[TUHS] Re: nassau smelting was Re: Current Ownership of 3B/WECo Computer IPs

Way off topic, but too nostalgic to pass up. I was involved in after-hours training courses and persuaded Bob Morris to organize the first one ever to be held off campus, "Bell System with field trips". The highlight of the series was Nassau Smelting and Refining. They proudly told us about their new environmental consciousness: aqua regia (used to reclaim gold) was now being adjusted to pH 7 before being dumped into the Kill van Kull, and stack emissions of lead had been reduced from hundreds of pounds per year to eight. The scene was almost straight out of Agricola. An enormous steel jousting pole mounted on a backhoe was used to shove scrap copper and live-cut tree trunks into a ferocious green-flaming furnace. Men in moon suits and respirators puddled slag floating on open vats of molten lead. A Dickensian crone snipped gold tips off the old relays cradled in her lap. Clothes, including shoes, exchanged at the door of the gloomy gold room, were collected periodically and thrown into the aqua regia pots to extract every last milligram. The only process that really deviated from Agricola was pyrolysis, for reclaiming modern cable cladding. But he surely would have been impressed by the mechanism for casting continuous copper bar and collecting it on a giant spool. They delighted in telling about the time the spool stopped turning while the copper feed continued, filling the hall with an enormous tangle of 1" copper stock. Doug On Mon, Sep 11, 2023 at 1:47 PM Mark Seiden <mis(a)seiden.com> wrote: