Chapter 1

Ithaca, New York, February 1st, 4 P.M.

Ravi was in his director’s office at the Materials Research Institute when he received a call from his colleague, Dr. Marcel Giraud.

 “Ravi, come down to the conference room in the lab!” Marcel exclaimed. “I’ve just gotten the test results.” 

Could they have found the missing element? 

Ravi excitedly banged his fist so hard on his desk that he almost fractured his knuckles. Then he jumped up and headed downstairs to where Marcel and his colleagues were gathered. 

It was not a long walk. The institute was in a cavernous building that used to hum with textile weaving and garment making machinery but had ceased production due to it, like many others in the country, not being able to compete against cheaper imports from China and other low-cost countries. It looked derelict from outside, with windows covered with grime and some of the bricks peeling off from the façade. Ravi and his nonprofit institute had acquired the building from the liquidators for almost nothing. Located just a few miles from the expansive campus of Cornell University, his alma mater, it was ideal for Ravi and his small team of scientists to conduct their research and advance the state of the art in materials technology—especially the very high-tech materials used in airplane engines.

For the last ten years, they had been laser focused on inventing a new super alloy—a mixture of two or more elements existing in nature, with at least one of them being a metal. Super alloys were mostly used in airplane engines, which allowed them to pack the power equal to ten train locomotives into a box the size of a couch. Most of the super alloys started with a nickel or cobalt-based material, which provided the strength at the exceedingly high temperatures these engines normally operated at. They were then alloyed or compounded with metals and non-metals, including chromium, which provided corrosion resistance; aluminum, which provided oxidation resistance; and others such as titanium, iron, carbon, and silicon. In addition, the alloying had to be conducted at precisely controlled temperatures, heating and cooling rates, and conditions. The super alloy Ravi’s team was working on would allow planes to fly faster for longer distances, while burning less fuel and thus reducing climate-harming greenhouse gases—a scourge that Ravi had dedicated his life’s work to fighting.

Two years ago, Dr. Marcel Giraud had entered the picture. A lanky Frenchman in his mid-thirties, he was an assistant professor at the Université de Marseille and a visiting associate at the Materials Research Institute. Over the following months he was joined by Dr. Larabi Hasan from Morocco and Dr. Riccardo Sperra from Palermo, Sicily. Larabi was a serious man in his early forties and talked in a measured voice. Larabi’s light brown skin, from his Berber heritage—believed to be a cross between the Indians and the Arabs—made him uncannily look like Ravi, who also had remarkably similar skin tone from his North Indian heritage. Riccardo, a jovial, pudgy man in his late thirties, was always ready with a quip in English, which he usually got wrong. The staff at the institute loved the easy demeanor that masked the man’s tough-as-nails personality. 

All three foreign scientists were close to the end of their terms at the institute and were scheduled to return home within the next six months.

“Good afternoon,” they greeted Ravi in a chorus as he entered the conference room.

It was a small room mostly occupied by a rectangular meeting table, with a glass wall on one side overlooking the shop floor and a large digital chalkboard opposite it. Another wall held a picture of the periodic table – a visual arrangement of all of the natural elements present on the planet - while the remaining wall was covered with a list of super alloy variants that Ravi and his team had explored over the last ten years. The variants had been both major—where the chemical composition of the super alloy had been changed from the previous versions—and minor—where the alloying process had been tweaked to obtain the desired material properties. The version that had been tested over the last three weeks was called MRI 297-10, meaning that it was the 297th major variant of the material, and the 10th minor variant within it.

“So, what do you have?” Ravi asked, pointing to the piece of metal on the conference table in front of them. It was one of the 20 sample pieces they had produced in the lab and was the last one available for display, the other 19 having been used for the myriad of tests the team was conducting. For the scientists assembled there, that piece of nondescript metal was a work of art, with its white-yellow hue that seemed to glow under the overhead conference room lights. 

“This latest version appears to just about meet all our requirements, including high temperature strength, distortion, creep, and fatigue,” Marcel said.

“What do you mean, ‘just about’?” Ravi asked with anticipation and concern in his voice.

“We might be a little off on the fracture toughness and ductility,” Larabi explained. 

