`Quincy Shipyard liquid natural gas tanker construction (mid-1970s)`

Quincy as the construction site for the LNG tankers whose steel Tom developed. Shipyard "now closed, turning into a parking lot for imported cars." Referenced again in §8 as the origin of the tail-shaft case.

Steel has an Achilles heel — many steels, as they get colder, go through what we call ductile-brittle transition and become brittle at low temperatures. So I had to develop a steel that could be welded and maintained good toughness at minus 60 degrees. They were building these ships down at Quincy shipyard, right down here in southern Massachusetts. At the time it had just been sold by Bethlehem Steel and was owned by General Dynamics. It's now closed, and they're turning it into a parking lot for imported cars and stuff. The Coast Guard said you have to meet twenty foot-pounds. It turns out the average toughness of the steel after they had heat treated it the first time was just like 20.2 foot-pounds. Every now and then they would have to do a second normalization heat treatment to get a finer grain size to give you toughness, and sometimes they would do a third. They would scrap the plate if they couldn't get a toughness above twenty foot-pounds after three tries.