not normal, but intentional defects in the wood. This was insect riddled wood that the cabinet maker chose to use for building this cabinet. So that's not damage from the fire. That's an intentional thing in the object. And on the inside when you open the doors you can see that it still looks pretty good even a little cleaner than the outside. But soot tends to settle out on horizontal surfaces and can penetrate inside closed cabinets. So to finish up, I'd like to show you just a couple of examples of how a disaster plan can make or break the recovery from an event. I'm keenly aware of this because I assist organizations with disaster planning and I've seen how it makes a difference. So I think it's worthwhile to be voting just a couple of minutes to it. This is an historic farm museum and its main components are the structures and their contents. This small organization had a rudimentary disaster plan in place. And I mean very rudimentary. The plan said that if the barn ever caught fire that they would bulldoze the back house. Oh, and just a little primer on New England architecture. So this is called the big house, the small little house, the back house and the barn. And they're all connected. Okay, so their rudimentary plan said that if the barn ever caught fire that their plan would be to bulldoze the back house. That house that's second from the left that connects it to the barn and the rest of the structure. Bulldozing the back house would break the connection to the main house. And this was a conscious decision to sacrifice a portion of the building in order to save the rest of the house and its contents. Unlucky for them, they did experience a raging barn fire. But the plan was executed and they successfully saved the main house with all the contents. The barn was consumed in the fire and the back house was bulldozed. And there's a little more to this story. From where I took this picture from where I was standing behind me is there's a chapel on the grounds. And this is the chapel. It's about 100 yards away from the house. And on the night of the fire, they carried out the second part of the plan which was to hand carry collection items from the house over to the chapel. So they organized a human chain and moved everything into the chapel. So this is a real success story and it relied on having a disaster plan as rudimentary as it was. The not so good story happened at this small village museum. So let me get my pointer out again. So the village museum, we can see part of it over here. They've moved these buildings to this location and around to the both sides and behind where this photo was taken is a little scene of an historic village. And the collections are stored in the historic structures and in the warehouses that you see here. Now they did not have a disaster plan and the grounds were flooded a few years ago and the contents of all the buildings including the warehouses got soaking wet, very deep water, again way above the window line. Now they too had a bulldozer and while their intentions were good during cleanup, the bulldozer was used to push the collections out of the warehouses and into this pile. So instead of having a water damage collection, they ended up with a pile of trash. You do very strange things when you're in the grips of a disaster and here's a case where a disaster plan would have helped them think through this scenario ahead of time. And that wraps up my comments for today. So I'm happy to entertain any questions. Great, well thank you so much John. We had just one question come in sort of early on in the presentation, I think it was about 15 or 20 minutes into your remarks, where you're showing an example of an upholstered piece of furniture and Peter was wondering if the tufting on that was wool. I don't know if you remember what that was, let's see if I can find the slide. Yeah, sure. I do remember if the tufting was wool, is that the question? Yes, mhm. Yeah, so I don't know how familiar Peter is with furniture, but I'll just make this so that everyone can understand the answer. The tufting is, the term tuft refers to the profile. It doesn't refer to the materials used. So by tufting, I mean that they installed a button on the front of the piece and connected a string to it and they pulled that string very tight so they create a deep well where that button is and that's called a tuft. So when you saw that chair I was working on that had the tufting and it was, the show cover was removed, that top material that you saw, that fluffy kind of padding, that was cotton batting. So maybe that's what he was asking about whether that was wool or not, but that was cotton batting. Then underneath the cotton batting was the muslin cover. Underneath the muslin cover was horse hair and horse hair is very tough. You could almost think of it like really coarse steel wool. So it has some body and some spring to it. And so when you pull your tufting button very tight it creates that well with a tuft of padding around the well. Peter Schmidt. Okay, I see you say thank you. I guess I explained that well enough. Little hard to explain something so visual, just in words. I think that was great, thank you John. Does anyone have any other questions? Please feel free to go ahead and drop those in the chat window. Again, thank you John for comprehensive overview and for providing the handout as well. Hopefully that will be a useful resource for everyone. You're welcome. I'm gonna go ahead and pull over at the survey link. You can see if there's any other questions. So as with past programs, please just take a few moments to fill out this evaluation. Oh, I'm seeing one question here. So John, Stephanie's wondering if you have any comments on more modern furniture that has plastics. So I think it's a great question. Yeah, that's a good question. I deal mostly with wood, but you're gonna run into plastics. So plastic is not hygroscopic like wood is. So you don't have any of those issues about expansion contraction, soaking up water. If the surface is dirty, it's probably safer to wipe down. You're not in such a hurry to dry the piece. So I think plastic almost falls into a lower priority item than wood. In fact, I would definitely say it does. So that's gonna fall closer to your priority list of ceramics and stone when it comes to high priority. So water is not gonna affect plastic much. Heat will, in a fire, it will melt. So if it's already melted, not a lot you can do, I would definitely say let it cool down before you touch it. You would burn yourself, or if it was still soft and pliable, you may cause deformation, you may unintentionally deform a piece of the plastic. But I think that there's not a lot of special techniques for plastic in terms of salvage. You're welcome, Stephanie. I noticed that I was reminded when I looked at the list, I'm talking to Seattle, and everyone said, when they signed in, they said, hello, good morning. And it's afternoon out here in Maine, so one of those miracles of technology that we're all here at the same time, talking to one another, but it's not really the same time. Galileo or Newton or one of those guys would be amazed at what we do these days. We're having a summer-like day here. It's 80 degrees and humid.


