Fredric Baur, the man who invented the tubular can that packages Pringles potato chips, died May 4, 2008, at the age of 89. Yesterday it was announced that he has had some of his ashes put into a Pringles can which was put into his coffin. Baur was an organic chemist and food storage technician who specialized in research and development and quality control for Cincinnati-based Procter & Gamble Co. A patent for the can was granted in 1970, according to P&G archivist Ed Rider. Pringles have always been my favorite potato chips. I’ve always felt their flavoring was superior…
Author: Noah Graff
The 100 mpg Gas Guzzler Jonathan Goodwin dropped out of seventh grade to help pay the bills and follow his passion for cars and engines. Today the automotive world bows to his genius and wonders if this car nut might actually win the 10 million dollar X PRIZE for producing a low emission, competitively priced, 100 mile per gallon car. His partner in this venture is Neil Young, rock legend, who contributed his 1960, Lincoln Continental “boat” as Goodwin’s test car. Goodwin works out of a garage where he specializes in converting Hummers into fuel sipping diesels while boosting their…
Noah and I visited Vienna, Austria, recently on a business trip to central Europe. Our first order of business was to find the original Julius Meinl coffee shop, which is my favorite in Chicago. After several missteps, we found Meinl at about 6:00 in the evening on Sunday. The only part of the store which was serving customers was the outdoor seating area. The blond fraulein who came to take our order spoke no English. She was quite pretty but she carried a near scowl on her face. I tried to order a latte, but she only understood cappuccino, so…
Remember the last scene of Back to the Future when Doc Brown returns in his flying DeLorian to take Marty to the year 2015? As a 5 year old kid in 1985 I still remember being fascinated, not only because the car was flying, but because the new DeLorian was powered by garbage instead of plutonium. At the time I didn’t even know what plutonium was. But garbage fuel – now that was a cool concept.In 2008, people are finally starting to work on garbage-powered aviation. The Solena Group, a Washington DC company that builds and operates renewable energy power…
An old friend of mine at Columbia University business school recently returned from Dubai where he had traveled with his class for spring break. He told me that there were tons of chic restaurants and bars, but that the place had “no real culture.” Everyone on the street was from a different country and speaking English, every type of food was available much like one would find in any major city, and the nightlife scene reminded him of South Beach, Florida. The place exists for foreigners – business people and rich vacationers (primarily from Europe). My friend said that the…
Today, April 21, in 1878, the fire station pole was invented. Prior to the existence of fire station poles, firemen often used sliding shoots like those in playgrounds to quickly get down to the ground floor, as opposed to taking a slower staircase. Like so many inventions it was inspired by an accident. At Engine Company 21, a station of all black firemen in Chicago, fireman George Reid was in the hayloft on the station’s third floor (back then hay was needed for the horses which pulled the fire “engines”). A long binding pole used to secure the hay to…
In 1962, the French government created CTDEC, a research and training center primarily devoted to screw machining, in France’s Haute-Savoie region, located right across the border from Geneva, Switzerland. Comprised of 630 member companies, CTDEC has an annual budget of 6.3 million euros, and contains 6,600 square meters of laboratories and workshops. One of the most interesting resources at the CTDEC is its advanced diagnostic center used to identify part defects. It contains an extremely powerful microscope that can magnify objects tens of thousands of times. It has the strength to see inside an ant’s eye and can surpass that…
The first week of April, Noah Graff of TMW attended a press junket put on by the Arve-Industries Competitiveness Pole in the Haute-Savoie of France, a historic and current hotbed of machining close to Geneva Switzerland. The first day the journalists had a tour of the Musee de l’Horlogerie et du De`colletage, or, Museum of Clocks and Screw-Machining.
Jeff and Brad Ohlemacher, president and vice president of Elyria Manufacturing, talk about utilizing Verne Harnish’s Rockefeller habit of “the huddle” to unify their employees.
Today’s Machining World did an interview in the April issue with David Plitt, the foreman of the U of C machine shop. This video is an excerpt of the interview. He discusses several of the projects that the machine shop has assisted with, including a balloon designed to collect cosmic rays.