Oral-History:Frank E. Goodwin
About Frank E. Goodwin
Since his retirement from International Zinc Association in June 2020, Dr. Frank Goodwin has been active as an independent consultant on issues related to zinc production, downstream processing, and use. Before this, he served as Director of Technology and Market Development at International Zinc Association for 16 years.
Dr Goodwin’s initial exposure to the steel industry was a summer labor gang job in the Blast Furnace Division at the Bethlehem, PA plant of Bethlehem Steel Corporation in 1972. After many days working next to sintering plant machinery, he decided that his next visit to a steel mill would be with a college degree in hand. After completing his formal education, Dr. Goodwin joined Chambersburg Engineering Co., Chambersburg, PA, as Industrial Engineer/Metallurgist, working on process improvements for their gray iron foundry and large machine shop. He then moved to Chromalloy’s Research & Technology Division in Orangeburg, NY as Assistant Director, Product and Process Development, involved in developing repairs for heavy frame gas turbines and their accessories. From there, he moved to International Lead Zinc Research Organization. Inc. in New York City with an initial position as Manager, Metallurgy and Program Development. He progressed through a series of increasing responsibilities, becoming Vice President of Materials Sciences in 1987 and Executive Vice President at the time of the merger between ILZRO and International Zinc Association in 2004, when he assumed responsibility for all of IZA’s global programs related to product technology and market development. He has served as a Visiting Adjunct Professor at Pohang University of Science and Technology and West Virginia University.
Dr. Goodwin’s first education in metallurgy was at Bethlehem (PA) Area Vocational-Technical School, where he took a three-year program aimed at producing metallurgical technologists out of high school. This excellent program inspired him to continue in this field, he then earned a B.S. degree (with distinction) in Materials Science and Engineering from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. With his appetite for a professional education not yet satisfied, he was accepted into the solidification processing laboratory of Prof. Merton C. Flemings at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA, where he earned his S.M. and Sc.D. degrees in Materials Engineering. The findings of his doctoral thesis, “Strengthening by Fractional Melting,” were awarded U.S. Patent 4,295,876, issued on October 20, 1981.
He is the author of several U.S. and foreign patents and over 400 technical publications and contributions to books. His service to the steel industry includes co-chairmanship of the global Galvatech conference series and founding chairman of the AIST Galvanizing Technology Committee, where he continues to play an active role. He is listed in Who’s Who in Science and Engineering and similar directories. His awards include the Nyselius and Doehler Awards of the North American Die Casting Association, the Nevison Award from the Galvanizers Association (USA), the EGGA Pin from the European General Galvanizers Association, Life Membership in Wire Association International and the American Galvanizers Association Hall of Fame.
Further Reading
Access additional oral histories from members and award recipients of the AIME Member Societies here: AIME Oral Histories
About the Interview
Frank E. Goodwin: An Interview conducted by Dan Baker in 2023 in Detroit, Michigan.
Copyright Statement
All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical, and Petroleum Engineers and Frank E. Goodwin, dated May 10th, 2023. The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical, and Petroleum Engineers. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical, and Petroleum Engineers.
Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical, and Petroleum Engineers, 2603 Camino Ramon, Suite 200, San Ramon, CA 94583, and should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user.
It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:
Frank E. Goodwin, “Frank Goodwin’s Life of Innovation and Outreach – Bringing the World of Industry Together,” an oral history conducted by Dan Baker in 2023. AIME Oral History Program Series. American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical, and Petroleum Engineers, San Ramon, CA, 2024
Interview Video
Interview
INTERVIEWEE: Frank E. Goodwin
INTERVIEWER: Dan Baker
DATE: 2023
PLACE: Detroit, Michigan
00:00:08 INTRODUCTION
Baker:
Good afternoon. Today is Wednesday, May 10th, 2023, and I'm here with Frank Goodwin, who served as the Director of Technology and Market Development at the International Zinc Association until his retirement in 2020. He continues to remain active in the steel industry, serving as a consultant to several organizations and metal producers. My name is Dan Baker. I am currently the co-lab lead for the Global Body Structure Materials Lab at General Motors. This interview is being conducted as part of the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical, and Petroleum Engineers Oral History Program. We are currently at AISTech 2023 in Detroit and are going to discuss Frank's experiences in metallurgy and his contributions to the steel industry and the overall materials industry. So, welcome, Frank.
Goodwin:
Thank you very much, Dan. It's a pleasure to be with you.
Baker:
So, essentially, everyone knows that Frank and I have known each other for a while. We've worked together on various projects in automotive steel research over the last decade or so, and it's been a great collaboration.
Goodwin:
Yes, it has. Yes.
00:01:31 THE BIRTHPLACE OF AMERICAN ZINC SMELTING – MY HOMETOWN
Baker:
So, let's start with your beginnings, Frank. Where were you born, and where did you grow up?
Goodwin:
I was born and raised in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and there's a little bit of metallurgical history that relates to that, which you might find interesting. The first zinc smelter in America was actually located in Bethlehem, and that got started in 1857. Until then, nobody really knew in America how to smelt zinc. But this fellow from Philadelphia, Mr. [Joseph] Wharton, came up; he was aware of the Belgians smelting zinc, and he [wanted to mine the zinc deposit just south of Bethlehem and build a zinc smelter]. There was a railroad fellow, Asa Packer of the Lehigh Valley Railroad, who was running coal from the Pennsylvania coal fields down to New York and Philadelphia, and he said, “Well, why don't you put your zinc smelter next to my railroad instead of next to your mine?” So, that's what happened there. Then two years later—this is just before the Civil War, about 1859 or so—a couple of local land speculators said, “Well, there are iron deposits here, too, so let's see if we can get an ironmaking operation going in Bethlehem.” They went first to the Secretary of War at that time, who was a guy named Jefferson Davis of the United States—a couple of years later, he ended up running [the Confederacy] during the Civil War, of course—but the government turned down these local investors. It wasn't until a few years later that Mr. Wharton, who had been running the zinc smelter, got interested in this. He had heard of a genius metallurgical engineer, John Fritz, who was out of Johnstown in the very early days out there as well.
Fritz was really one of the geniuses of steel metallurgy, starting in the mid-1800s up to about the [end of that century, and served for a time as President of AIME]. So, [Wharton] got him involved, and what became a steel mill got going by the end of the Civil War. That area then underwent tremendous growth. What was formerly a rather unpopulated area really started to grow. Where my family gets involved is [just after World War I]. The influenza pandemic was in 1918-19, and my grandfather and my grandmother were living in Philadelphia, which [a government chart shows] was the epicenter of that pandemic, and they wanted to get out. My uncle had been born in Philadelphia. They moved to Bethlehem, which was not seeing the pandemic in 1919 and moved there. Then, my father was born there in Bethlehem a couple of years later. I was born in the same hospital as my father was some time later. So that's how my family came there, and a little bit of history about the local industry there. So, the steel company, of course, grew tremendously and actually grew around the zinc smelter, and that went out of business around the time of World War I as the steel industry expanded.
