Pittsburgh cold heading plant

Tom's first-person visit as a young assistant professor — "you have never been through a plant any louder than that plant."

There's another process. Back when I was a young assistant professor, I went to Pittsburgh once and I don't remember why, but I went through a plant doing cold heading. Cold heading was developed after World War Two when someone learned that if I put a phosphate coating on steel — how do you put a phosphate coating on steel? You just dunk it in phosphoric acid. Is that hazardous? It's Coca-Cola, right? Coca-Cola is just phosphoric acid. So it's not all that hazardous. The other day a classmate of mine was here who used to go through a case of Coca-Cola a day, and he ended up in the infirmary with anemia, because he lived on Coca-Cola and M&Ms. Couldn't figure out why he had anemia. But if you phosphate-coat this — you take a wire, this is 3/8 inch diameter wire, phosphate coated, then put it in a stearate bath. Stearate — what's that? It's soap, same type of thing. Stearic acid, it's a stearate.