[SPAM (Header Checking)] - Re: [TheForge] trade secrets - Email found in subject

[Jeffrey Polaski]

I don't remember the details any more, but a few years ago there was a
problem with someone stealing the "secret sauce" for making capacitor
electrolyte. He sold it to (or went to work for) another capacitor
manufacturer. It turns out he had only half the formula, and all the
capacitors from the new manufacturer went bad in a year or two. A lot of
those capacitors were used in computer motherboards, causing lots of
problems.  

Jeff Polaski
Webmaster
Office of Research 
Office of Graduate Studies 
University of California, Irvine
http://www.rgs.uci.edu/
949.824.6363

-----Original Message-----
From: theforge-bounces at mailman.qth.net
[mailto:theforge-bounces at mailman.qth.net] On Behalf Of David E. Smucker
Sent: Saturday, November 25, 2006 1:42 PM
To: Sponsored by ABANA
Subject: [SPAM (Header Checking)] - Re: [TheForge] trade secrets - Email
found in subject

On an industrial front trade secrets are very much alive and very much 
guarded.  Why have trade secrets vs. patents?  Well with patents you
have to 
disclose a lot of information -- in many cases enough information that
some 
one else can get around your patent -- especially as it comes to 
manufacturing process.

Let me give you an example from my old day job.  Cold rolling of
aluminum 
with water based coolants.  Aluminum and water don't do well together if
the 
water is trapped between wraps of metal in a coil.  The water causes
very 
bad stains.  Yet it is very desirable to roll with water rather than
mineral 
oil because of the high amount of heat removal with water vs. oil.
Starting back in the 1950's Alcoa learned how to do this by the use of 
special additives to the water / oil mixture and methods to remove all
of 
the coolant (mixture) as the metal leaves the roll bite.

Now I know the technical details of how to remove all of the coolant as
the 
metal leaves the roll bite but not the technical details of the
chemistry of 
the rolling coolant mixture.  I'm retired and still get a good pension
from 
Alcoa and I am not about to "sell" this information but even if I was,
you 
still would have only half of the story.  The other part of this is that
you 
have to be ready to deal with all of the pain of the process.  When it 
works, great, but if things go wrong you have tons of scrap and very
upset 
customers to deal with.  So you might get close to having the trade
secrets 
but not the depth to deal with the problems.  I am sure that things are 
similar in many other fields or companies.

Dave Smucker

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <schade at acegroup.cc>
To: "Sponsored by ABANA" <theforge at mailman.qth.net>
Sent: Saturday, November 25, 2006 2:22 PM
Subject: [TheForge] trade secrets


>I was wondering what kinds of things that we talk about here every day 
>might have been considered "trade secrets" at some time.
>
> Are there still trade secrets? Would we know if there were?
>
> Bob
>
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