Baker:
Interesting. Tell me more about what your parents did when you were growing up.
Goodwin:
Well, they really had nothing to do with anything that we're doing—metallurgy or engineering. My father was an insurance agent, and my mother was a teacher. She had some background in dentistry, also, but I didn't draw any inspiration for metallurgy or engineering in general from them. Those are all influences from elsewhere.
00:05:32 DISCOVERING MY PASSION AT VOCATIONAL-TECHNICAL SCHOOL
Baker:
So, who or what got you interested in becoming an engineer?
Goodwin:
Well, when I was young, I had an insatiable curiosity about everything I didn't know. One of those was just taking all kinds of things apart in the house, much to my parents’ dismay sometimes. As a result of that, I became pretty good at putting them back together and fixing them, and how to just fix things that I'd destroyed and stay in good grace with my parents. So, I was rather mechanically inclined, but also, I was not a friend of school, and school was not a friend of me. My parents really wondered about whether I was going to be seeing any academic achievement in my life when I was young. So, rather than being slotted into a college prep course, I was tracked into our local vocational-technical school in Bethlehem. And Bethlehem Steel, at that time, had sponsored a metallurgy technology course. The whole idea there was to learn about stuff you would do in a metallurgical lab and come out of high school with some sort of training that would take you into a union job working in the steel mill and backing up all their work in production, and so I picked that up, and I just fell in love with it. It was the most wonderful thing I'd ever come across at 14 years old, and I had a wonderful teacher. This teacher just turned on all the lights in metallurgy for me, and the school had gotten a whole bunch of, I'll call it surplus equipment, probably junk, but old tensile testers, we had an old Charpy impact tester, we had a couple of old muffle furnaces, we had an ancient metallograph with a big bellows, probably about ten feet long, and we had grinding and polishing wheels, and all the rest of it and these old microscopes.
He really taught us how to use all this and what it meant. We'd heat samples up and quench them. We would then have to grind and polish, and we didn't have any cameras, so you'd have to look in the microscope and draw a circle and see what you saw. Then he taught us what it all was and how it related to the processing that was done. It was the most marvelous thing I'd ever run across. So, I did that in that school, and miracles of all my grades went up. So, I got interested in school. It was the most marvelous thing to do that. My teacher said, "Have you ever really thought about going to college? You really have something here, and you ought to think about going to college." So, we started talking about that, and he was a tremendous guidance for me to go on. I then had to climb a pretty steep hill to do all the things you need to do in high school to go to college, but I managed to do all that. It was just a wonderful thing to find this wonderful passion and this whole subject of metallurgy at a very young age and to have that. So, it was just great that that worked out the way it did.
Baker:
Yes, that's really great to have that sort of background all the way back in high school. I certainly think we could do more of that again and interest new talent into the industry.
00:09:20 MY FIRST PATENT AND DOCTORAL THESIS AT MIT
Baker:
So, after high school, where did you go to college, and why did you choose that [school]?
Goodwin:
Yes. So, with this wonderful guidance and with some very good recommendations, I managed to get into Cornell. Of course, I only looked at schools that had material science and engineering departments. That was the only interest I had in college. So, I applied to Cornell and got in, and I thought that was a kind of a miracle, but I got in. After that, I went on to MIT, which also had a very good material science and engineering department, eventually ending up with my doctorate in material science and engineering from MIT.
Baker:
Excellent. So, obviously, your high school experience really helped you pick material science and engineering as a career path. Was there anybody in particular who helped you along the way?
Goodwin:
Yes, my high school teacher, whose name was Mr. Garihan, was a tremendous influence on my life. Also, in Boy Scouts, we had an Explorer post, and I was the head of that. A fellow named John St. Clair, he was a Bethlehem Steel metallurgical engineer, and he really helped me as well, recognizing my interest and all that. So, these were two big influences during the very early days. But it was quite tough to come out of high school with really minimal preparation and climb this very steep curve up into an Ivy League education. That was quite a lot of work, too. And I was [on the] rowing crew. I rowed crew at Cornell, which took time as well. So, it took me a while to really feel comfortable at the same level, then, of course, to advance on to graduate school.
Baker:
Right. Was there anybody in your college career who really helped push you along?
Goodwin:
Yes, so at Cornell, the professor who I really latched on to was Professor Che-Yu Li. His expertise was electronic packaging, but his industrial and other experience before entering academia was at US Steel Research Lab in Monroeville, Pennsylvania, and also at Argonne National Lab. So, there was a nice meshing of personalities. I liked [his mentorship]. He was a great professor at Cornell who really helped me along the way. Of course, then moving into graduate school, my thesis advisor, Mert Flemings, who has also been interviewed for this oral history series—I recommend you have a look at his, as well. It's a marvelous recording that he did—of course, working with my thesis advisor was much more intensive. Mert had a quite large research group, which I was very happy to be with, and that group was really focused on Rheocasting and Thixocasting, which are semi-solid metal casting. I think I've included a picture of the continuous Rheocaster from the MIT lab in the photos that we have here. So, what Mert did was assign a postdoc, Ken Young. He was a student of Dave Kirkwood's over at Sheffield before coming to MIT, and he was really my primary resource for my master's degree. And then my doctoral committee, Nick Grant, who's a legendary guy, and Joel Clark at MIT, also were on my committee. It was great to interact with them as my thesis work developed. Mert and I eventually patented my doctoral thesis, which was on semisolid processing for ultra-high-strength aluminum aircraft alloys. So, it was wonderful to see all that come not just to be a thesis on a library shelf but turned into a US patent.
Baker:
Great. Did you have any classmates who helped influence you, either at Cornell or MIT?
Goodwin:
Yes, it's very interesting. At Cornell, I ended up taking more courses in physics than in materials science and engineering. It's very funny how that happens. The science of solid-state physics, of course, is a big part of material science, and I became interested in that. The more sciency part of material science, I guess, was very interesting to me. So, the kind of people I found in physics, and this is, I think, what took me more in a research direction rather than an engineering practice direction, was to hang out with those sorts of people. So that was more of my group there, and I was in a fraternity at Cornell, which was much more of a social thing—not too much to do with my actual career with them, but it was wonderful to have this broadening of what I would call engineering science and moving more into the scientific part of physics. There was a wonderful background to get from there.
Baker:
Great.
00:15:21 GAINING NEW PERSPECTIVES – THREE SEMESTERS AT HARVARD AND A NEW INTERNSHIP
Baker:
What about work experiences during college? Did you have many internships or work-study programs?
