SACRAMENTO, CALIF--"It’s too low-tech for some people," admits Ray Anderson cheerfully. "But I like the idea: using low tech to make high tech." Anderson casts a slightly apologetic glance around his company’s big workshop. A crazy quilt of clutter fills it: stacked chairs, boxes, empty Pepsi cans, silvery asbestos-lined gloves, metal shelves, wooden benches and, of course, a bright-blue hydraulic press.
Using that big hydraulic press, his small corporation, Ceracon Inc., is making superconducting history. Ceracon is molding the new high-temperature super conducting materials into denser tougher, potentially machinable, shapes.
From there, says Anderson, it’s just a short step to products, a new superefficient magnet for, say, medical imaging devices.
One might assume that U.S. manufacturers would be flipping over the idea, after all, Anderson’s was one of the first practical methods of making the new ceramics usable. Not so. A few months ago Anderson wrote 40 U.S. companies and ...