Damn, they afforded here some in Hyde Park. This is like the Sydney version. I'm looking for some of those crazy speakers. I don't see any crazy speakers out. So I just ran into a bloke. I told him I'm a tourist looking for the opera house, the opera house, and told me to perform there in the early 1980s. I said, perform what? And he was an actor. And I said, can I Google you? He said, nah, but have a good time at the Sydney Opera House. So I'm the only person I've seen with a selfie stick. The selfie stick's not big in Sydney from what I see. So I had some kids go, oh, look at this. So I'm the only person wondering around with a selfie stick. And so this is Hyde Park. This is where the crazies and nutters come out and rant and rave. So here's my philosophy from this trip. I want to learn from everyone, even my big sister, even my big brother, like strangers, people I disagree with. I want to just maximize my learning from as many people as possible. See? This is Hyde Park. I guess that's Captain Hyde there. They were in the CBD or in the Central Business District about a mile away from the Sydney Opera House. So that's discovered this territory. I think that's Captain Cook. Captain Cook having a look. So Captain Cook discovered this territory. Good old Captain Cook. But where are the nutters? I'm the only nutter in Hyde Park, mate. I hear drugs are bad. Is this really true? This is erected in 1908. Now I'm about a mile away, I think, from King's Cross, which is like the worst part of Sydney. Really bad, really bad things happen in King's Cross, filled with vice and depravity and iniquity. So it is spring. Very early spring here. The temperature varies between about 65 and 75 degrees. I had a nice hour-long shower as I was walking here. And it just felt like being a kid, like an adventure. Just walking in the rain. Not worrying about a thing. Ah, the importance of situation. Now I'm in Sydney. So it's going to bring out a whole different side to me. I'm not wearing my yarmulke because here, Sydney is not a real friendly place to wear your yarmulke. I see some strong Jewish Orthodox institutions around here. I haven't seen any Jews yet in Hyde Park, but I think a big shout out to everyone I might know in Sydney. I'm going to go see Professor Drew Fraser, who wrote the lost question. Look how lush it is. All our buses are electric. We're totally down with the green revolution here, right? We're doing our bit. I'm going to go down here and find... That was Hyde Park, but no nutters out today. A little bit of rain and all the nutters go away. So there's going to be a big anti-vax rally here at Hyde Park tomorrow. Anti-vax, anti-lockdown. So I hope I'm on Hollywood Street, William Street. I've got to be down here somewhere, mate. Oh, look at these beautiful dogs. No dobermans, no kept balls. Lots of beautiful churches in Sydney. I'm not sure anyone actually goes for them. But lovely architecture. Beautiful plumage. Man, I'm planning for the fjords. Yeah, I'll try to have a conversation with Dr Fraser. Like the lost question. What is it, 10 years later? A great book, The Lost Question. Revolutionary book. If the Anglo-Saxon tribes to be saved. And I'll say that one day, welcome to Hyde Park. One day there will be a big statue in Hyde Park of Drew Fraser. Doing his bit to unite the world's fractured Anglo-Saxon tribes under a philosopher king. Surely love is all around us. Okay, I'm looking for some nutters, mate. Let me know if you spot some nutters. Got to be some nutters around here somewhere already. I might have to talk about the importance of situationism. Yeah, look at that beautiful church. Is that the Anglican church? That's a fine church. Gonna have a church. Have a beautiful one. Lovely steeples, spires. I'm not sure if I know the difference between steeples and spire. Very reverential. Aw, man, I'm hearing the big smoke. Sydney, central business district. Okay, don't visit the park during after heavy rain or strong winds. Oh, wow. This looks like a great place for cottaging. It's like Central Park in New York, but with less violence and less raping. It's gotta be an offer house down here somewhere, right? Well, CBD, Central Business District. So, the big anti-vax rally is gonna be here tomorrow. Anti-lockdown. Might even get violent, right? God forbid, God forbid. I think, is that the Anglican church where they did that beautiful hymn by Disney? I've played on my show. Got no idea that Sydney was this nice. Sydney is the most beautiful city in the world, mate. Unbelievable. It's built around a bay. Potney Bay is where the first settlers landed. Back in about 1770s. It was at the Declaration of Independence. One of those, how you can grow anything here. I don't think Sydney's having any water shortage. Every day that I'm here, it's supposed to rain, at least for the next week. What an amazing church. St. Mary of the Cross. Okay. So, is this Catholic? Just a pointer, we don't have any nutters out here. R-rating. I saw one person who was like crying for her mother. So, one crazy person so far in Sydney. She was sitting on the ground, got her earphones in, got her backpack on. She was crying for her mother. Seeing one crazy person.


From the Ludwig von Mises Institute, this is the Mises Report, a public policy and economic issues commentary series. In this program we present another part of 10 great economic myths. The material heard today was prepared by Murray and Rothbard, Ph.D. of New York Polytechnic Institute for the Mises Institute.  Those people who are properly worried about the deficit unfortunately offer an unacceptable solution. Increasing taxes. Curing deficits by raising taxes is equivalent to curing someone's bronchitis by shooting him. The cure is far worse than the disease. For one reason, as many critics have pointed out, raising taxes simply gives the government more money, and so the politicians and bureaucrats are likely to react by raising expenditures still further. Parkinson said it all in his famous law, expenditures rise to meet income. If the government is willing to have, say, a 20% deficit, it will handle high revenues by raising spending still more to maintain the same proportion of deficit. But even apart from this shrewd judgment in political psychology, why should anyone believe that a tax is better than a higher price? It is true that inflation is a form of taxation in which the government and other early receivers of new money are able to expropriate the members of the public whose income rises later in the process of inflation. But at least with inflation, people are still reaping some of the benefits of exchange. If bread rises to $10 a loaf, this is unfortunate, but at least you can still eat the bread. But if taxes go up, your money is expropriated for the benefit of politicians and bureaucrats, and you're left with no service or benefit. The only result is that the producer's money is confiscated for the benefit of a bureaucracy that adds insult to injury by using part of that confiscated money to push the public around. No, the only sound cure for deficits is a simple but virtually unmentioned one. Cut the federal budget. How and where? Anywhere and everywhere. You've been listening to the Mises Report from the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Funds for this series come from the Friends of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a non-profit educational foundation. Address your comments and inquiries to the Mises Institute, Thatch Hall, Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama, 36849.


