The Ultimate Fueler

One day late this year, a missile will streak over Florida burning what the Air Force calls "the ultimate chemical fuel": liquid hydrogen. When burned with liquid oxygen ("lox"), liquid hydrogen delivers 40% more thrust than currently used fuels, can double the payload of a satellite-carrying rocket. Last week the Air Force took the wraps off a secret plant near West Palm Beach known prosaically as the Apix Fertilizer Co. The name is a phony to hide the fact that the plant produces liquid hydrogen.

The Florida plant was built by Air Products. Inc., a fast-growing company that has become a key supplier of missile fuels. Though small (1958 sales: $38 million) by chemical-industry standards. Air Products beat out such giants as Union Carbide and Olin Mathieson to win the Air Force contract, estimated at $20 million, to build and operate the plant, and surprised the industry by the way it licked a host of new problems.

One of the biggest was liquefying hydrogen on a commercial scale. The process requires that the hydrogen be cooled to 423DEG F. below zero and kept there so it does not vaporize into a highly explosive gas. This was a feat previously performed only in the laboratory. To turn the trick of liquefying and safely transporting the hydrogen. Air Products had to develop new types of pipes, tanks and machines. Eventually, the military expects to use solid fuels for operational missiles, for easier handling. But for all special missiles, such as space probes, liquid hydrogen and lox will probably be used, because this mixture has so much more power than any solid fuel now in sight.

Cadavers & Generators. Air Products' Minneapolis-born president. Leonard Pool, 52, was a salesman for National

Cylinder Gas Co., a manufacturer of gases, when he decided in 1940 that there was room for improvement in the industry. At the time, oxygen was made by a few companies in big plants and shipped around the country. Pool thought a better way would be to develop small oxygen generators that could be installed wherever the oxygen was being used, thus cutting freight costs. He saved and borrowed $80,000 and set up shop in a mortuary run by his brother, a medical intern who was teaching embalming on the side. "We were so poor," recalls Pool, "we needed any kind of space we could get. On one side of the building you'd find 50 cadavers, on the other, 50 oxygen generators."

One of the company's first products was a portable oxygen generator to charge cylinders for aircraft-carrier pilots. It was a difficult engineering feat, because previous generators needed a stationary surface to work properly. Pool's generators chugged away perfectly despite pitching carrier decks. Air Products performed so well on other Government contracts that when the U.S. began to turn out missiles, the firm was right in line to build lox plants at Canaveral and other bases. It now makes 90% of all lox used in U.S. missiles. Last year it earned $1,402,018; this year earnings should climb above $2,000,000, roughly $2 a share, on sales of $50 million.

Much of Air Products' earnings growth came from its postwar development of oxygen plants for the steel industry. By using oxygen instead of air in furnaces, steelmakers are able to increase their production 20% ; Jones & Laughlin's President Avery C. Adams hails the process as "the only major technological breakthrough in the steel industry since the turn of the century." Last week Air Products announced three new plants for steel companies. It will build and operate a $10 million plant for Weirton Steel, j a $3,000,000 plant for Granite City Steel, and a $7,000,000 plant for Jones & , Laughlin. Accounting for 25% of industry j sales, Air Products has helped bring the cost of oxygen down from $1 per 100 cu. ft. to 5-c- per 100 cu. ft.

Small Advantage. The company is also well on its way in commercial production of other "cold liquids." It is building a $6,000,000 facility for liquid nitrogen, liquid oxygen and liquid argon, has teamed up with Northern Natural Gas Co. to form the Helex Co., which will produce helium for missile development and atomic energy.

President Pool thinks his company has grown so fast partly because it is in an industry of giants. Says he: "Small companies have the advantage of being fast moving--by the time the big companies make up their minds that they want to do battle, the little company has already won."

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