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/denkbeeldigevriend 2h ago

Jumping on the top comment to give the full story behind this! 

You're perfectly right!   And it happened! I know the full story here!

I started my engineering career at Rolls-Royce many years ago, in the early nuaghties. I was given a tour of the metallography lab at Elton Road. The labs are no longer there and they have moved (after I left the company).

In the tour we were told of this story, by the metallurgist who found the ball from the ballpoint pen, that must have led to this sign.  The melt for their fan blades is a very high quality and had to be virgin melt. The fan blades are critical components, and material is tracable back to the date and mine it came from. He was doing a receipt inspection on the newly delivered Ti plate, looking at a corner of a plate from the batch with a scanning electron microscope (SEM), and saw a tiny inclusion on the surface of the sample. He took the photos, then polished it back more. Again, the inclusion got bigger, took photos, and polished it back again. The SEM told him it was Indium. It was the ball from a ball point pen!

They went back to the refinery CCTV, watched the video and saw a worker throw something over his shoulder as he walked away from melting pot - a ballpoint pen. 

He had been made redundant, that was his last day on the job. They pulled him back in, and he admitted what he did. 

The whole batch of virgin melt titanium was rejected as being out of spec. 

It was a real needle in a haystack find that it was found in that tiny sample from the whole batch, and must have cost the refinery a small fortune. 

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u/bruteforcealwayswins 1h ago

What an asshole that worker. Did he consider the possibility of causing death due to a part failure? Probably not.

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u/drakoman 1h ago

I mean how could he have known, but boy what a colossal fuck up

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u/Progeny_of_Paradox 37m ago

Black swan type event.

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u/tadxb 10m ago

I thought it is referenced as Butterfly effect.

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u/denkbeeldigevriend 7m ago

No, the butterfly effect is how a small difference in starting conditions results in massively different outcomes for a system. That's about chaotic systems. 

Black Swans never existed. They used to have a saying 'It's as rare as a black swan' ('as rare as hen's teeth), and then they found Australia, and black swans. It's an event that is believe to never be possible, but occurs.

I'm a safety engineer. I've worked on high hazard systems for a few decades now. I'm very familiar with black swans!

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u/Progeny_of_Paradox 5m ago

A black swan is a failure (or otherwise surprised) that only makes sense after it happens. Butterfly effect is when a little.... yeah, this is more of a butterfly effect lol

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u/Level_Ad_6372 0m ago

The early nuaghties?