We now have our panel discussion. It's going to be moderated by Dr. John Sutherland. Professor Sutherland is the head of environmental and ecological engineering. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and has had an illustrious career in both mechanical and environmental engineering. And so I will turn it over to John to be the head wrangler in chief. All right, thank you very much, David. I'm going to introduce all our panelists that are up here and then ask them to each say a few words about their background and their expertise. And why don't we start with the gentleman that just introduced me, David Barr. Okay, so hi, I'm Dave Barr. As I said, head of materials engineering. It's just for a little bit of background. Actually for the students here, I did my degree here for bachelor's and master's degrees in materials and in metallurgical because we hadn't switched over between materials and metallurgical during that degree period. So the bachelor's was materials and the master's was metallurgical. I went on to University of Minnesota for my PhD. I've been doing materials reliability, mechanical properties, materials and how materials deform for about 30 years now. And I've had about 25 years in academia starting at Washington State University becoming department head there and then transitioning to department head here in 2012. So my interests that tie into this have to do with the school as a whole. I think our school is moving towards an area where as enrollment grows and as the students' interest in sustainability and in societal impact has grown. It's important for us as a school to think about if we make bumper stickers that say we can't make without materials, we may have to think about how we make those materials and what the impact that making is. So that's kind of what I'm here to talk about today. Thank you, David. Next up, we have Linda Sarros who comes from Arcelor. Right, I'm a proud Purdue grad. If I was a year older, I'd be a math teacher but Purdue started a summer engineering program for women when I was between my junior and senior years and I came down to see the campus and decided this engineering stuff is fun and I'd like to be an engineer. And that served me well. I was able to get a summer engineering job at Inland Steel after my freshman year because there weren't a whole lot of girls around. They wouldn't put me out in the mill because I was not yet 18. But I managed to retire from Inland and Successor companies 47 years later. So I was happy to be asked back to like relive my steel days I retired in 21. But Inland gave me an opportunity to work with a lot of different people, including Dr. Cram for a short period of time and I love the steel industry. So I'm glad to be here. Next up we have the reason we're all here today, Alan Cram. Did you want to send anything else in addition to comments from earlier in your introduction? Maybe a fact that we didn't know about. Sure, sure. I might have a challenge to think of a fact you didn't know that already said. I think the one thing I would say is that I've been fortunate to be at three different universities and three different technical engineering-based universities as this is a technical engineering university also. And I found them both all to be really interesting places full of very smart people who wanted to make a difference. And I think the highlight of my career was the 19 PhD students I have and the 28 master students I had. And I probably learned more from them than I ever did from anything else. And that's the beauty of being in engineering schools. Very nice. Next up, Eric Boria, who is from GTI Energy. Hello everyone, Eric Boria. I'm a senior analyst and project manager at GTI Energy. It's an organization that does research and development for energy projects across the US. I work on the Department of Community Benefits that works on developing and implementing community benefits and impacts for these kind of projects led by Elizabeth Koch, who is on the Sustainability Committee of the MRS Journal. My background, I have a PhD in sociology where the topic was looking at community response to the dredging of Indiana Harbor in Chicago and a master's in urban planning policy from UIC. And apparently there's a theme here going on. My father made his career at Inland Steel and then our slower mental steel is a research engineer. So apparently we have that theme going on here. Glad to be here. All right, well let's hear for the panelists before we get started. So our panel over the next 45 minutes or so is going to be, is there a path for green materials production for structural materials? So this is a panel session. So people should feel free to if they have a question to raise their hand and we'll try to get that question answered. So I'm kind of looking out there to see whether there's any pent up questions. So let me start and I'm going to leave it to you all to figure out who is best positioned to respond to this. But as we heard from Alan earlier, as steel production aims to reduce its carbon footprint, are there any unintended consequences to recycling steel using EAF that come to mind? I think Alan really touched on the major issue in the presentation, especially as EAF steel started producing for sheet steel where formability is more important. The residuals that continue to be present in the scrap can really restrict the use on some like deep drawing applications and those kind of things. You need to really watch nitrogen specifically, but there's a lot of other tramp elements that cause the problem. And you can't call those unintended. You really should, people have been designing for that for 20 years already since they started that. You just need to know that and application. That's very good. Other thoughts? Yeah, Alan? I think unintended consequences are inability to capture all of the dusts. You know, and the dust is a hazardous waste that can be transported across state lines. So unintended consequences be when you release it because you didn't expect it. Other unintended consequences could be also the gas that's coming off of even electric, our furnace at high temperature can precipitate dioxins, et cetera, as it cools down. And that has a really severe effect on local environments. So I think that that's too. The other one is that I just spent time on a large study of what to do with electric art furnace slag for the National Academy. And it's not a straightforward issue of, because I mean, think of it as 10% of the weight of steel. It's a lot of slag. And people would like to do lots of things with it, but you have to realize certain things. I didn't realize that just the fact that it's pretty basic. Therefore, you wouldn't want to ingest any of it. You know, for beginning, you know? So you have to think about, is there dust that children could ingest? It's also a pretty hard material that as you recycle it and you break it up, of course, to end up with a size distribution you would like. You know, pretty sharp particles there that if ingested to a child is very problematic too. So there are some unintended consequences of what you do with the other streams coming out of electric furnace. That's very good. I was thinking about some of the community issues as well, Eric. A lot of the work that GTI Energy does is looking at what impacts, how to mitigate impacts, both the expected and the unexpected. And a big part of what we're doing is workforce development and workforce implications. And whenever you have a technology, we try to work closely with the technical team to understand what potential air emissions, water emissions and discharges can come out and design workforce implications, like