Readers’ Letters
Alfred Wilm’s Mountain Farm
With reference to the mention of duralumin in the September 2021 issue.
On a visit to the Sudetes Mountains, my wife and I booked a room in an Agrotourist farm, called The Mountain Farm, in the village of Zachelmie, south west Poland. The farm is in a beautiful location with outstanding views of the surrounding countryside and the medieval Chojnik castle. Following the Potsdam agreement of 1945, the German inhabitants of this region were relocated and the farm was occupied by the parents of the current Polish owner. There are layers and layers of history to be discovered.
We took our breakfast on a patio at the side of the house under an impressive oak plaque fixed to the front of the house. This was carved with a quotation (in German) from Goethe followed by some more words that seemed familiar to me as I remembered them being spoken by my metalwork teacher 60 years ago. Talking to the farm owner I was informed that the farm once belonged to Alfred Wilm (1869-1937), the metallurgist who invented the alloy Al-3.5–5.5%Cu-Mg-Mn, now known as duralumin.
The serendipitous nature of the discovery of the age hardening of metal alloys is well known but worth repeating. To use Wilm’s own words that appeared in an article in the Aluminium Journal in 1936: “I
