Ceramics fever / NIST kitchen-sink talk

Tom's 1986 NIST talk after returning from Japan. Punchline: the only high-volume structural ceramics are portland cement and toilet bowls — "and I throw in the kitchen sink, but you have to line it with gray cast iron." Griffith fracture-mechanics argument: critical flaw size too small to inspect.

Did I tell you about myself and the kitchen sink at the National Institute of Standards and Technology? When I got back from Japan, like 1986, I was an up-and-coming material scientist at MIT. I hadn't got full professor yet, but I was getting to be known. I gave a talk on what I'd learned in Japan, from spending a year there studying what was going on in material sciences in Japan. Great big auditorium at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland. I was telling them about the ceramics fever in Japan and how they had two million people come to a scientific show about fine ceramics, how they were going to take over engines and everything else. This is probably the premier material science laboratory for the U.S. government — in fact I used to be on their advisory committee, and I called NIST the crown jewel in the federal laboratories. Seven hundred federal laboratories, but they've had several Nobel Prize winners at NIST — just an outstanding laboratory.