Goodwin:
Yes. So, I mentioned Professor Che-Yu Li, and that he had worked at Argonne before entering academia. He was able to get me an internship at Argonne in the western suburbs of Chicago. There, I worked with Dr. Roger Poeppel, who was in charge of their radiation damage program. I worked on the Clinch River, Tennessee, breeder reactor program, which was called EBR-II, which is the Experimental Breeder Reactor. So, this had to do with nuclear power irradiation histories, and because that's a very fast reactor, a breeder reactor, [there were] a lot of radiation damage concerns there. That was a very interesting internship. That was back in 1973 or '74, and that's when I sent my first email because the national labs had the very beginning of an email system with teletypes. That was so long ago to have your first email. I remember that.
Baker:
Amazing. Were there any big political or cultural events that affected your studies or changed your course any?
Goodwin:
Not really. I was really focused on metallurgy, but I will say that when I was at MIT doing my doctoral work, they required a minor program, and I decided, well, let's do something really different. So I went to Harvard, and I said, “I'd like to do a coherent set of courses in comparative literature,” and they said, “What?” and I said, “Yeah! Let's just do something completely different.” So, I got my department to sign off on it, and I got to go to Harvard for three semesters in the comparative literature department. Of course, the kind of students you have at Harvard were much more politically attuned. They're the sort of people who end up in government and politics, so that was living and breathing that stuff for them. So, as part of our coursework, of course, these current events of the day would come in, and it was very interesting. It just shows you how many different kinds of people there are in the world because that was a very interesting group to interact [with] over three courses there. That was about the only relevancy, I guess, of current events through my formal education.
Baker:
Yes, that's quite a shift, I think, from the engineering and physics that you'd been doing up to that point.
00:18:07 FORGING HAMMERS AND 70-TON ANVILS – MY FIRST JOB IN INDUSTRY
Baker:
Okay, so after you finished your doctorate, how did you get your first job in industry?
Goodwin:
Well, I'd come straight through. I had not taken any breaks from studying. I just went straight through from a bachelor's, master's, and then doctorate, straight through, and I was ready for a break. I'd had enough of school for a while, and I said, let's go see what it's really like to practice all these things that I've learned. To get my feet wet, I joined Chambersburg Engineering Company, which is in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. They did two things: they made some of the largest gray iron castings anywhere in the world, which, coming from the Casting and Solidification group at MIT, was very interesting, and they made forging hammers and other forging equipment that went hand in hand because some of the forging hammers used 70-ton anvils. These are huge. Seventy tons is a very big chunk of metal [to cast]. To run a foundry like that and be involved with that—the sand that you need to use in the foundry for such large castings is a very strong kind of sand called cement-bonded sand. So, it was a very interesting company to work for and get involved with, trying to bring some more science into the art of, there is a lot of still, some art in the foundry, by putting thermocouples in the castings, especially when they are weighing that much and take a couple of weeks to cool. So, these anvil bases were for this company’s own equipment, and then the jobbing work was things like bell housings for coal crushers, these very big rotary coal crushers. So, the end bell housings for those that rotate on these huge bearings. Also, some of the largest gas handling or even fluid handling castings, such as turbine casings for hydroelectric dams and blast furnace blower housings—these very large shells you could cast as one piece in gray iron. So, that's the sort of work that was involved. We only did one pour every week or every ten days or so, but then we poured a whole lot at once to make these very large castings.
Baker:
So, what was your position there, and what were your job duties like?
Goodwin:
I was brought in as industrial engineer and metallurgist, and it was a real manufacturing engineering job. You had to deal with specifications. If a customer failure happened, they would come in for failure analysis and what happened. So, I liked doing that, using the metallurgical knowledge to come up with, really, what happened there and how do you fix it? Defining work practices, I was with, of course, the rest of the manufacturing team. They were very focused on production [objectives], and I was really the engineer dealing with new equipment that we wanted to bring in—[new generations of] machine tools and things like that. We had an old-fashioned iron cupola, which is a bottom-blown— it's kind of like a blast furnace. You have coke, and you've got scrap. We used to have scrap railroad rail and engine blocks we used to melt, and that would be the way you make gray iron. But to pour a 70-ton casting, you'd have to gather ladles. You had 15, 20, maybe 25-ton ladles and try to fill them all up in sequence and keep them all warm and all ready to pour all at the same time to pour these huge castings. So, there's quite an orchestration effort involved with that. So, that was quite a challenge to do that.
Baker:
That does seem like quite a challenge.
00:22:12 CEMENT-BONDED SAND WORK AND A MAJOR RESEARCH PROJECT
Baker:
How was your transition to your professional life from research and school?
Goodwin:
Yes, well, as you noticed, it was all about [coming from university] research, you know, coming from doing a doctoral thesis and getting a patent on it. That was a wonderful thing. So, I missed research. It was great to get industrial experience and to just be part of running a company involved in metallurgical processing, but I did miss doing research.
Baker:
Yes. What was your first major project?
Goodwin:
So, at Chambersburg, there was a lot of gray hair at the top, which I guess is why they hired me. They wanted somebody young to come in, a new PhD with new ideas. So, the first thing I did—nobody had ever written too much down. It was very much like I said before, more art than science. So, I tried to come up with a [documented] practice, an operating manual, for the cement-bonded sand work, and how it all worked—the mixes, and the core, and the flasks, and all that kind of thing. So, I gathered all that together and wrote a little book. Then, I went through the rest of the place. This company had its own forge shop as well. So, how those pieces were made and whether it was open die, or flat, die forging, or impression die forging, and various types of steel grades that were used from that, from the lower to the higher carbon contents, and so forth. We also did a lot of forge welding of these massive pieces. Forge welding is quite an art, and to try to document how you do that and do that consistently was kind of fun, too. That was really the first big project I did there, was just trying to document [all the plant practices] using whatever knowledge I could, using the perspective I could bring to that from my background.
Baker:
Yes, forge welding is quite the process. Who were your mentors there at Chambersburg?
Goodwin:
The president of the company, Gene Clark, was a graduate of Cornell also, so that was one reason why I went there. He was [President of the] company. Getting to know how a company ran [was important for me,] just coming out of school, learning just how the organization works, how teams from the commercial and industrial side of the company worked together, I had no idea, really. At least in engineering, you don't take too many courses in that sort of thing. So, he was a wonderful mentor and really gave me a perspective on how an industrial company was organized and run.
Baker:
Great.
00:25:16 STREAMLINING HOT ISOSTATIC PRESSING WITH CHROMALLOY RESEARCH AND TECHNOLOGY
Baker:
How long were you there?
Goodwin:
So, that was about a year and a half at Chambersburg. After that, I was starting to say, what's to do from here? I thought there were some more challenges to come. So, I ended up at Chromalloy Research and Technology Division in Orangeburg, New York, which is near the Tappan Zee Bridge, up the Hudson River from New York City.
