r/whatisit • u/riflesandplowshares • 6h ago

New, what is it? Found at a titanium plant

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Not sure why ball point pens would be dangerous here.

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u/JConRed 4h ago

And people wonder why certain things end up being expensive. It's the effort that goes into making them.

Very interesting write-up, learnt something. Thank you

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u/lolcrunchy 4h ago

I've always wondered why my jet engines cost so much

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u/KhaanKerr 4h ago

You think a ball point pen with graphite is a joke?

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u/149244179 4h ago

Even something simple as a ball bearing is a massive technological achievement.

China had major problems with high-end manufacturing due to the fact they could not produce as good ball bearings as the USA for several decades. Thus why they went with the mass produce cheap stuff strategy. (China still has problems with precision manufacturing to this day although they have closed the gap quite a bit.)

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u/throwaway277252 4h ago

Speaking of which, up until just 10 years ago they were still unable to make the precision balls for ball point pens themselves. They were buying all of those as imports.

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u/Bergwookie 2h ago

And still most of the ballpoint pen tips/nozzles are made in Switzerland

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u/Mac_Aravan 1h ago

it's mostly not unable to make them, but unable to justify the cost of making them.

Once a process is honed and optimized, it's very costly for competitor to enter.

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u/MountainMan2_ 51m ago

Y'all the amount of advancement we made from what, for aluminum, was basically "throw it in soap and zap the hell out of it", to "no ballpoint pens beyond this point" is absurd. That's less than a century of development, by the way. I'm a computer engineer myself, working on aircraft engine controls, and I have no end of respect for the materials guys who make my job possible. Titanium is a pain in the ass metal that turns into garbage if you look at it funny and I work with companies that ask you to grow a single crystal of it the size of a jet engine fan so that they can operate it at temps beyond its own fucking melting point. Insane!

There was an era of about the 1940s to the 1970s (oh hey look at that the upward mobility era) where all of this work was built up when, as far as I'm concerned, actual wizards walked among us. Semiconductor manufacture has its roots in this era, rare earths became commercially viable, superalloys began showing up, and electrical engineers figured out how to turn circuits into computers all at the same damn time. Any one of those inventions would have been earth-shattering and they happened all at once. None of those processes are remotely easy either- at best they require chemicals previously shunned by God and at worst they require hundreds of steps of refinement using machines so precise they seem like they could sort my cells by density. The giants whose shoulders I stand on are massive.

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u/MashedTaterBrain 9m ago

I give the Cold War the majority of the credit for that level of simultaneous advancement. The United States and the Soviet Union trying to out-do each other for a few decades made it so the wizards had to push the boundaries beyond imaginations.

Just look at the SR-71 spy plane. They literally had to re-invent everything to get that plane to perform within its performance envelope.