Out of Thin Air

The only U.S. industry that creates its products out of thin air is the $1 billion-a-year industrial gas business, which is becoming as expansive as the exotic gases that are making it prosper. By compressing air until it liquefies, the industry extracts various gases whose temperatures are close to absolute zero ( -- 460DEG F.). It has thus created a spectrum of uses for rare gases whose inertness, heavy atomic weights and unique electrical properties make them invaluable servants: argon for welding, krypton for long-lasting light bulbs, and xenon for high-intensity lights such as those used at airports. Even the more common gases are moving into new fields. In the next few months a big food processor will announce that it is flash-freezing fruits and vegetables with liquid nitrogen, which locks in that on-the-vine flavor. Last week McDonnell Aircraft announced that it has ordered eight special nitrogen-cooled chambers that re-create the lonely cold and vacuum of outer space.

These are only a few of the myriad new uses; man also employs the gases to fire rockets, sterilize rooms, freeze ice cream and produce soda bubbles. Food processors use liquid hydrogen to stiffen oils into shortening through "hydrogenation." Steelmakers are taking big gulps of pure oxygen in their furnaces to speed melting. In orbital flights, the astronauts burn liquid oxygen as fuel and breathe its evaporations.

Sharp Rivalry. Broader markets have only sharpened the competition among the three rival companies that dominate the industry. Union Carbide's Linde Co., founded in 1907 to exploit the air-separation discoveries of German Scientist Carl von Linde, rings up $287 million yearly and leads in sales of oxygen. Air Reduction Co. (sales: $287 million) leads in gases for welding and in research on food freezing. The youngest, smallest and scrappiest of the big three is Air Products and Chemicals (sales: $100 million), which pioneered in liquid hydrogen and grew to its present size by building big air-separation plants right on the sites of their industrial users.

The hottest competition now is in the frontier science of cryogenics--Greek for "creation of icy cold." Working with chilled liquid gases, the three companies have found that materials behave in weird and wondrous ways in the icy world of low, low temperatures. By slowing the movement of electrons and thus reducing resistance to electricity to almost nothing, the extreme cold of liquid nitrogen, for example, gives an electric magnet four times or more the usual pull and makes a light bulb shine 20 times brighter. Linde has also found that whole blood and body tissues can be preserved indefinitely when frozen with nitrogen.

Hot Prospects. To bring these laboratory tricks much closer to commercial reality, the industry has developed new methods to store and ship liquid gases, which are constantly accompanied by the danger of evaporation or explosion. Linde and Air Products both have developed liquid-nitrogen tanks that keep food trucks cold even when doors are endlessly opened and closed. Linde is using nine miles of pipeline to pump oxygen and nitrogen along the Houston Ship Channel to Humble Oil, Sheffield Steel and other users; Air Reduction has opened a 22-mile nitrogen pipeline along the Delaware River to service such customers as Du Pont, SunOlin and Shell Chemical.

This is only a prelude to the future possibilities of the gases. Within a decade, liquid hydrogen is expected to propel man to the moon and on beyond. Cryogenic magnets will make electricity much cheaper, and cryogenic wires no thicker than a man's finger will carry very strong electrical currents over great distances without resistance. More important, even the industry's conservative scientists say that they will be able to transplant gas-frozen limbs and human organs, and use injections of supercold gases to destroy diseased tissue. Linde scientists expect that xenon anesthetics, which best duplicate natural sleep, will eventually be used to put aged people into lengthy and revitalizing naps, adding years to their lives.

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