update to health and safety standards, update to risk assessment so that there's not only monitoring, but some mechanism to help the workers who are working there take precautions to reduce their impacts, have information that goes, that's publicly accessible, that the community can take to understand what the potential impacts of technologies are. Because even technologies that reduce some emissions can produce increases in other types of emissions. So having these types of metrics and transparency within the project team at least, and putting in monitoring so we know what's going on as the project's being developed is crucially important. That's very good. Okay, go ahead, David. I was going to shift gears a little bit since Eric brought it up, you brought it up and given my own background, as we begin contemplating issues like a greener steel and perhaps less carbonized grid and so forth, what does that then suggest? And you brought up issues as well, Eric. What does that suggest about how we should be evolving the curriculum at the university and thinking about requirements and so forth? I know David and Allen have had to deal with this in the past, figure out how we jam more and more into the curriculum and no one ever wants to take anything out. But are there some bigger issues? Maybe we can start with you, David, and talk a little bit about how we should be thinking about this. Sure, I mean, I think you're right on the nobody wants to ever take anything out. So if we want, and I think, are there any students here that think they have lots of extra time and that we've given them plenty of time to ponder and think about things carefully and take na, not usual. So I think one of the challenges is we're asking people to make technical decisions. We expect our students to be able to walk out and think about the ramifications of the technical decisions at a level, I think that is higher than we used to. And I don't necessarily, I think back when I was a student, could I solve a problem was what I was being asked? Not if I solve that problem were there knock-on effects and I don't think that, I think now most of the students come thinking about that. I don't think we as faculty necessarily address that yet. But I think of how do we integrate some concepts of sustainability across engineering disciplines is a challenge. And I think it is a question of what do we wanna take out because extending it to saying that we're gonna go the civil engineering route and to be a professional engineer, you really need five years and a master's, I don't think is palatable to a lot of our, the educational system we have. Yeah, maybe Eric, you have some thoughts. Yeah, I had two things. One of the, there's a couple of routes that we put into community benefits plans. And one is to move away from that model where you get educated, then you get a job in going to industry, you implement it and then there's a product and then if there's any community opposition to pollution that's a downstream effect and making it sort of a, first of all, a feedback internally where we've put together a couple projects where we try to make a consortium where there's more structured interaction between the industrial partner that's putting into technology, a university and then workforce training organizations and labor unions that do that kind of workforce training to try to get some form of information feedback because I'm not the technical expert but I know that there's some information that on application side that could feedback to the curriculum side and then we run up against that exact same problem that we know there's a need to do more research on this new technology but then getting space into the educational side so we're setting up the structure for that interaction, how you guys do it on the academic side is something that we need to figure out but we're at least putting together that structured interaction. So that's within the project, setting up this consortium between industry academic and training partners and the other feedback mechanism we get is a two-way communication that's literally stated by the DOE requirements to have two-way communication with communities. So we set up structured information feedback where we can take new information from communities and feed it back to project teams, feed it back to academic partners so that they have a little bit, they can broaden their scope of what the impacts are, what the concerns and priorities are on the ground, this information even and then adjust accordingly. And how many of you are required to get any tools for understanding community impact, social impact, how to look at census data, how to look at energy burden, how to look at environmental burden? Very few, right? So another tool that we get is training of technical young engineers and technical staff with environmental justice toolkits so that you could at least have the awareness and you have the tools to figure out what community impacts are. If air pollution is going to the community that's directly around the plant, how do you even assess in 15 minutes how do you assess what the existing burdens are within that community that you can be contributing to so you don't do what Alan mentioned of, hey, there's already this heavily industrialized, heavily polluted area, let's just put the heavy pollution technologies in there, right? Because that's exactly how you get community opposition that stops projects. So earlier one of the questions to Dr. Cram was where do we stand with the current electric furnace DRI base and going to hydrogen as a refining source but that presupposes that the electricity you're using in the electric furnace and for the hydrogen creation is clean in and of itself and that's huge because that's the big challenge when you've got all these worldwide steel makers saying that they wanna be carbon neutral by 2050, that's not gonna happen if we don't have clean electricity. So that goes back to putting it in the curriculum, it's not just in materials, it's in the whole of the engineering department or at school and it's good that we're working on things concurrently but this is the biggest challenge I've seen and I actually was making ingots when I started and was on the project to justify the first ladle met station. So the technical challenges are really exciting but the coordination is not something I have my hands around yet. Maybe I could talk about this in a different viewpoint in the philosophy of what is an engineer and what do we need an engineer to be? I think we need engineers to be leaders, simply leaders and the problem we have in society is we don't have enough engineers who are leaders and this means engineers, although they are very narrow in certain areas, they need to be broad. They need to communicate well, they need to listen to other people, they need to look at the big problem and be able to bring people together to solve big problems and they have to be willing to step up to go into politics, they have to be willing to step up and lead and I think the big failure and I'm gonna be honest, my whole career, big failure of engineering is not realizing the role is to make leaders who are engineers and I think if you focus everything that way these problems become straightforward. The fact is yes, you should understand community, you should understand impact, you should understand the technology but you should understand your role in life is to change things. You're a change agent as an engineer, not a person who works in a job. You're not a person who makes things for the electronics industry, you're not a person whose whole life is just to make steel, you're a change agent with your