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Maybe eight WS, but they have a whole facility down at Quonset Point to get that extreme circularity you need for a good pressure hull in steel. They have an indoor building that cost $200 million down at Quonset Point so they can weld these things. And so they weren't using electroslag, they were using gas metal arc on the steel. But you could do that with electroslag, and the Soviets, Paton Institute, was the leader in electroslag technology in the whole world. Um, and Gurevich [had] quit publishing on any of the titanium, and so we — I came back, and on my titanium project we took some of our one-inch plate and we made the first electroslag weld outside of one research project in France and the Soviet Union, at least the first one I know of. We made it just the room next door basically. Uh, it was a terrible weld, no fusion, but we found, wow, titanium is easier to electroslag weld than steel, okay, so far as that goes.

So at that point the Navy classified everything and I couldn't work on it anymore. But this is an electroslag weld in titanium that was made at Oregon Graduate Center, because even though MIT doesn't do classified work on campus, Oregon Graduate Center took a contract from the Navy. And this is two-inch thick plate with an electroslag weld. These are the reinforcements from the water-cooled copper dam, so on either side. And here's, you can — I've outlined, I — this thing was painted, or I put Crystal Clear on it and it's been wearing away over the last twenty-five years. Uh, but this is an electroslag weld on two-inch thick titanium. And titanium doesn't have some of the problems that steel has with bad grain size and poor toughness.

And so you can bet that this is one of the technologies the Soviets used to weld a lot of their titanium hull, was electroslag. And I won't say any more than that. But the next thing — you couldn't weld everything in the vertical position, sometimes you got to turn it sideways. And so it turns out another thing that Gurevich had been working on in the 1960s — so we could add, I didn't talk to Gurevich because it was afterwards — was electroslag welding. So that definitely was one of the processes. Submerged arc welding, uh, who knows, but it was kind of expensive on the flux, but his book goes through for a hundred pages on how to make flux, so it's possible they were using submerged arc. But you can get almost the same qualities with gas tungsten arc.

And we did some of those first welds in this country, and here is one done on a smaller piece of titanium with gas tungsten arc. Um, and I put a bead on this side and a bead on this side. This one was done with no flux, just argon shielding, which is the way usually you run gas tungsten. And this one was done by putting a flux on the surface. You can actually still see a little bit of the flux. In fact, you can see on this one if you look at the top, you can see where we had no flux, and we had painted this little paint layer of calcium fluoride or strontium fluoride, maybe a little sodium fluoride, with the exact same welding parameters. You get this much penetration with no flux. With flux you would get three times the penetration. And so the Soviets called this semi-submerged arc in their literature, but it wasn't submerged arc like the stuff I had been working on. It was what we now call deep TIG.

TIG stands for tungsten inert gas, it's the colloquialism. You could call it, if you want, deep gas tungsten arc. And what happens is if you use a little bit of these fluoride fluxes, and you were — let's say you wanted to weld something that was an inch and a half or two inches thick in the horizontal position. If you did a joint prep that looks like this — and it turns out the Navy went out and started funding some work at EWI, that's Edison Welding Institute, or Ohio State. Again, it was somewhat classified early on but it's been declassified now. A lot of the oil companies have come in and paid for this type of research. You could make a weld with a little layer of flux inside this channel, okay. And you could use up to 1,000 amps. Ordinarily for gas tungsten arc that's not deep TIG, you might not use more than 150 or 200 amps, okay. You use a tungsten electrode, um, that's about the — this is not a tungsten electrode, but you might use something that's 3/32 of an inch in diameter for regular gas tungsten arc. For deep TIG you might use something that's a quarter inch in diameter, you might use a tungsten that looks almost like this, okay. You get 1,000 amps through it and you can weld something, could be a half an inch or 3/4 of an inch deep. You could then turn the plate over, you could weld it from this side, and then you could fill in up here at 1,500 to 2,000 amps. And you could make in four passes — you could weld one and a half or two inch thick material in a horizontal position with deep TIG, which the Soviets called semi-submerged arc.

