GE Cleveland wire plant tungsten metallurgy challenges

"If you want to be a metallurgist, just go to the Cleveland wire plant and you'll get burned out" — metallurgists there worked only on grain-growth control in tungsten.

Tungsten — you know what tungsten's used for. Light bulbs. This is what made Thomas Edison a rich man. Coolidge — Coolidge's first name was Coolidge. Coolidge became one of the directors of research at General Electric, but he was an MIT grad. He became a wealthy man, and he gave 350 acres to MIT, up on the North Shore. At one time they thought of moving MIT from Cambridge up to those 350 acres, because Cambridge was such a pain to live in — not for the students necessarily, but for dealing with the politics here. But anyway, they finally decided to stay in Cambridge. The Coolidge process for making tungsten wire was the thing that made the light bulb possible. And the Cleveland wire plant of General Electric — they used to say, if you want to be a metallurgist, just go to the Cleveland wire plant and you'll get burned out. Because the only thing metallurgists could work on there was controlling grain size in tungsten. That's what gives incandescent light bulbs their life: making it resistant to grain growth.