education and I think we haven't done a good job as engineers, is explaining to everyone, use your abilities to change the world, one person at a time. That's really good, I was just gonna, too often we talk about engineers being problem solvers and that's too narrow, too limiting. We need to be the leaders, David. I was gonna say, I appreciate, I think we also need to have students be comfortable asking for help because you can't be perfect, you can't be great at everything, you can be good at some things but you have to know when to ask for help and experts and you have to know when to accept that help and to trust their expertise and I think that's something we need to do a better job to teaching people to ask earlier and to find trustworthy help quicker. Yeah, go ahead. First of all, I think that's phenomenal, that's right on the money. One of the things is not just asking for help, it's getting the skill sets to learn to work in collaborations and coalitions that are with people outside of your discipline because your ability to communicate with people with very different skill sets is what's needed to move to the next idea, to move that idea forward because you recognize that you have a great skill set in here and for you to get the awareness and start moving, you need to be in these multidisciplinary teams, you need to be in these teams that are cross professions and learn how to work collaboratively with others. Those are skill sets that I don't think are emphasized enough but we focus so much on the technical side but your ability to work with others in other professions to be able to get from point A to point B, that's just as valuable as your technical expertise. If I could just, I think that's absolutely correct and the thing that I discovered myself when I was provost and all of a sudden I had a law school, I had an architecture school, an engineering school, et cetera, et cetera, reporting to me was that they speak in their own language and what you say is not what they hear. They hear their own language but it's not what you meant and when they talk to you, it's not what they meant to you, it's a very interesting thing, it took me a while to recognize the architects talking metaphors and what they're saying, you have to interpret, it's like a game but you know, everyone's like that, lawyers are very difficult to talk to because it's very transactional, you know? So, but I think that's something that everyone has to and it's part of when people say you have to work in multidisciplinary teams, this is why you have to work in multidisciplinary teams to listen, to learn how to listen and then start to understand what people mean by the way they say it and it's all in how we educated them. We are educated in a certain way so we think in a certain way and we refer to things in a certain way but architects are also educated but they were educated in a different way and they think in a different way because of that and it's the history of the area. We're all living in the history of our areas and if you don't have the background it's very difficult to understand exactly what they mean unless you spend time with them and spend time socially with them and the same with them all and they become comfortable with you to say I don't understand what you mean by that.  And then you start to realize the issue is communication in a very fundamental level. It's not the ability to speak English, it's the ability to understand everyone's English and the international thing adds another wrinkle to that too, you know? And because culture and language and what you mean is part of what you say also. So I found that that was the most interesting thing that I learned as provost was not only do I have to listen better just spend time to understand and it was my issue, not theirs. That's the other big thing. It's your issue, it's not they should learn to speak to me. It's you have to learn to speak to them so that they understand. Very good, yeah. We have a question from the audience. Who will wait to get the microphone so the question will be heard. Thank you, Professor. Have hydrocarbons or particularly biomaterials been tried in the reduction of iron ore processes? Yes, they have. It is another way of getting charcoal. I mean basically, I hear a lot of things about biomaterials and other things and when you look at it as a form of charcoal as a feed material into the furnace basically how do you take any carbon source and turn it into a carbon source you can use? So yes, there is many areas and there are companies doing some really interesting things because there's a lot of waste biomaterials that are just thrown away that could actually be turned into fuel. Yeah, and not to get rid of the hydrogen to make charcoal first and then to have the iron come in but have the hydrogen stay in and a process that could utilize the hydrogen for positive benefits. Yeah, and I'm sure there are processes doing that also. It makes sense. Again, it's how much can you make to make a difference? So unless you have sufficient volumes of hydrogen at the reasonable price, then you have to be able to using it. So we are in farm country. They would say we have a lot of biomass, not necessarily hydrogen. Ethnol, right? Yes. I was just gonna say that the Arsler Middle has got multiple projects going and they know they're gonna be using like sour hydrogen to start with because there's no way that they've got the clean green hydrogen available now. That raises issues for materials because anything that's containing this is gonna corrode faster. But ultimately, to get where we need to get, we need to get the clean hydrogen, right? Oh, and also we need an infrastructure to transport hydrogen. The big problem with hydrogen, as a graduate student and I started using hydrogen in one of my experiments I learned very quickly that it truly is more flammable and it's very easy to watch it explode. And I always remember in the lab watching the flame front run through my glasswork thinking, oh, that doesn't look good, you know? And there are significant issues with the distribution of hydrogen and an infrastructure that doesn't exist in the country. So that's another issue with, even if there was plenty of hydrogen and volume that becomes an issue of transportation and, you know, et cetera. David. I was just gonna comment on hydrogen and brittlement being the, you know, like a good career path to get into right about now, because there will be problems coming up because people will miss pick things that they didn't, that wasn't rated for this hydrogen service. Well, we didn't have that hydrogen service. It's actually not an unintended, it is a consequence that we can pretty much anticipate, right? So there was a question in the back. Yeah, thank you for the talk. I just wanted to go back to how you said, like, there has to be more leaders in the engineering field. I think it's like a easy topic to say, but like, it's a very simple explanation if you see me and my brother, I was good in math, I was incentivized to do that when I was a child. So I go to engineering school, my brother was good in English, so he just went into law school. And predominantly, if you see the actual changes, I think me actually spending my time in the lab and doing my PhD work doesn't do that big of a change in the world. And actually, like my brother, maybe he can go back to politics, oh, go into politics and change it. So what do you think like a practical change in the curriculum or like the incentive cycle for like children or like students to change so that they could be incentivized to be more proactive, more into communication while actually being an engineering student