Bethlehem Steel — Tom's early career

"When I worked at Bethlehem Steel forty-some years ago." Anchors Tom's authority on Charpy practice and the Alaska Pipeline steel work. Not a developed case. ## Figures referenced These are framing statistics, not cases:

[Tom holds up two Charpy bar halves.] Here I have half of a brittle Charpy bar and half of a tough Charpy bar that stopped the machine. You take your Charpy bar, machined, and after you hit it, if you have a really good steel, you can stop the Charpy bar — which the guys who run the test hate. When I worked at Bethlehem Steel forty-some years ago I was working on high-toughness steels, and I would stop the Charpy bar on a fairly regular basis. They have to recalibrate the machines, about five hundred dollars every time. They actually ran my samples at the end and wouldn't recalibrate — they'd just break my samples and give me the results, and who cared. But stopping the machine means you have a very tough steel. So that's a way to measure — it's not really the energy of fracture, but we measure it in foot-pounds.