AtIndustrial Heating, it is always our goal to provide you, the reader, with valuable content. Our technical content, in the form of articles and columns, is chosen to assist you by providing information you can use to make decisions. Other columns, and often this editorial, provide information that might affect how you do business because we know you don’t always have the time to keep up with what’s happening in the world and how that might affect your company or career.

The Buyers Guide you are currently holding (assuming you are not reading this online) is a resource like no other in the industry. Our staff goes above and beyond to provide you with the best information on how to find what you need. This excellent once-a-year tool is enhanced by the searchability provided in our online Buyers Guide.

Speaking of our website (www.industrialheating.com), it also includes our magazine articles and columns for each month archived back to the beginning of this century. In addition, are you aware that we are updating our Experts Speak blog daily with new expert input? Topics include failure analysis, heat treatment, brazing, management advice, patent law information and other general metallurgical information. If you have questions for our experts, you can respond to the blogs directly.

The bulletin board is another tool available to the industry. One thread initiated last year has answered several questions about CQI-9 and AMS 2750. We also update current news on CO2legislation, global warming and green energy in separate bulletin-board threads.

Our website includes our daily news item to keep you informed. If you would like to receive an e-mail daily with this news item, sign up for our IH Daily newsletter on our home page. Another newsletter available to you is the IH magEzine, which contains industry-related news that is both informative and compelling. Sign up for it on our home page.

If you prefer to read our magazine digitally as it appears in print, our Digital Edition is just for you. Each month’s issue is posted on our home page for you to flip through as though you would a magazine.

I occasionally receive a comment that this editorial and other columns do not focus enough on thermal processing and are sometimes too “political.” As I mentioned above, we try to provide you with information you should know that might affect what you do and how you do it. If you don’t think CO2legislation will affect what you do in this industry, you need to think again. If you aren’t concerned about the government’s involvement in private industry – think General Motors – maybe you should be. We try to point out these types of issues so that you have an opportunity to reflect on how they might affect you.

This type of editorial content is nothing new forIndustrial Heating. To illustrate this, I took a look atIndustrial Heatingmagazines from 1949 – 60 years ago. The following are just a few quotes from three different editorials that year, and they seem particularly prescient today.

“Mr. Morrow also quoted Lenin, ‘Some day we shall force the United States to spend itself into destruction’ … these United States shall be a land of liberty, freedom and opportunity and never become one totalitarian, collectivist state.”

“If the leaders of the people become panicky and start to flounder around in desperate attempts to ‘prime the pump,’ or some other such foolish idea, they will only make the situation worse by government spending of money it does not have. If the situation is permitted to adjust itself, as it must, no one will be too badly hurt, and the nation will eventually settle itself. This is one time when a decision to leave well-enough alone will, perhaps, be the best possible way of restoring a sound, normal state of business and allow the natural economic balance to assert itself according to its own natural laws.”

“Whether or not a nation can have everything in social comfort and social security and at the same time avoid a reduction in technological progress and national security is doubtful. Technology must continue to be directed at putting some people out of work and destroying property to the end that there may be an increase in productivity, new products, lower costs and a steadily mounting number of new jobs. Technological progress must march in advance of social security and comfort if we are to have national security as well as social security in its truest sense.”