Um, so it could be done. People have been — they've shown you can sort of do it in aluminum, but no one has a lot of applications for aluminum. And people have been trying to do it in steel for the last twenty-five years and it sort of works, but it really works well in titanium. I mean, titanium has a sweet spot for both electroslag and deep TIG. What David Taylor had been working on was this one. They hadn't worked on this at all, they hadn't worked on this at all. Um, and what the Soviets actually were using — was probably the only one they might have, Soviets might have used — was this one. So completely different welding technology.

Because this guy in the Soviet Union had a job, um, and there you kind of have employment for life, and he had become a scientist there and decided, oh, I'm going to do welding of titanium. They had applications from the military to weld heavy section titanium. He was just a scientist, a wonderful person, uh, had no political aspirations whatsoever. Um, the other interesting thing is, while we were sitting there having this conversation, the KGB agent was sitting right next to us, listening to everything and encouraging him to answer my questions. Okay, because they didn't want us — they wanted to keep this exchange going with the United States. Uh, it was a very valuable exchange. Um, and we learned all kinds of things from it, um, and they learned things from it too.

But uh, I remember, um, there was a group — there was an exchange, and some people from the US could go live in the Soviet Union. Well, who would want to do that, because the living conditions weren't all that great, so we didn't have all that many people who wanted to go live in the Soviet Union for six months. But the Soviets had a lot of people who wanted to come over here, and so there were two or three people in 1978, um, who had come over to go to Rensselaer Polytechnic, which was the big welding school in 1978. Uh, and they were working with Professor Savage and doing research there. And then in 1978 Nick Grant had a meeting here in Boston for all this electrometallurgy — he was Nick Grant's professor here. And so, uh, I got — maybe '79 — uh, I got to meet — I was still an assistant professor, but I got to meet these people. Uh, I met, uh, um, not Gurevich, because he wasn't allowed outside the Soviet Union if he wanted to go. Uh, but I got to meet Medovar and uh Paton. Well, there are five people right underneath Paton at this 5,000-person institute, and these are two of the five, okay.

Medovar was interesting because he was Jewish, and he was one of the top five. It's very unusual for a Jewish person to rise that high. And uh, Patarya was head of welding, arc welding. And I sat with Patarya and the State Department interpreter up there in the fourth floor where my office was at the time, and uh, we invited Don Sadway, who's a faculty member here, to sit in too. And we didn't tell either the State Department interpreter or Patarya that Don Sadway's family came from the Ukraine, and Don had been raised speaking Ukrainian when he was a kid. In fact when I went over to visit his house a few years later and his four-year-old son came up to me, he was speaking a combination of Ukrainian and English, because that's what he spoke at home — his son spoke at home, or his parents spoke to him and teaching him Ukrainian. So it turns out, the State Dep— Patarya would ask me a question, I would answer it, or the State Department guy would translate it back and forth. In the meantime Don's sitting there and he understands everything. Uh, and so it was sort of interesting because the State Department guy kind of didn't get all the translations right, but Don filled me in later of what Patarya had really said.

Um, in any case, um, there was a guy there who was our KGB agent host, and we all knew he was the KGB agent because his name was Marinsky. And if you asked the Soviets a question — we had like six or eight of them who were visiting MIT — if you asked this group of six or eight a question, all the — everybody except Medovar would look at Marinsky first to see if he would — you to get the nod whether he could, you could answer the question. If you ask Marinsky a question, a technical question, he couldn't answer any of — he was supposedly a scientist at Paton Institute but he couldn't answer a single technical question. Uh, and he would sort of defer or whatever. On the other hand, Medovar, who was this very powerful guy, he didn't care what Marinsky — uh, what signals Marinsky gave, he just ignored him.

And uh, um, the funnier thing about all that is, the guy who was my predecessor's — department head, but he was just a full professor at the time — was Merton Flemings. And Mert doesn't remember names very well, neither do I, but Mert used to call Kent Bowen, who is a faculty member here, he used to call Kent Bowen Ken, okay. And so Don Sadway and I decided that Mert was not Mert but Merr, okay. And so we used to joke, and when Mert wasn't around we would talk about Merr, our colleague. Well, Professor Flemings couldn't remember Marinsky to save his life, okay, so he called him Marin, okay. It's sort of — okay, it began with an M, actually with MA. The funniest thing about this was that Medovar started calling the KGB agent Marin-che, okay. And everybody, all the Soviets, everybody except Flemings — and um, everybody except Flemings knew this joke. And you'd just see Marinsky just seething every time Medovar would call him Marin-che. Uh, so, you know, they had a good sense of humor, actually. They have a very good sense of humor, the Soviets.

