From Jack Chapman
Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire
Jeff Hecht’s piece on protecting outdoor art details another reinvention of
the wheel, another instance of “nothing new under the Sun”
(This Week, 24 January, p 6).
In the mid-1930s, I witnessed a demonstration of the British
Oxygen Company’s “metal spraying process” and came away with several samples
sprayed with different metals.
The process differed from the Los Alamos process only in using an
oxyacetylene burner instead of an electric arc. A continuous wire of the desired
metal was fed through the centre of the—presumably reducing—flame. I
cannot remember whether there was an outer cone of inert gas to propel the
molten drops.