Ravi imperceptibly shook his head with disappointment. These were the two last key properties his team had been struggling to achieve over the last six months. The material in airplane engines needed to be tough enough to withstand the ingestion of many foreign objects, including birds, ice, pebbles, and dust particles, at an exceedingly high force. At the same time, it needed to be able to maintain its exceptional strength at the extremely high internal temperatures of airplane engines. Any shortfall in these properties meant that the material was still not ready for prime time and they had to continue their arduous and painfully long search for either the missing element or a further tweak of the alloying process.

“I think the cooling rate needs to be adjusted,” Riccardo spoke up, trying to inject a sense of optimism. They could all see Ravi was disappointed at the news, even if he did not outwardly show his emotions. “If you like, I can have a new variant available for testing within the next two days. And I don’t think it would violate any of the regulatory constraints since I would still not have knowledge of the entire process.”

 To meet stringent government and business constraints, the chemical composition and the alloying process were tightly controlled and could be disclosed only to U.S. citizens on a need-to-know basis. Even the regular members of Ravi’s team had limited access either to the chemical composition or the process, but not both. Visiting foreign researchers could test the new material and learn about what it could do, but not how. 

“I’m sorry, Riccardo,” Ravi replied. “You may well be right, but I can’t afford to take any risks in this area.”

Ravi could see the disappointment on Riccardo’s face, as well as on the faces of Marcel and Larabi. He felt bad for them. They had all become good friends and he could understand their frustration at not being able to fully participate in the invention of this groundbreaking material. He would have felt the same, but his hands were tied.

“In any case,” Ravi continued, “I’m not certain we have the right chemistry. We may have to tweak it a little and make sure we have the right element.” 

Ravi continued to think about it long after his colleagues had left for the day. He was certain that the missing element belonged to the Lanthanide group of metals, also known as rare-earth metals—not because they were rare, but because it was difficult to separate them from the mixture of metal ores dug out from the earth. This group of metals had the highest melting points and retained their strength at high temperatures. Ravi’s team had already tried Gadolinium and Thulium, which were close but not the ones. Could it be Erbium or Holmium? he wondered, scratching his head. These were the two elements next to the ones they had already experimented with.  Feeling somewhat dejected and defeated at still not finding the right chemistry, he began to wonder if he would ever get there and if all their effort over the last ten years might have been in vain.

Just then a moth showed up from seemingly out of nowhere and landed, of all the places, on the rare-earth group of metals where the potential elements were located in the periodic table – specifically, on one of the two elements he was considering.

 “That’s it! It has to be the one,” he screamed as loud as he could, looking up towards the ceiling and whispering under his breath, “Thank you.”  

Tests still needed to be done for absolute confirmation, but Ravi was sure in his heart that this element was the one. Success was so close that he could almost taste it. 

Ravi had waited for this moment for a long time. The son of middle-class, small textile business owners in Varanasi, India, he had been in the top one percent of his graduating class at the Indian Institute of Technology. After a yearlong internship at Tata Steels, one of the leading steels and aluminum manufacturing industries in the country, and another as a design engineer, he found himself not fully challenged and fulfilled. He had grown restless and wanted more. He found himself awake at nights thinking, “This cannot be it. I know I can do more. I want to be at the leading edge of my profession. I want to be where the action is. I want to be where new inventions and discoveries are being made. And it is not here in India.” He knew there was only one place on the planet that offered him the opportunities he was looking for, and that was the United States. 

Over the next six months, he applied to all the major universities in the U.S. and was accepted at most of them. He decided on Cornell. It offered him a teaching assistantship, had a strong materials engineering program, and, more importantly, was the institution where Carl Sagan – one of Ravi’s favorite scientists – resided and taught. 

When Ravi left India, he could take only $300 due to the strict foreign exchange control by the government. He traveled for a few weeks in Europe and spent most of that money before he arrived in Ithaca, New York, the home of Cornell University. After paying the YMCA for a place to stay for the night, he had $5 in his pocket. It seemed like a worn-out cliché, but he did come to this country with just $5 in his pocket. 

 What followed was a whirlwind of professional and personal achievements, but never in his wildest dreams could Ravi have imagined that at 47, almost 25 years after he had come to the United States, he was on the brink of making a discovery that could change the world and lift him, his family, and his beloved institute far from those struggling student days at Cornell.

And there was no one else he wanted to share this moment with more than his co-inventor and his life partner—and the only other person who knew everything about the super alloy—Dr. Caitlyn Mariko.

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