Plater

Professor Colin Garfield Fink of Columbia, who invented the drawn tungsten filament for electric light bulbs and developed the first commercial process of plating automobile hardware with chromium, last week announced that he was successfully electroplating objects with tungsten.

Tungsten is one of the hardest metals. Its melting point is high, 2,974DEG C. It is more lustrous than silver, nickel or chromium. Most important commercially is its resistance to corrosives. Only nitric acid and hot hydroxide solutions affect tungsten. Factories dealing with chemicals need just such a resistant to coat their pipes and pots.

Electroplating is the only practical way of putting on tungsten coats. But the electroplater needs a stable solution of a tungsten salt in water. Most tungsten compounds decompose in water or else are altogether insoluble. Professor Fink's accomplishment was to prevent the tungsten atom of his sodium tungstate molecule from going into another tungsten compound. The tungsten atom, thus kept free from changing relations, could be driven by an electric current and deposited on pieces of brass, copper, zinc, iron or carbon.

Because Professor Fink is able to do such things by electrolysis he has earned high academic position (head of Columbia's department of electrochemistry), and notable prestige among antiquarians. By reducing the oxides which corrode antique metal objects, he restores them to approximately their original form.

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