At that point in the late 1970s, hot isostatic pressing, or hipping, was becoming industrialized, where you heat a metal above its yield stress, and then you can squash it [under hydrostatic compression]. It was possible to make a sound part in this way. So, that company had applied that to turbine engines for both jet aircraft engines and for stationary gas turbines. I was working on product and process development related to that. They would take a nickel-based superalloy, the moving blades [of a turbine engine], which are carbide strengthened, solution heat treat those to make them soft, do the weld repair, then give them a very heavy nickel vapor coat. Then hot isostatic press, so you could close up any porosity that was left after welding, making a very sound turbine blade again out of that, [ready for final heat treatment to make them strong again].
So, I worked there on the stationary—like these peak-shaving turbines you see used in cities during a hot day. You have basically jet engines that you can switch on and make electricity for peaking power to supply electricity. They're also used for industrial uses, for pumping, and so forth. So, what happened then was about the fall of 1981, President Reagan fired all the airline controllers after they went on strike. So, the flight engine business [which was the mainstay of the company suffered]. They get rebuilt on a pretty regular schedule. Being a very new hire, after a year, I said, well, this doesn't look particularly bright for me right now. So, I started looking around around Thanksgiving, Christmas, right when this airline controller strike was at its peak. I said, well, maybe there's something else out there. But it was very interesting to work both in cobalt-based and nickel-based superalloys for that company. It was a nice added bit of metallurgy. That was really good.
So, anyway, let's continue that story. Then, one of the things that really changed my life was I was sitting around in this rather unbusy shop that had not had a lot of work during this airline controller strike, and I picked up the Journal of Metals (JOM), which is, of course, the TMS [The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society] publication, and this had an article in it. It was, I think, in the fall of that year, one of the late 1981 issues. There was an article called “Casting with Zinc Alloys” by Diran Apelian, who [has also been interviewed for this oral history series], and Don Herrschaft of the International Lead Zinc Research Organization (ILZRO). So, these two had put together an article, and JOM had published it. So, I said, well, that's interesting. Diran was doing research, and I knew Diran through my MIT connection as well, even way back then. So, I felt very comfortable about that. I called up ILZRO in New York City, and I said, "Hey, I'm looking for a job." And they said, "Well, you know, we're a very small company. We're a small industry association. No jobs are open, but send your resume in anyway." So, two weeks later, the president of the company, Schrade Radtke, called up, and he said, "Get in here, 41st and Madison, and then we'll interview you and see what's going on." So, it turned out he also had his degree from the metallurgy department at MIT. It became more a question of who do you know and who do I know? He made a few calls up to Mert Flemings at MIT and others from my list of recommendations, and so that worked out wonderfully. I began my career in the zinc industry on February 1st, 1982, not too long after reading that Journal of Metals article, so that was a wonderful thing. And just coincidentally, I walked in the first day of work, and my wife-to-be was working there at the company, so I met her my first day of work in 1982.
So, just continuing the story there, I advanced in the company at ILZRO and moved through various positions up to executive vice president in 2004. During that year, ILZRO and the International Zinc Association (IZA), and the International Lead Association all merged. We consolidated our operations, and I became the Director of Technology and Development for IZA upon its founding in 2004 and was in that position until my retirement in 2020. That IZA job encompassed all of our research and development activities globally, outside of what was going on in life sciences. We had another department dealing with health and environment and so forth, but I did all the non-life sciences research. I was in charge of that, together with all of the market development work. As a result of that consolidation, it was a big growth period for IZA. We had our office in North Carolina, having moved there from of New York, [we also had many people working] in Brussels, and then we opened regional offices in Shanghai, New Delhi, Lima, Moscow, Johannesburg, and Kuala Lumpur. So, as global director, I was trying to give all of those offices program support, hiring people, and working with them on all the different uses of zinc, the research and development programs, and the market development programs that each area would come up with.
00:31:54 PENNIES, TIRES, SUNTAN LOTION, AND OTHER RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS
Baker:
So, during this time, were you mainly focused on zinc-coated steels, or were you dealing with other products other than life-sciences-type applications, like you mentioned?
Goodwin:
I dealt with all the uses of zinc. I dealt with coated steel from the very beginning, of course, and not only continuous galvanized sheet steel but also the wire business, meaning galvanized wire used for springs, wire rope, fence wire, and other kinds of wire. Also, die castings, including pressure die castings [and gravity castings], zinc anodes, and zinc oxide, which is used as a vulcanization accelerant in tires, for example, in the auto industry, and many other things, such as suntan lotion. [I was involved with] just all the uses of zinc that are out there. The US penny was converted from copper to copper-plated zinc in 1981. I came along not long after that, so there was a lot of work in that as well, to develop that further and look for coinage opportunities in countries other than the USA. It was just always involving the R&D needed to move all these areas ahead and to take advantage of market development opportunities. Sometimes, those needed more research, which I just love doing.
Baker:
Great. So, tell me a little bit more about some of that research and work focus both at IZA and ILZRO prior.
Goodwin:
Okay. So, you know that in the auto industry, until about the late eighties, we didn't galvanize auto bodies in the auto industry [except for some small-volume, high-priced cars in Europe]. We had zinc-rich paint, and we had other ways that we tried to deal with corrosion of auto bodies. And then finally, with the situation with road salt and body corrosion [becoming more evident to everyone, it was agreed that] a metallic coating of zinc on steel was required; otherwise, ten-year perforation, five-year cosmetic warranties, which everybody wanted on the automobiles, [could not be achieved]. So, there was a huge change and a huge opportunity then for an engineer or a metallurgist to get involved in how are we going to galvanize all this body and structure sheet for automobiles? That was quite a huge effort, a step-change in the quality requirements for the steel mills to move up to auto body and structure quality coating. Together with the surface quality issues, the fuel economy requirements became more and more demanding, requiring lightweighting of steel automobiles. So, a huge problem was how the heck are you going to galvanize all these steels [with very high surface quality] and keep the mechanical property requirements for these steels after you go through all this processing? The combination of those two things led to a suite of projects that I put together and managed to get a number of our steel industry friends interested in co-funding with the zinc industry, auto industry, and some suppliers.
