LNG tanker steel development for cryogenic service

Tom's own work at the steel company developing minus-60°F-toughness steel for the cylindrical skirts that hold the aluminum spheres on LNG tankers built at Quincy shipyard (Bethlehem Steel → General Dynamics). Sets up the Sparrows Point runoff-plate fraud (§2.p6).

Now the US Navy does it for nuclear submarines, but nuclear submarines are sort of a different matter. It's a 22 billion dollar vessel, and you tend not to like to lose them. I try to keep track of them, find out where they last docked and things like that. It's not like losing your keys, but almost. People keep on wanting higher and higher toughnesses. Is that really necessary? Well, there are some reasons why it might be. For example, when I worked for the steel company, they were building LNG tankers — these great big steel ships that have great big aluminum spheres, five of them, like five stories tall or five stories wide, these big aluminum spheres. In order to hold that sphere you have to have a cylinder that you put the sphere on, and that was made out of steel, and that had to have toughness at minus 60 degrees Fahrenheit.

1975. Tom developed a special steel for an LNG carrier and traveled to Bethlehem's Sparrows Point BOP shop to observe the heat. Highest-paid hourly employee (~$100,000/year, responsible for $100,000/hour of product) threw Tom out of the pulpit on discovering he had an MIT doctorate — incident triggered by Tom sitting in the operator's chair and asking whether he'd shoot for high or low end of the chemistry range. The heat came in off-chemistry.

And the guy doing it has, if he's lucky, a high school diploma. In 1975 I got thrown out of the BOP shop at the Sparrows Point steel plant, right next to the shipyard, when the guy found out I was from MIT and had a doctoral degree. He threw me out of the pulpit. They were casting a special heat of steel for an LNG carrier, and I had developed the steel and gone down there. When he found out that I actually had a degree that he didn't have, he threw me out of the pulpit. I couldn't be there while he melted the steel. And the steel came in off-chemistry. He was one of the highest-paid employees at Bethlehem Steel in the mid '70s. He was making probably $100,000 a year as an hourly employee, but he was responsible for $100,000 an hour worth of product, and getting it right. I still wonder if he got it wrong just to spite me. I hadn't said anything. I'll tell you what I did. There was no one there, it was a slow time after the oil embargo. We came in, there was one chair in the pulpit and there were three of us, and I went and sat in the chair. When he came back in I stood right up immediately and said hello to him. But he was very upset that I had been sitting in his chair.