Metal from the Sea

	The first magnesium ingot poured at Dow Texas Operations, Jan. 21, 1941 at 1:45 P.M.

As the Battle of Britain raged in the English skies, British experts were amazed at the large number of bombs the German planes could carry. The wreckage of a shot down enemy bomber provided the answer to how the feat was possible.

Magnesium.

The Germans were using magnesium alloys as a major structural material, making their planes lighter and stronger. The British were also using the metal in their planes, but in far less amounts. In 1940, they went to The Dow Chemical Company for more of the badly-needed material.

Dow, then the chief magnesium supplier in the United States, agreed to produce 8.4 million pounds for the British. Six million pounds were to come from Dow's new plant in Freeport, Texas, which was going mine the ocean for the metal - something man had never done before.

Dow's magnesium-from-seawater research was completed in 1938, but it would be almost three years before the company would accomplish the task on a large scale.

On Jan. 21, 1941 at 1:45 PM, Dow operator Clarence Hock poured the first ingot of magnesium taken from seawater. The event was an amazing technological achievement and also cemented Dow as one of the biggest suppliers for the Allies in World War II.

"There is an epic quality involved in the peopling of a flat, narrow tongue of wasteland with strange shapes of structures and having them combine to take a ladle of gleaming metal out of a curling, white-capped ocean wave," said Dow President Willard Dow. "Not even the old alchemists, in their wildest fancies, ever got that far."