00:35:25 ANSWERING INDUSTRY’S PROBLEMS WITH NEW ALLOYS
Goodwin:
That led to a formalization of all these in 1999, which we call the Galvanized Autobody Partnership. That is a program that is still running today that involves quite a number of programs to support the automotive use of zinc-coated steel. But that was only part of my job description. The die-casting industry also needed a lot of help; they were still using alloys invented in the 1930s by New Jersey Zinc, and so that hadn't really changed. The two biggest drawbacks of zinc die castings are, first of all, [limitations on] high-temperature service. Zinc is a low-melting-temperature alloy, so if you take it up to, for example, an engine compartment temperature [under load], it is likely to creep. It's going to deform under load at any temperature near an engine temperature. Second, [zinc die-casting alloys are denser than] aluminum and magnesium die-casting alloys. So, [I was] working with the North American Die Casting Association in Chicago, and they had a director there, Steve Udvardy, and I was very happy to work with him. Over the course of time, [working together,] we won two large Department of Energy grants to develop completely new alloys that answer both of these problems. One was a very high creep-strength alloy and required a lot of fundamental work. Just how does creep happen in these alloys, and how do you make zinc alloys more creep-resistant? I was very fortunate to run into Frank Nabarro, who came up with the Nabarro-Herring creep mechanism some years ago. He was ready to retire by then at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa, but he agreed to help me out and work there with CSIR [the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research], which is the national lab in South Africa, in Pretoria.
We came up with a wonderful composition with many times the creep resistance of conventional zinc die-casting alloys. That has been commercialized now as what's called the EZAC Alloy. So that has entered new areas where zinc could not go before, with much higher temperature capabilities. For the second one, [Steve and I won] another Department of Energy project addressing the density issue; we came up with ultra-thin alloys because, a lot of times, the shape capability [required for a part] was limited by castability rather than mechanical strength. So coming up with very [high fluidity, ultra-]thin [section casting] alloys was a great development. The [optimal alloy has been standardized as ASTM B989 [the American Society for Testing and Materials]. We now have very lightweight castings, and we also have ones capable of use at higher temperatures than before. So, I was very pleased to lead, and fund, and be part of all that.
Just to finish the story on the different areas of zinc, there's another very large part of zinc application and consumption, which is for after-fabrication galvanizing, what we call batch galvanizing, or general galvanizing. This is where a part is fully fabricated [before dipping in a zinc bath]. For example, you'll see stairs, grates, guardrails, structures, or heat exchangers—many things that are made from steel that then need corrosion protection. They are just dipped as-fabricated into a big zinc bath; the problem is these steels have very different reactivities from one another. We started with what’s been known for some time, that the silicon and phosphorus contents of silicon-killed steels have a very important influence on steel reactivity [in the zinc bath]. This had been looked at in the past; however, it had never really been reduced to much of a scientifically organized body of knowledge.
Over a course of years, I worked with the University of Cardiff and the University of Swansea in Wales, UK. We put together the whole story there by looking at hundreds of steel compositions [donated by many companies] and digging into all the metallography and the thermodynamics of how the reactivity worked [and systematized the results, creating process maps that could be used in industry]. So, the general galvanizing industry was very grateful to have this new knowledge, and it really has allowed the general galvanizers to have some guidance, so they come up with more predictable results for the steels that they are galvanizing. That was a nice thing to put out there. I think that really covers the main uses of zinc that I've been involved with. The most intensive efforts have been in continuous galvanizing, die casting, and general galvanizing.
00:40:43 MY CONTRIBUTIONS TO INDUSTRY – TECHNICAL ASPECTS AND BEYOND
Baker:
So, can you talk about some of your technical contributions to industry?
Goodwin:
I mentioned before about the automotive steel challenge. Contributing to the technological platform or the knowledge platform that we have now for galvanizing advanced high-strength steels for automobiles is certainly part of that. Some of the things involved there are galvanneal reactivity and the role of titanium and niobium contents in steel sheet on galvanneal reactivity. I was involved in a lot of the fundamental work on internal and external oxidation in these sheet steels. We knew about internal and external oxidation and steels for many years, but its applicability to galvanized steel sheet processing and how it helps us to come up with really nice coatings on steel is another area where I was instrumental in developing a tremendous amount of work on that. The galvanizing bath itself was not very well understood. This [work involved understanding thermodynamic and kinetic drivers toward equilibrium in the bath, the formation of intermetallics and drosses and oxides, and the control of soluble] aluminum and iron and perhaps other elements in the bath. The whole scientific description of the temperature, flow, and composition fields in the galvanizing bath, made possible by the wonderful computer flow software we have these days, was [a big part of gaining this understanding].
Then, finally, I would add contributions on coating weight control developments for continuous galvanizing. A lot of our knowledge, if you go back to some of the earlier work, was based upon coating of non-automotive steels. To work with the strip-to-knife distances and gas pressures that are required for automotive steels really required an extension of the past work to provide predictive modeling for the advancement of coating control. This helped to achieve closed-loop coating controls in many cases. All of these contributions I've mentioned are essential for steel-based automobiles these days. I mentioned before about contributions in the die-casting, especially the two families of die-casting alloys that we came up with there, and some of the general galvanizing work as well.
Baker:
How about a few comments about what you've done with AIST and the Galvanizing Technology Committee?
Goodwin:
Yes. So, I think one of the greatest accomplishments of these groups is bringing people together. I was very pleased when AIST [Association for Iron & Steel Technology] was founded from the joining together of ISS [the Iron and Steel Society] and the AISE [Association for Iron and Steel Engineers] in, I think it was 2003 or 2004; they invited me to be the founding chairman of the Galvanizing Technology Committee. That is and continues to be a wonderful platform for all of our educational developments. There's a lot to learn from our colleagues. To bring together everybody in this forum on a regular basis, as we do, is a big part of it. The other programs I developed with the Galvanized Autobody Partnership and other industry association programs are also important for bringing people together and advancing everybody together, learning from each other. That's been a wonderful thing to do. I'll talk a little later here about some of the conferences that help do the same things.
00:44:41 SCHRADE RADTKE, BRUNO DE COOMAN, MICHEL DUBOIS – COLLEAGUE COLLABORATION
Baker:
So, can you tell us a little bit more about your involvement here at AIST and the Galvanizing Technology Committees?
Goodwin:
Yes. So, a big part of, I think, what I've achieved is through many forums to just bring people together. It's so important to do this because we all learn from each other, from our experiences, and from our knowledge that we all come together and share. Back when ISS, the Iron and Steel Society, and AISE, the American Institute of Steel Engineers, merged to form AIST, and I think it was 2003 or 2004, they invited me to be the founding chairman of the Galvanizing Technology Committee. We turned it into a very nice, open-handed group of people, of producers and suppliers, and we shared a lot of information together. That has been now almost 20 years since that happened, and you've been involved in that as well. So that's one aspect of working with AIST on these things and put it together as Papers Co-Chair. Since then, the annual AISTech Galvanizing Technology sessions and also the MS&T [Materials Science & Technology] sessions that we have on galvanizing of advanced high-strength steels, for many years, have been a nice part of bringing together and learning from other people as well.
Baker:
I know we'll probably talk about some of the other things as far as conferences go here shortly, but do you recall any significant experiences working with colleagues that you want to share?
