FRIDAY, MAY 21, 1948
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN, LAWRENCE, KANSAS
PAGE THREE
Mud Pies Baked At KU Help Clay Industries In Kansas
Think of making mud pies and getting paid for it! It may sound unbelievable, but it is being done every day in the state Geological Survey clay laboratory on the first floor of Lindley hall. You can look in almost any time and see people mixing "mud," someone else feeding the mixture into a machine that produces "mud bars," another stamping and weighing the bars, while still another may be putting the clay forms into an electric furnace for firing The process continues by boiling
This clay laboratory is the only one in the state where mud is scientifically studied and tested for commercial uses. Many of the bricks and pottery plants in Kansas were established on the basis of information furnished by this laboratory. These industries also depend upon it to find new uses for clay, new types of clay, and for locating new clay deposits.
Norman Plummer, ceramist in charge of the laboratory, and W. B. Hladik, assistant ceramist, do most of the collecting. When they go on field trips, they return loaded down with clay samples. The samples are ground in a crushing machine until the clay gets a fine, even texture. About 30 pounds of each sample is mixed with water and let set for eight or ten hours. Then the mixture is fed to a de-airing extrusion machine, which presses and cuts the clay into small test bars. One of the ceramists then stamps a sample and serial number on each bar.
Mrs. Carrie Thurber, Mrs. Ethel Owens, and W. P. Ames, laboratory technicians, take the bars, weigh them, and determine their volumes by immersion in kerosene. If they were put in water at this stage they would dissolve. The bricks are then put into an electric dryer. After the bricks are removed from the dryer, they are again weighed, measured, and the volumes determined.
They are now ready for firing and are put in an electric furnace at a low temperature from eight to 12 hours. When taken out of the furnace they are stamped with temperature numbers, weighed, measured, and placed into water to determine their volumes.
University Helps Foreign Students
University foreign students are as well taken care of as foreign students at any other university or college, James K. Hitt, registrar, said Monday.
Mr. Hitt returned recently from a conference on International Student Exchange held at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He represented the University and the committee on foreign students at the conference.
The registrar said that after attending the meetings and talking with representatives from other colleges, he has decided that the University takes better than average care of foreign students.
Although the boomerang is generally associated with Australia, it did not originate there but in Egypt. Picture drawings of Egyptians hunting ducks with a boomerang have been discovered in ancient tombs.
The process continues by boiling the bars to see how much more water they will absorb. Again they are weighed and their volumes determined under water. If the water absorption is less than 10 per cent, the bricks are fired to a temperature about 100 degrees higher. The cycle is repeated until the water absorption is reduced to as near one per cent as possible.
"It itakes all of this and more to find out what we need to know about the commercial possibilities of clays," Mr. Plummer said. "Color and temperature are guides to testing for specific uses.
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