at the same time? I think every engineering student should take introduction to law. Simple as that. Is without understanding the law, you can't do any of these things. And by the way, as an engineer to understand the law, you can protect your intellectual property, et cetera, understanding this. So I was a big proponent always of there should be a lot more law in engineering curriculums as important as anything else because the engineers are the ones that are developing the next technologies, et cetera, that need to be protected and need to protect themselves so that their own intellectual property isn't lost. But if you want to go on into anything, you have to have some knowledge, and I don't say you have to be a lawyer, I don't mean that at all, but you have to have a knowledge of what the law process is and how it became as it is where you are. So I think for me, the first thing is understanding something fundamental about how the law process works is necessary for everyone. And the last one I would say is we should all tell all engineers, you can be anything you want to be as a change agent. You are not stuck in a career path defined by the four years you spent in college. The four years in spending college taught you to think in a certain way. It's going to be very valuable, but that way of thinking is very valuable in every area and actually more valuable than most backgrounds. And I'm not denigrating other backgrounds. It's just the mathematical bent and being numbers focused and actually being able to understand decision based on numbers is very important now and is a way to make decisions that make better decisions faster than others. Intuition is not a good idea. I mean, it works occasionally, but it's not a good idea. It's like hope's not a strategy. So go ahead, Eric. Just a very quick response. I recognize there are structural and there are individual level decisions that can be made. You, everything is set for you to go in one path and you can, as he said, Elsa, you can go work for a company, get a job and then just do that job. Like nothing's pushing you to do anything extra. Nothing's pushing you to be a leader. Nothing's pushing you to assess community impacts and whatnot, but you as an individual with the encouragement to take on those and expand your role, broaden out, work with others across disciplines helps push that a little bit in the right direction and from the top down, structurally, they see the need to change some of the... I think there's pressure on education to incorporate more community impacts, diversity impacts into curriculum because they see that a lot of these projects, they get halted because even a good technological project, if they don't work well with communities, they'll get community opposition, environmental group opposition, and it'll stop, right? So I think that's the motivation for putting community benefits into federal funding requirements. So there's that top down, but you as an individual, you can make the decision to be a leader. You can make the decision to incorporate some more awareness of community impacts and move in that direction on your own. There, another question right here and then we'll come to you. Oh, well, we've got two microphones, so we're gonna go with you first and then you're next. You had yours first? All right, all right, you guys worked it out. Go ahead. Guys hear me? Okay. So something here answered my question. The first question about my biohydrogen issues for engineering, but my question, second question is how can materials engineering like solve problems in astro engineering and also like space exploration issues? Like what's some ways like materials engineering can fix some problems in that field? Why did everyone look at me right away? I thought I'd let you go first. Yeah, no, no, I appreciate that. I mean, no, it's, so we had a speaker in one of our seminars a couple weeks ago who said, you thought materials was a great background because it meant that everybody used materials, so you had to learn that everybody had materials problems and that your job was not necessarily to bring your material solution to their problem, but to figure out what their problem was and was it tied to the materials they were using? And there's usually something. So if you look outside of, you know, we've been talking about making bulk materials, making structural materials very early down the feedstock, but if you think about then how do you apply that to, you know, the thing above you, right, since we're in Armstrong Hall and there's always a certain throwback to the fact that there's like a space aspect of things. Material challenges, how do you make it more efficiently? How do you use less energy? How do you use something that's more recyclable? That does, that pervades not just how you make it the first time, but then how you use it and where it goes. So I think there's a lot of potential for any industry that has materials problems. I think one of the things you asked was about space exploration. One of the biggest issues is where's the oxygen coming from?  You have to make it there. And that's a materials processing issue. And obviously that's an electricity issue and there are many ways of doing that. But you know, you start going through that and you see that many of the technologies we've already developed, you just change into the situation you're going into and you can come up with novel technologies because all of a sudden the financial constraint has been taken away. Because you just have to have oxygen. It doesn't matter how much it costs. For example, in many things like this. So I think there's a great future for materials in space exploration, in the materials for space, et cetera. And it's application of what we know to this new frontier, understanding what are the properties that are necessary to survive. So another one I was thinking of example, like the Splashdown example. Like the spacecraft going through the atmosphere. I think making metals that can withstand the heat from the atmosphere could be a great problem to solve for using the materials engineering as well. I think. Very good. Actually years and years ago when I was at Michigan Tech I ran into an alum that worked on the ablation process by which they dissipated the heat. There was a question. Okay. So follow up on the discussion before about all sorts of different things. I guess interdisciplinary work as engineers. Thinking with numbers. And hopefully I'll find my question as I keep talking. I'm thinking about this. I've seen the change within myself as I did my undergrad in engineering and now starting grad school where I'm thinking more in numbers and I'm approaching problems from that side. But I wasn't always like that. And the more I look around I almost feel like most people aren't like that. And when you talk in numbers even though that represents maybe the objective truth that's not what people respond to. And so what is your advice for these kind of situations as a young engineer? I think we saw it with COVID. We see it with a lot of such things where people just don't, as you said, speak the same language. How do you overcome that barrier? I think the first thing we have to realize is not all people need our brilliance. You know. Need our brilliance. But they need our knowledge. They need our wisdom. They need to learn to communicate it in a way that everyone can understand. And in doing that sometimes means we have to change the way we talk to people. Unless, you know, we're all have a problem of being impressed by our own impressions. You know, if you want to look at that we're smart. And we like people to know that. It's a failing and a benefit. But