Goodwin:
Yes, of course. Colleagues, of course, really enrich your life. I mentioned before, Schrade Radtke, who was the president of International Lead Zinc Research Organization (ILZRO), who hired me. After I came on board, he really took me under his wing, and we went all over the place. The Galvanizers Association meeting in April of 1982 was in Monterrey, Mexico. That was wonderful to really meet everybody from the industry down there. Quite a number of our USA steel friends were there, too. Then, he put me in charge of the Galfan development, which was the zinc 5% aluminum-mischmetal hot-dip coating effort. I worked to try to develop that, and eventually, we came up with 98 licensees between the various steel coating industry sectors, such as steel, and wire, and tube, and other steel products, and also the alloy suppliers. So, there's a nice picture from 1983 of Schrade and myself at the tender age of 29, and also Dr. Yusuke Hirose from Nisshin Steel. He's really the godfather of the zinc, aluminum, and magnesium coatings. He was the first one to really suggest that these coatings had promise, and ten years later, of course, they were commercialized by Nisshin Steel. Also, Jacques Pelerin is in that picture, who was working for CRM [Centre de Recherches Metallurgiques], and he did a lot to develop the jet vapor coatings, the JVD [Jet Vapor Deposition] process that ArcelorMittal has now taken commercial near Liege, Belgium.
So, moving beyond Schrade, I was also very fortunate to strike up with Professor Bruno De Cooman, who received his doctorate from Cornell in materials science and engineering and went back to Belgium. He was on a Fulbright when he was in the USA. We did some of the first work on galvanizing of TRIP (Transformation-induced plasticity) steels together, and that was in the early 1990s. There was some marvelous ferrous metallurgy work that Bruno did with us there, really defining what we call the silicon-phosphorus-aluminum triangle that we use to define TRIP steel metallurgy. After that, he continued at Postech, the Pohang Institute of Science and Technology. When he was there, he managed to have me appointed as an adjunct professor. So, I came over to Pohang once in a while and did some special topic seminars for the students who were there. That was kind of interesting because you get used to an American university, and then you go to Pohang, and all the students bow when they talk to you. I said, "Yeah, couldn't we do that at home, too?" So, it was kind of a different attitude over there. One of our friends, Michel Dubois, I'd like to mention. Michel was quite a character. First of all, to finish up with Bruno, after he moved to the Russian steel industry, he was killed. I really miss him. I just think of how much Bruno would have contributed since then if he was still alive, and I really wish he was still with us.
Then, moving to Michel—I do have a picture of Bruno and Michel here to show. We were together at the APGalva conference that I helped to organize on Jeju Island off the south coast of Korea. Michel was a process engineer at Cockerill. Before that, he became part of ArcelorMittal, and then, he joined the CMI, which became John Cockerill. Michel and I both were very curious about how things worked and liked to take things apart and understand. Michel's office was full of just stuff. You'd walk into his office, and he had dart guns that he would shoot at the strip with a thermocouple bead that would unspool, trying to measure for the first time the cooling rate of the strip as it went up the tower until the wires fell off. So, he would just do crazy stuff like that. He had little acoustic transducers to try to measure the vibration of the strip. Just a wonderful attitude about what's really going on here, and trying to figure it out and asking questions that were obvious when you heard them, but you realized that he knew how to ask some really good questions. So, Michel has really helped, I think, all of our understanding about what's really going on [and] how to measure because you have to measure things to understand them, and then the galvanizing process.
00:51:07 COMPLETING MY MAGNUM OPUS WITH ARNIE MARDER
Goodwin:
Then, I'd like to mention Professor Arnie Marder, who was at Lehigh University. I funded him to do a lot of work, really the basic work, on galvanneal. He taught us a lot about galvanneal, and in 1999, he said, "We've done a lot here, and I want to write a review paper." So, he had a sabbatical at Technion in Haifa and went over there for a year. At the end of the year, this marvelous review paper called “The Physical Metallurgy of Zinc Coated Steels” came out. I think that is one of the most cited papers ever in our field. I think it's got 5- or 6,000 citations.
During the pandemic in March or April of 2020, when we were all locked up, he got ahold of me and said, "You know that paper I wrote back in 2000?” He said, “It's been 20 years, and we need to update that." At first, I thought he was asking me for money, so I said, "Well, let's do it together." The more we talked about it, the more we realized just how much has happened in this field of zinc-coated steel in the last 20 years, and it turned into a book. We then signed a contract with Elsevier and just got to work there and cracked away at it for two years. We just finished up at the end of 2022 here, two years later, and it was published and came out for sale in March of 2023, very recently. So, that magnum opus is now out there. So, to work with Arnie for two years on that—if anybody ever wants to write a big book, 688 pages or so, I really recommend a coauthor. You need to support each other technically, emotionally, and everything else. It's a very daunting undertaking, but I think we're very pleased with how that book came out.
Baker:
Yeah, I'm sure that's going to become the new most-cited document out there in zinc.
00:53:35 GLOBAL EXPANSIONS AT IZA, WORLD TRAVELS, AND MY YEAR AND A HALF IN CHINA
Goodwin:
Yes, there's a lot in there, and there's a lot in there that was never all assembled as a body of knowledge before, so we're very pleased about that. Yes. Thinking more about internal people, I mentioned before that IZA expanded globally, and I was very lucky to be put in charge of a lot of how that happened.
So, of course, in 2004, China was just developing by leaps and bounds. They said, oh, we have to have a China office. So I went to Wuhan, which was the steelmaking center of China historically, in 1984, which was the year the first coil-to-coil galvanizing line opened in China, which was a horizontal Mannesmann line. Until then, sheet galvanizing in China was a piece-by-piece operation. They'd take 1- or 2-meter-long pieces of steel strip and dip them in the bath by hand, and this was how you made galvanized sheet in China until 1984, which is just amazing. They were still doing some of that when I was there, but then they got this line.
I'd been working with the German steel industry on the Galfan development, which really took off in Germany in the late eighties. The Germans, of course, with Mannesmann, they were looking for somebody to go over who really knew English quite well, too, and who was a metallurgist, so I ended up working with the Verein Deutsche Eisenhüttenleute [VDEh]. The German steel industry said go to China. In 1984, it was really a very different world to go there and visit Wuhan and work with those guys on galvanizing; that was very interesting. But at the same time, their zinc supplier, Zhuzhou Smelter, was in Changsha in Hunan Province, and I got to know their foreign relations lady, a very young lady at the time, Annette Huang. So, we got to know each other over the years, and we put together the first Global Zinc Producers conference to show the Chinese zinc industry what's going on, and all the Europeans and Australians, North Americans, South Americans, everybody, were there. It was a wonderful first attempt at having a global—again, bringing people together was so important there, to bring together the whole industry. Eventually, Annette agreed to come work for IZA. So, we established our Shanghai office, and for the time since then—I mentioned IZA was formed in 2004—she and I just traveled all over China. I've been to so many places in China, really every corner of the place, talking with automotive manufacturers and steel suppliers. We also got into die casting and some of these other things as well across the zinc industry and all the zinc smelters.
