Edward Goodrich Acheson

• Born: May 9, 1856
• Birthplace: Washington, Pennsylvania
• Died: July 6, 1931
• Place of death: New York, New York

American chemist

Acheson’s research led to the discovery of carborundum, an important abrasive second only to the diamond in hardness. He also produced graphite in a very pure form, which resulted from heating carborundum to a high temperature.

Primary field: Chemistry

Primary inventions: Carborundum; graphite-making process

Early Life

Born and raised in southwestern Pennsylvania, Edward Goodrich Acheson was educated at home by his parents, William and Sarah Acheson. He briefly attended Bellefonte Academy in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, but was largely self-taught. He excelled in mathematics and mechanics. In 1872, at the age of sixteen, he filed a patent caveat for a force auger for use in coal mining.

In the following year, his father died, and Acheson was forced to work full-time in order to provide for his mother and sisters. He worked at various railroad jobs and surveyed tank capacities in the oil fields. Briefly, he even attempted mining iron ore in a partnership with his brother, William. Acheson continued to study and invent in the evenings, focusing mainly on electricity, and hoped to work for an employer manufacturing electrical equipment. He applied to Edward Weston, a manufacturer of electroplating dynamos, but was turned down. Working on his own, Acheson created an electric pile. He took the battery to Thomas Alva Edison, who saw promise in the young inventor and hired him on September 12, 1880, to work in his workshop in Menlo Park, New Jersey.

Life’s Work

Working under John Kruesi, Acheson experimented with developing a conducting carbon for Edison’s electric light bulb, and he was successful enough to be credited with contributing to Edison’s invention. More important, Edison appreciated Acheson’s inventiveness. About a year and a half after he started working for Edison, Acheson was sent to Europe as assistant chief engineer. During the next two and a half years, he installed electric generating plants and lamp factories in England, France, Italy, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Among the most notable public buildings in which he established successful electric lighting systems were the Hôtel de Ville in Antwerp, the Musée du Nord in Brussels, the Restaurant Krasnapolsky in Amsterdam, and the La Scala Theater in Milan.

In 1884, Acheson returned to the United States, stopped working for Edison, and became a competitor as the superintendent of a plant manufacturing electric lamps. He married Margaret Maher in the same year and started a family that eventually included four daughters and five sons.

Acheson’s dream was to create artificial diamonds. His experiments after 1884 were directed to that end, but the road to that goal was long and arduous. Along the way, he invented a number of other highly useful materials. He earned the first of his seventy patents in 1886 with his invention of a “conductor of electricity,” which he sold to George Westinghouse. Subsequently, the Standard Underground Cable Company purchased the patent and developed it further in its electrical transmission business. Acheson continued his research into high-temperature electric furnaces, a necessary first step in the development of the abrasives for which he would become famous.

In 1891, he obtained the use of a powerful electric generating power plant in Port Huron, New York (at Edison’s suggestion), where he worked to impregnate clay with carbon in an attempt to create artificial diamonds. The resulting mass contained some small, shiny specks, which turned out to be silicon carbide, which he called “carborundum”—a name based on his mistaken belief that he had combined carbon with alumina. On February 28, 1893, he patented a method for making silicon carbide. The silicon carbide he created was the hardest synthetic abrasive in the world, rivaling the diamond in hardness.

In 1894, Acheson started the Carborundum Company in Monongahela City, Pennsylvania, to produce a variety of grinding and abrasive tools and materials, including grinding wheels, knife sharpeners, whetstones, and abrasive powders. This plant quickly became too small to keep up with demand, so Acheson established a second, larger plant at Niagara Falls, New York, in 1895, when his factory became the second company to establish a long-term business arrangement with the Niagara Falls Power Company.

By 1896, Acheson had discovered that, if he heated carborundum to about 7,500 Fahrenheit (about 4,150 Celsius), the silicon would vaporize, leaving behind a very pure graphite (carbon). Later that year, he patented this process. Graphite was especially valuable at this time as an abrasive and, counterintuitively, as a lubricant. It was also used in the loop filaments in the incandescent lamps of the era.

In 1899, the Acheson Graphite Company was formed to manufacture the graphite, which was increasingly in demand for various uses. Acheson now was able to produce the graphite from calcine carbon and anthracite coal. This company merged with the National Carbon Company in 1928 and ultimately became Union Carbide.

Acheson also expanded the use of graphite as a lubricant. He suspended it in a variety of liquids such as oil and water, producing the commercial colloidal graphite products Oildag and Aquadag, which were manufactured by the Acheson Colloids Company (later Acheson Industries). Altogether, Acheson successfully established at least five major industrial corporations, including the International Acheson Graphite Company (1908) and the British Acheson Oildag Company (1911), in addition to those mentioned above.

Acheson was not a particularly effective manager. Many of his companies had to be reorganized or removed from his direct control by concerned investors, but this fact should not obscure the significance of his inventions. His accomplishments have been recognized by a number of honorary degrees and awards from a wide variety of chemical, industrial, technical, and manufacturing organizations. In 1997, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Impact

In 1926, the U.S. Patent Office rated Acheson’s discovery of carborundum (silicon carbide) as one of the twenty-two most important patented inventions responsible for creating the industrial age. Carborundum has played a critical role in the manufacture of precision-ground interchangeable metal components. Without carborundum, mass production of these specialized parts would be impossible. Carborundum has also been used in the production of almost pure graphite.

Graphite has its own role to play as an abrasive and as a lubricant, but it has even played a significant role in the production of nuclear energy. Graphite is a valuable neutron moderator in nuclear reactors. Without a significant supply of graphite, the U.S.-British development of the atomic bomb in World War II might not have been possible, since the only known alternative to graphite was “heavy water” (an isotopic form of water), of which Germany possessed most of the world’s supply.

Acheson was an active inventor, establishing five major industrial corporations that used electrothermal techniques. He patented seventy different abrasives, oxide reductions, refractories, and graphite products.

Bibliography

Acheson, Edward Goodrich. A Pathfinder: Discovery, Invention, and Industry. New York: The Press Scrap Book, 1910. This autobiographic account is still available and provides Acheson’s view of his wide-ranging development of several inventions.

Agassi, Joseph. Science and Its History. Boston: Springer, 2008. Provides a general history of science and technology, with insights into the role of inventions.

Cohen, H. Floris. The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. A history of modern science and technology, including inventions.

Evans, Harold. They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine—Two Centuries of Innovators. New York: Little, Brown, 2004. Provides a general history of innovations that includes useful material on many products dependent on carborundum and graphite.

Grissom, Fred, and David Pressman. The Inventor’s Notebook. 5th ed. Berkeley, Calif.: Nolo Press, 2008. Offers a practical discussion of inventing, with some interesting insights into the process.

Langone, John. How Things Work: Everyday Technology Explained. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 2004. Provides clear explanations of how many major inventions work, including products made possible because of the discovery of carborundum and graphite.

Platt, Richard. Eureka! Great Inventions and How They Happened. Boston: Kingfisher, 2003. Examines the circumstances in which some of the world’s best-known inventions were conceived and the genius of their inventors.

Schwartz, Evan I. Juice: The Creative Fuel That Drives World-Class Inventors. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2004. A theoretical look at the process of inventing that includes examples relevant to Acheson’s work.

Smil, Vaclav. Creating the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations of 1867-1914 and Their Lasting Impact. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Examines the period in which key inventions of the modern world were developed. Discusses Acheson.