I think the answer is that learning how to talk to people so they understand your point without having to take them through the derivation of the equation to get there is really important. Among engineers, you can't do that. They actually want to know, how did you get to that answer? And explain it to them in detail so that they will accept it. They will go through their own derivation and say, yeah, that's correct. But for many people they're willing to accept that you have the intelligence and the ability to do this and they want to know the answer. You know, and they want you to tell them the answer in a way that they have confidence in you. So I am an engineer, so I do want the data. Not necessarily every piece of data. And I always used to joke at work, why did the engineer write a 10 page report? Because he didn't have the time to write a 10 page report. And it's really important and it's a big skill to be able to only give the elevator pitch or if you were presenting to somebody in the DOD, one of my fellow materials grads went to war college and she was working at the Pentagon. I mean she had five minutes to tell a general what they should be doing. And they also wanted to know she had the data. But the data is important so I'm glad you like it. But I agree totally. You need to know your audience and what you're trying to accomplish when you put your summaries together. First Eric and then. When you go to law school what they teach is a way of thinking. Not the knowledge that they give. When you go to engineering, it's a way of thinking. When you go to sociology, it's a way of thinking. It's a way of specializing in a way of thinking. And as they both mentioned if you're not able to communicate that to others who are not in your group, that's where the boundary comes. All the silo things where you were encouraged to use complex language that only those in the in-group understand that hinders actual progress because if you can't get from the 10-pager and explain clearly exactly what you're trying to convey that's why we have a whole science communication effort and there's specialists in science communication because they can convey complex thoughts very clearly so that others can use it build on it and interact. Hey, you didn't think about this. How does that apply to this? You can't answer that question if you're only speaking within your own framework. That's why communication is crucial. I was going to suggest two things. The first is have you seen three-minute thesis? So I think there's a lot of examples online. I don't know if the ones that Purdue are always the most impressive. I will be blunt. I think I've seen better ones from elsewhere. Three-minute thesis is a really neat competition because you only have three minutes and you have to explain it clearly succinctly to a broad audience. The other thing I was going to say is I asked my first-year engineering class which I think I can't see because of the light but I think they're all gone so then I can talk about them. I asked them to do me in a minute slides for material introduce themselves if they were material and they all managed to keep it to a minute. If I think if I asked the seniors to do that not a single one of them would be able to keep it to a minute and so I don't know if it's that they're more scared of me and follow instructions or that something we do between when they showed up on campus and they become seniors teaches them makes them makes it harder for them to only say what they want in a minute. I don't know if we do it to them or if it's part of what we do. Yes, please. So a little different question. So we're talking about structural materials so there is one structural material and considering it on a global picture bamboo so like there's a community aspect of it as well. So what are your views on this as a like can we put our resources into engineering that material and making some more solutions instead of with that material? Well we certainly see bamboo through the Asian world being used as structural material. It's been one of the ancient materials right also one of the fastest growing plants we have so and doesn't degrade very quickly what's cut down so it's an excellent material to begin with. So it's a matter of acceptance of the customer and what you can make with bamboo is quite different than what you're going to make with other materials as long as you can make the final end product that's acceptable to the customer it would be fine but bamboo is a fine material in the right circumstance for use. I think that is a good example of one of the push backs from communities where how often have you heard that you need to look at the entire life cycle from source to sink to decommissioning like where are the waste streams going communities are impacted by the waste streams if you're not thinking if you're only thinking of the process within the factory you're not thinking about the entire sustainability of renewable resources the forever chemicals and everything that's in the end products and those are the cumulative environmental burdens that communities deal with which pushes engineers to think in terms of entire life cycles so I think that bamboo is a good example of that. Very good. I see you. I'll stand up. I am currently building a campaign here at Purdue to get the steel mill companies in northern Indiana to commit to being low carbon to protect the environment, protect the affected communities and keep manufacturing jobs in Indiana. What do you think it would take in order to convince them to commit to low carbon production and change the way that they've done things in the past? So, Arcelor Middle sold the Arcelor Middle USA component to Cleveland Cliffs so you're dealing primarily with Cleveland Cliffs at this point. I actually went on their website and there's a stark difference between the Cleveland Cliffs and the Arcelor Middle website on this issue and I would say the biggest reason for that is because Arcelor Middle is in partnership with Spain for the Spain plant and Germany for the Germany plant and a lot of the money that's going into this is from Arcelor Middle don't get me wrong but a lot of it is from Canada and Spain and so when you're dealing with the people in northwest Indiana in the United States I know SDI has got the same commitment that Arcelor Middle does but I still see a focus on return on investment because it's a cyclical industry and they want to be around next year let alone in 2050 so we can talk later if you want but it's a challenge that I totally understand and it goes back to what Dr. Cram said throughout his whole presentation sustainable means that you've got to be able to stay in business too but it's a laudable goal so I don't think you're going to have any problem with any of the steel plants saying they're not in favour of that the issue will be the definition of what do you mean by minimal carbon I think the law say that they all have programs to do that and they all want to do that and it wouldn't surprise me that they're willing to support whatever you're going on openly because one thing we should realise all the people who are owning steel companies are working for steel companies have families and children and they're concerned about the future also it's just a difficult problem to solve but I think if you go to the individual steel companies they'll all say we believe in that too that's really good go ahead Eric they do believe in it the question is are they going to spend money on it they'll spend whatever money they have one of the kickers they do believe in it one of the kickers to get companies to spend money on it are the federal requirements for community