She opened up wonderful opportunities for me. I've spent about a year and a half in China overall, if you count up all the days. It just was an amazing experience to develop that office. And, of course, we hired other people, too, as we went along. We also developed a Chinese group of steel companies that joined the Galvanized Autobody Partnership that I mentioned before. So that became a regular way of exchanging information with the major Chinese mills.
Then, beyond China, we established an office in Moscow, and that's a little more difficult on the organizational side, but on the people side, it was always fine. You know, you're dealing with people. It’s quite different from dealing with the bureaucracies of countries and so forth, so the people side was always fine. Vladislav Polkin was a metallurgist there who we picked up, and he and I did many seminars over the years in both Moscow and other places. The location of the main zinc smelter is in Chelyabinsk, which is in Siberia. So, going to Western Siberia to give seminars in January meant bringing all your warm clothes. I think I show a picture of that seminar that we did one winter there. And the Russian Orthodox Church has a holiday in January where it's kind of a baptismal thing. So, you go in January, in Siberia, and you jump in the lake, and that was way below zero. I think what I gathered from it, I did it with my friends, is the main purpose of that is to get a bottle of something to warm you up afterward. That was the main purpose of that. So that was a bit of time in Russia.
Yes, beyond China and Russia, we also, of course, dealt with our Indian market, which has been growing by leaps and bounds and still is. So, we established an office in Delhi, hiring Rahul Sharma, our manager of that office. I was very pleased to work with Rahul for many years. He was very instrumental in developing our relationships with the steel industries in India, especially Tata and their Jamshedpur complex, with their main research laboratories there. The Steel Authority of India Limited, SAIL, in Ranchi, and also Jindal, or JSW, which has operations, including a huge expansion now going on in Hampi in the middle of India. So, just as in China, the success of all these programs was all about developing relationships, not only with the local industry but also with the governments. Things like developing corrosion warranties and other aspects of market access are important in developing all these markets. So, as part of that, we held many seminars and conferences in India. I’m just showing here a picture of Steve Wilkinson, who was the executive director of IZA, and myself. It’s very traditional at an Indian conference to open it with a lighting of the lamp of knowledge, which is what we see here. In most of the conferences that we did, we would start out by getting a government official to participate with us as part of our development of these markets.
01:00:06 THE START OF A CLOSE RELATIONSHIP WITH GALVATECH
Goodwin:
One conference that I've been particularly closely associated with is the Galvatech series of conferences. This was started in 1989 by Professor Hisamatsu and Professor Yamaguchi in Tokyo. The Japanese led the way on developing the Japanese character of much of the Galvatech conferences. I participated on the organizing committee for Galvatech ’95, which was run by ISS, and then I co-chaired the Galvatech 2004 with Debanshu Bhattacharya, “DB”, of ArcelorMittal. That was a wonderful experience to work with him. That was the year after AIST was founded, so that was the beginning of a very close relationship with AIST.
After that happened in 2004, the Europeans asked me, “You did such a great job in Chicago in 2004; could you come help us in Genoa in 2011?” So, Josef Faderl of Voestalpine, Thomas Koll of Salzgitter, and I co-chaired the Genoa meeting of Galvatech 2011. And then the Chinese, of course, wanted to get in on the act. So, the vice minister of the metallurgical industry, Riuyu Lin, he and I were the co-chairmen of Galvatech 2013 in Beijing. That was a big conference that you were part of there. So, we really exposed the entire Chinese steel industry to the advances in technology that we were able to bring out with the Galvatech conferences.
After that, Professor Joe McDermid of McMaster University and I co-chaired—and it was organized by AIST— Galvatech 2015, which I think is still the largest Galvatech attendance that we’ve ever had because we did it together with the PHS, the Press Hardened Steel conference. I think we had over five hundred people for that one. So that was another good experience. Then, the Europeans asked me again to co-chair the 2021 conference, but COVID hit, and we couldn’t do that face-to-face. So that was a very interesting experience to co-chair that, again, with Joseph Faderl of Voestalpine. That was all virtual on Austrian time, so we were all up at 2:00 in the morning [in the eastern USA] to give our speeches, sitting here in the dark while on European time. We did come up with a Galvatech Highlights Symposium the following year, 2022, in Vienna, when the world started opening up again. Now we go to Galvatech 2023, which will be in Seoul. The Koreans have asked me to co-chair that one as well. We have 190 papers coming to that one. That’s all set up now, and I think that will probably be my last one. It’s time to pass the torch for the next one because that will be in Monterrey, another AIST event. Joe McDermid at McMaster and Omar Garcia of Ternium will be co-chairing that one. I’ll probably be coming along just to be there to be with my friends.
Baker:
Yes, I’m looking forward to all the upcoming Galvatech conferences.
01:04:02 AWARDS AND RECOGNITION FOR MY INDUSTRY ACHIEVEMENTS
Baker:
Could you tell us about the awards and honors that you’ve received throughout your illustrious career so far?
Goodwin:
Well, I’ve been very fortunate to receive a number of these. I mentioned before about general galvanizing, and so there are industry associations around the world. The major one in this part of the world is the American Galvanizers Association, and they gave me their Hall of Fame Award in 2021. Also, the European General Galvanizers Association gave me their Silver Pin Award in 2007. For the diecasting industry, I received the Nyselius Award for exceptional technical achievement, and that was in 2018. Just recently, I received that industry’s most prestigious award, which is the Herman Doehler Award. That was in 2022. Then, moving to the sheet galvanizing industry, the Galvanizers Association’s most prestigious award is the Nevison Award, and I received that in 2009. When we had the meeting in 2022, Professor McDermid, myself, Brian Lester, and Ed Silva [were all Nevison award winners]. So that was fun to all get together again. I’d just like to give a special note about Dale Nevison, who really was the leader of all that. Dale was a native of Detroit here, and we worked together very, very closely over the years. He’s another one that I miss very much. I mentioned before about Wire, and I was made a life member of the Wire Association International for contributions related to wire galvanizing. And then, way back in time, about 30 years ago, AIME gave me an appreciation award for all the support for the US lead and zinc mining industries.
Baker:
Great. What sort of milestones in industry do you think you’ve had the biggest impact on?
