1980s all-ceramic engine development initiative

Brief reference — "in the mid-80s the ceramists were touting that ceramics were going to take over the world." Used as a foil for the steel-as-future argument.

I remember 20, 25 years ago I was going around giving talks, because in the mid-80s the ceramists were touting that ceramics were going to take over the world, that ceramics had much better properties. The problem is, the ceramists had never studied mechanical properties very much, because the mechanical properties of ceramics are pretty lousy. We'll talk about this more.

Tom's mid-1980s ONR-Tokyo experience at Shinjuku ceramics conferences with millions attending; his standing taunt that "the only structural materials made out of ceramics are Portland cement and toilet bowls"; ceramic kitchen knives that stay sharp but chip catastrophically.

The history of this paper is that around 1990, I was sick of listening to people talk about fine ceramics and how they were going to make ceramic engines. I worked for the Office of Naval Research in Tokyo, Japan in the mid-80s, and they would have a ceramics conference at Shinjuku station and two million Japanese would come to this display of fine ceramics. Only like four square blocks of people.

Tom's 1986 NIST talk after returning from Japan. Punchline: the only high-volume structural ceramics are portland cement and toilet bowls — "and I throw in the kitchen sink, but you have to line it with gray cast iron." Griffith fracture-mechanics argument: critical flaw size too small to inspect.

Did I tell you about myself and the kitchen sink at the National Institute of Standards and Technology? When I got back from Japan, like 1986, I was an up-and-coming material scientist at MIT. I hadn't got full professor yet, but I was getting to be known. I gave a talk on what I'd learned in Japan, from spending a year there studying what was going on in material sciences in Japan. Great big auditorium at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland. I was telling them about the ceramics fever in Japan and how they had two million people come to a scientific show about fine ceramics, how they were going to take over engines and everything else. This is probably the premier material science laboratory for the U.S. government — in fact I used to be on their advisory committee, and I called NIST the crown jewel in the federal laboratories. Seven hundred federal laboratories, but they've had several Nobel Prize winners at NIST — just an outstanding laboratory.