Rongeur (orthopedic surgical pliers) consulting work

Tom's ~1982 consulting case for a Johnson & Johnson medical-instruments division south of Boston. They wanted a stiffer material than steel for arthroscopic rongeurs; Tom proposed single-crystal sapphire (twice the stiffness of steel, behind diamond on hardness, can be color-tinted as ruby for surgeon-preference marketing). Client rejected without explanation.

This is for stiff materials. Once upon a time, back in the 1980s — so this is 30 years ago — I used to do a lot of consulting for a firm south of Boston, been around since the 1830s. It's now a division of Johnson & Johnson, makes medical instruments. Does anyone know what a rongeur is? I never knew what it was. It's a French word. A rongeur is basically a pair of pliers that an orthopedic surgeon would use to chew up bone, to break up bone. So a rongeur is just a pair of pliers, and it has a little cup in it, so you can go in there and just bite away the bone. If they're going to fuse someone's spine or something, they go in and he chips away at the bone, removes the bone he wants to remove.