Goodwin:
For the sheet galvanizing industry, I think that gaining control of coating weight stability has been a real milestone. We were able to provide a much narrower window of maximum and minimum coating weights, which, for automotive, is, of course, especially important for formability and weldability. This has come about through the development of much more highly engineered gas-wiping knives, which are now designed using scientific principles together with the measurement and the feedback control equipment that we have here. Also, I mentioned before about galvanizing bath management. I think I’ve contributed greatly to the scientific understanding of how the interaction of the flow fields in the bath, the temperature fields, and the composition fields all interact and can be managed to provide very high-quality zinc for dipping the steel into. As you know, every moment you’re putting steel into a zinc bath, you’re creating a reaction between steel and zinc, which has the potential for making intermetallics and dross. To understand how to do that, so you have the least possible impact on these, and quality is very important. We've learned a lot about that. Also, the development of much more durable bath hardware equipment, both the bearings and the bushings that support it, together with the minimization of build-up on the roll surfaces. I think there's been a lot of knowledge that I've been instrumental in helping to conceive the project, and organizing the funding, and getting the work done there. Beyond that, just working with all of our colleagues on how we develop these high-strength steels so that they actually are galvanizable and producing successful zinc coatings on so many of the new steel products that we're seeing.
01:08:32 NO ONE IS AN ISLAND – HOW SOCIETY MEMBERSHIP IMPACTS A CAREER
Baker:
Can you tell me how your membership in these different societies has evolved and how you first came to hear about AIME and got involved with AIST and its predecessors, I should say?
Goodwin:
Yes. I mentioned before that little recognition award from AIME for lecturing at one of their lead and zinc conferences about 30 years ago. So that was AIME proper. With AIST, it had its predecessor organizations, the ISS, the Iron and Steel Society, and the AISE. I was a member of ISS for some years before the merger and certainly on the organizing committee of the Galvatech 1995 and before. So, when AIST was founded, we had Galvatech 2004. Also, I founded the Galvanizing Technology Committee at that time. So, I've been very pleased to serve our Galvanizing Technology Committee, both as the chairman and as the Papers Co-Chair for many years, helping to organize all of the technical sessions at AISTech and also the Advanced High Strength Steel Galvanizing sessions with MS&T over the years. So, it's been a very nice way of bringing people together and joining in the possibilities we have here to work together in these association committees.
Baker:
Can you elaborate on how membership in the professional societies has benefited you in your career, and how do you see our societies benefiting people going forward?
Goodwin:
Well, I can speak personally that you think back to when you got your final degree from university and what you knew then versus what you know now. Most of what you know now, you did not learn in school; you learned it along the way. AIST, our committees, and our other collaborative activities have been a huge part of my continuing education. A lot of that has come from me talking with you and us talking with the suppliers in the industry, and we all learn from each other. So, the forum or the venue and the chances to join together to just continue learning from each other and to watch everything evolve—much of it has a lot of science-based understanding beneath it. We really have had to come up with a lot of science to do these things, and we have worked on these things together. We've sponsored research projects together at universities. So, our membership involvement has really allowed and really facilitated the collaborations that have resulted in continuing education for all of us. So, I just show a picture here of the 2017 AHS conference that we had in Keystone. We had people there from the automotive industry, the steel industry, and academia. It was a big part of our continuing education together.
Baker:
Who helped get you into the societies?
Goodwin:
Well, I think a lot of it was self-motivated. Because I work for a very small industry association, International Zinc Association, and I really was trying to lead the group to advance their objectives; you realize that you have to be involved. You're not going to work as an island in a small association; you have to get out and collaborate with people. So, I drove that and encouraged others in our association to be part of the whole collaboration here.
01:12:50 YOU CAN NEVER STOP LEARNING – THE VALUE OF COLLABORATION
Baker:
What would you say to a senior in college or about to graduate as a master's or PhD student to get them interested in joining societies?
Goodwin:
Well, the first thing that I always try to impress upon our younger generation is you never stop learning, and you can never stop learning. To even stay still is unacceptable because everybody else is moving forward; you have to keep learning. What the various opportunities you have in these associations offer is the chance to keep learning and to be part of the technical sessions, and to take part of these committee meetings where we're sharing our experiences, learning what worked and what didn't work, what's new, what new opportunities are there out there, what challenges are there out there. These are all part of our never-ending effort to continue our education, which is just vital and necessary for our continued professional development.
Baker:
What can we do to attract new young people into steel and zinc-coated steels?
Goodwin:
We need to continue programming meetings and meeting content that will meet their needs. I think we have to understand the place where young people are today, coming into industry from. They're coming out of school, and certainly, when I came out of school, I knew very little about the industrial experience. MIT was very much like a government research lab with students in it, and it was not much like industry at all. So, to get out and actually be in industry is a very different experience. To have plant tours and to present topics of current interest, of new things that are coming along, from our industrial experience, I think, would be very beneficial to young people.
Baker:
Excellent. Thanks. Yes, all good comments. As we start to wrap up here, what has made working in this field meaningful to you? What has been your favorite part of working?
Goodwin:
I think just finding out that there are a lot of people here who have common or mutual interests. We all have common goals and shared challenges that we're trying to meet. As a program developer in an industry association, I've always tried to develop programs where people would feel that they have something to gain if they join in. If they help to fund a program, they're going to gain something from it. I think looking across the board, you always try to find things that are of mutual interest and where we all have something to gain. Whether it's programming an AIST conference, a galvanizing session, or putting together a research project, you really look for the common platform. I think the associations have helped greatly in providing a perspective on what that platform should be, what the opportunities are, and of course, allowing us to meet all the contacts, the different people who are like-minded in the field.
01:16:37 ADVICE FOR YOUNG METALLURGISTS AND NEW LEADERS OF INDUSTRY
Baker:
So, what advice can you give to today's young leaders in engineering professions?
Goodwin:
Yes, well, leadership is distinct from just learning as part of the group. When you're a leader, you always have to be thinking about what's next because if you're going to lead the group, you have to know what's next before they do. You have to say, okay, now we're going to do this before they've even stopped thinking about what they're doing right now. So, my advice to people and young leaders trying to develop their leadership potential as an engineering professional is to say, okay, we're here now, but what's next? And what do I need to assemble? What resources do I need? What people do I need? How do I need to prepare for what's next? And to think about where the next step is beyond that.
Baker:
Excellent. Is there anything else that you'd like to bring up that we haven't already talked about?
Goodwin:
Yes, well, I mentioned way back that I met my wife-to-be on my first day of work on February 1st, 1982, which is about 41 years ago. And for some reason, undeserved to me, we're still together. And I'd just like to acknowledge my wife, Rosalind, who has given me so much support over the years. The picture here is when we were at the Kentucky Derby. So, there's been a lot of travel involved, a huge amount of international travel, as we've mentioned, and this would have been impossible to do without her constant support.
Baker:
Great. You've certainly had quite the career in both steel and zinc-coated steels on top of all the other things that you've done. It's been my pleasure to spend this time talking with you about your career and getting this recorded for future generations to look back on what we were able to accomplish over the last bit of time.
Goodwin:
Wonderful. Thanks very much, Dan. Thanks.
