Bulk metallic glass commercialization effort

Bill Johnson (Caltech, Duwez's student) developed iron-beryllium and other bulk metallic glass alloys in the late 1980s — golf-ball-sized amorphous parts achievable at 100 °C/sec cooling. Fifteen-year-old company; the only commercial product is golf-club metal woods, which fail at about 50 shots. Used to land Tom's "you can sell anything to a golfer" line and his broader skepticism about scaling research-grade materials.

It turns out another guy, a student of Pol Duwez — who was the guy who discovered this at Caltech in the early or mid 60s — his student Bill Johnson, who's a faculty member at Caltech now, about my age, in the late 80s came up with bulk metallic glasses. He started throwing all kinds of other metalloids from that part of the periodic table in with the iron. Actually it wasn't just iron, it was iron-beryllium alloys originally. Beryllium's toxic, but he was able to make bulk metallic glasses. You could make things about the size of a golf ball, and still get the amorphous structure. There's actually a company out there now — they haven't been all that successful, they've been around for fifteen years trying to sell bulk metallic glasses. All the way through the 1980s and 1990s no one figured out how to consolidate these thin sheets into a solid bulk material. They tried explosive bonding, where you just slam them together with an explosive charge, they tried everything and nothing worked. Still today nothing has worked, except Bill Johnson has gotten some alloys where, if you cool them at 100° centigrade per second, you can actually make them bulk — so you can get bigger things if you cast them the right way.