Structural ceramics for automotive and turbine engines

First of Tom's "dozen tremendous revolutions" — billions in research, ended up making kitchen knives.

Now I've been through about a dozen of these tremendous revolutions. One of the first was structural ceramics, in the early 1980s. Ceramics had excellent high-temperature strength, they were supposedly corrosion resistant — they're not, but they were supposedly. Certainly they're corrosion resistant to a lot of things that metals corrode in, but ceramics will corrode in other things. The world was spending billions of dollars in research for what they called fine ceramics.