Karl Meyer reheat cracking thesis (Lehigh)

Meyer was Tom's supervisor at Bethlehem Steel. His thesis identified residual sulfur, arsenic, phosphorus, and antimony as the agents of reheat cracking during stress relief.

Reheat cracking. My supervisor at Bethlehem Steel had done his doctoral thesis at Lehigh on reheat cracking of steels. If you stress-relieve a steel — we put steels in a furnace at 1,200°F for an hour to get rid of the residual stresses from welding — sometimes they'd come out, and you'd actually hear a pow inside the furnace, and there'd be a great big crack going through the steel, a very intergranular crack. It turns out it was small amounts of sulfur, arsenic, phosphorus, antimony — things that shouldn't have any business being in the steel, but they'd do it. That's what Karl Meyer did his doctoral thesis on. He was one of the last in the line of the great metallurgists at Lehigh. He was my supervisor at Bethlehem Steel. We learned how to solve the reheat cracking problem. It was a problem all the way up through the 1970s, but not really today.