benefits that are tied to federal funds for sustainability technologies technology technologies putting those in commitments and they put it into the plan and that gets executed into a contract that they then have to follow and that's why they that's that moves from wanting to do it to then now you have to do it by contract here's the metrics here's the monitoring that you committed to and then you know the entire issue is getting to that contract in the first place before coming to GTI I worked the zoning administrator for the city of Gary and it's the same thing you have companies who want to do the good thing but when you get down to putting the plans and what they can execute they say what does the zoning code make us do right and it goes back to Alan's point of hey do you know the law or do you not know the law thank you that's very good David go ahead I was just going to say in a few minutes we have to invite people down to the reception so I will let you wrap up can we have one last very short very short question I'll try my best here I know that being an engineer you want to lead and you want to progress the world to the future however just with history you need to have public buy-in to get anywhere so whether it's World Wars, a nuclear race, a space race that's when we really had scientific advancement today when you see the public and policy and legislation being passed that doesn't go along with science as much as it used to how can we work on that how can we as engineers present that to become the leaders I think that's why we don't have enough engineers in Congress or the Senate you know I've met with many of them but I know that there are very few PhDs who are in the Senate or the Congress for example very few have an engineering background and if you have people making decisions without some people there who can explain the impact of these decisions on an engineering base why is science important why is engineering important and it's all very well to the NSF and all the other national things the fact is without someone there actually in the committees who's willing to speak for science speak for engineering in a reasonable way with the background that they have gravitas to speak on that we have a problem and fundamentally that's one of the largest problems we have if we were in China we'd find that most of the leaders had a science and engineering background quite different than here now they have other backgrounds too but if you look at the leadership in which disciplines they come from they were proponents of engineering and science and that leads to a different discussion about the importance of science and funding of science and I'm really talking about the funding of science here which is your question and if you look at whose funding science it's countries that have engineers and scientists at the top levels that understand the benefits to their country of doing this but you're absolutely correct and real dollars were well behind what we used to be and if you look at leadership of technology when I came here to go to graduate school from Europe there was only one place in the world to go if you wanted to do top class research it was the country that funded research at universities more than any other country in the world that was the United States best research country in the world without a doubt there was no second choice that's not true now there are many countries you can go to the outstanding research abilities where you can go and do a great PhD with great faculty most of them trained here by the way and then gone somewhere else so we're still the training ground of the professors of the world but this fact that we don't invest in our own scientific and engineering infrastructure and more than that we don't invest in our people to become the leaders in this the fact is that regardless of the research that's done the most important output of research is the graduate student, the graduates and goes on to actually change everything so that's something we've lost and become not as competitive as we used to be the dominant force here in my lifetime when I went to graduate school to do a PhD there was nowhere else to go and the facilities that were in American universities were unbelievable compared to the facility I had in one of the best universities in Scotland I mean it was like coming from a high school to university so it's a very important point you're bringing up and we need to bring everyone back to the viewpoint that we need to invest in research we need to invest in graduate programs across the country in all areas just engineering in all areas I think that's a good spot to end up on let's thank all the panelists once again


Hi, this is Rob from Jack's Abbey, here at my friends at Electric Time, and this is another episode of Shipping Out. Tom, thanks for having us. Why don't you tell us what's Electric Time? What do you do here? We're a Massachusetts manufacturer. We make power and street clocks, and we ship them all around the world. We've been doing this since about 1928. We started by an MIT engineer who had a patent on the first electric self-starting clock. We grew out of a firm called Telechron that was based in Ashland, Massachusetts. Now we have since moved to this art current. Manufacturing facility in Medfield, which is about 50,000 square feet. What sort of special sauce will Electric Time, what do you do that's different? What makes you special? One thing is to be a manufacturer in Massachusetts, which there's very few of us, right? We're very proud of what we do. We have great staff, both operations, engineering, manufacturing staff that have been here for, in some cases, almost 40 years. We make pretty stuff that is very public, and it's sort of fun to go visit, too. We actually have a clock in every continent. Someone actually managed to put one in a Coast Guard cutter, and it is now in a common room and an art cut. You mentioned one of the special things is you're running a manufacturing plant here at Massachusetts. What does that mean to you? It is a challenge. It's a very easy place to ship stuff all around the world. And you're doing mostly custom pieces. You have some that are repeated with a lot of custom pieces. What is sort of the steps of making a clock just in a brief synopsis? We offer a bunch of standard products at three o'clock here when we do custom projects. We usually start with a client who sends us a drawing or expresses an idea through us. It's then passed to our engineering department. Try to come up with a final design after the client approves it, depending on what the product is, a fairly standard product, a CAD design would be sent out through the water jet cutting machine, which you saw earlier. That product, if it was a simple metal product, would be formed on our press grate and welded up. And then it would go into our finishing department for painting, and there it would pass into assembly. And then the clock dials, beforehand the clock dials, which you saw also, get applied. And it's very, very satisfying to see a project if you've worked on something really concrete. It's not nebulous. And there's a lot of history to your business, and a lot of history to time pieces. Let's look forward to that. What are you most excited about in the future of your project? The future projects are fun. Whatever somebody is going to come up with a new sketch, someone will send us a sketch and they want us to build it. And it's become the challenge. It's been a great tour. It's really amazing to see what you do here, unexpected. And I look forward to seeing the clocks out there. And Tom, thanks for having us. Well, thank you very much. Cheers.