Uh, so anyway, that was that. I don't know, that has much of anything to do with anything. But we were followed constantly by Marinsky. Uh, he met us at the airport in Moscow, and we had a hard time getting through customs. There was some guy, some German ahead of us, and they went through his bags and they found a copy of Der Spiegel, and you would have thought that he just had the plans for a hydrogen bomb, okay. I mean, everybody converges, "Oh, this is propaganda, you know, and you can't bring this in," and everything. Finally, after two hours, we get through customs, and Marinsky meets us just beyond customs. Obviously he didn't have power over customs, but from then on out, all Marinsky had to do was flash his ID and we could go past any guards, any policeman, anybody we wanted, if he flashed his ID. Pretty good for a scientist at Paton Institute, right? So everybody knew Marinsky was the KGB agent.

So on the last night there, um — well, actually one night in Kiev we went to the opera, and they had a car pick — to the opera, and they had a car pick us up and take us, Szekely and myself, to the opera. And afterwards — I didn't realize it at the time — um, Marinsky says, "Oh, it's a nice evening, why don't we just walk back?" Well the walk back was about three miles, and I thought — I now realize the reason they didn't have any cars is because all the other officials were being picked up from the opera. They didn't all go to the opera at the same time, they might have been dropped off earlier to have dinner at some restaurant or something, but they all wanted to leave the opera at the same time. So we didn't rate a car going back, we had to walk back, which was fine.

But the next day, uh, um, Friday afternoon we were supposed to leave — or not Friday, Saturday morning we were supposed to leave the next afternoon. Um, and we had had time in Moscow, supposedly, where we could just walk down to this little market and stuff and see things. Um, but the next afternoon we actually had an hour where we could walk through Kiev, and maybe sometime I'll tell you that story. We'll take a break here in a second.

I guess the last thing I was going to say is, these people that went to RPI, the Soviets that spent six months in the United States — I had a red Chevy station wagon at the time, and since I had a vehicle that could seat eight people, I was asked to drive the Soviets. And we were going to a dinner up at the Winchester Country Club. And uh, so I was driving the car. Sadway was in the very backseat of this station wagon with a couple of the Soviets, and they still didn't know he could speak Ukrainian and understand it. Um, but they were having a conversation in English, and uh, and you know, I could hear part of the conversation. And he said — uh, Sadway says, "What do you find different about the United States?" He says, "Well, um, for here you play sports for fun," okay. Because no one played sports for fun in the Soviet Union. If you were an athlete, you were there for the Olympics and you were a professional and stuff. If you know anything about the Olympics and the cheating of the Soviet bloc on grading judges on figure skating and other things, Alpine skiing and stuff — um, that was one thing was different, that people just enjoyed athletics here, whereas over there it was sort of a profession. Um, and if you were good at it, you were sort of a ward of the state.

The other thing is, uh, these — they couldn't believe — they thought everything we were doing was some big put-on for show, and that we were trying to impress them. As they were driving through North Cambridge, and they had some nice single-family homes, okay, big single-family homes, they said, "How many families would live there?" And they said, "One." And they said, "Oh no, ten families would live in that, Soviet Union, okay. Whose car is this?" "It's my car." "No, no, no, no professor has a car." Okay. So they couldn't believe any of this because it just was different than their culture. And the thing — it wasn't our car, but some other person had to stop, "I get some cigarettes or something," and he went into a grocery store. And the Soviets went into the grocery store, and they saw all the food filling the shelves. And that was when they became convinced that this was not just a show, this was real, because they said even in the Soviet Union, even the top authorities couldn't assemble that much food in one place at one time, okay. And they said, "Oh, this must be real, that you have this much food." But anyway, there were some — it was interesting cultural exchange. Okay, why we take a seven-minute break till 8:40 or so.