Rust: The Longest War

by Jonathan Waldman

  Among merchants and VPs, Castillo has a reputation. At biweekly meetings, she always has new products to show off. This is not the case with the lumber department. The 2012 model two by four is the same as the 2002 version. As such, Castillo loses track of where her niche products end up. At least with me she did. To track down the other rust products in the store, she asked a sales associate in the electrical department—orange apron consulting orange apron—for help. “Do you have any rust removers?” she asked.

  The associate led us to aisle 14 (hardware), where he stopped between tool belts and welding supplies, looked at a shelf of WD-40 spray, and said, “I guess not.” But among the various lubricants were seven that claimed to prevent, protect against, penetrate, or eliminate rust and corrosion. Castillo had a sense that more lay hidden elsewhere. She walked to aisle 33 (sinks, showers, tubs, toilets), looking for cleaners. Like so many customers, she couldn’t find what she was looking for. She asked another orange apron for help again and was directed to aisle 37 (kitchen appliances). There she found some cleaners, but none was tailored to rust. There was Steel Meister (“Put the stainless back in steel”), but that was it. There was also Glass Meister, a granite cleaner, a cooktop cleaner, and a washing machine cleaner, which seemed to beg a circular question.

  I asked if rust products ever made it out from their dusty, forsaken shelves to the prominent positions of batteries, duct tape, and measuring tapes on the ends of the aisles. Castillo told me she’d never heard of it.

  Before achieving prominent positions in the market, some rust products have been modified or removed entirely from the shelves—dusty or otherwise—by the US Federal Trade Commission. Regarding two motor-oil additives, the FTC told the products’ makers to stop falsely claiming that the additives reduced corrosion in engines. The most famous case involved a $600 cathodic protection system for cars, sold by David McCready, of Pennsylvania. He called the system Rust Buster until Dust Buster sued him. Then he called it Rust Evader, Electro-Image, and Eco-Guard. It was two anodes hooked up to the car battery. In the early 1990s, corrosion engineers began denying McCready’s claims that Rust Evader prevented or substantially reduced corrosion in cars. McCready responded with force. In response to a corrosion engineer at the University of Oklahoma who’d gone public, he sent a letter to the president of the university, who in turn shut up the professor. The scene repeated itself at Case Western.

  At Texas Instruments, Bob Baboian began investigating, running a couple of experiments. In his lab, he scratched car doors and stuck the Rust Evader system on half of them. He put the doors on the roof of the building and on the beach in North Carolina. When he checked up on them later, he found no difference in the corrosion suffered by the doors with and without the system. GM and Ford did the same thing with complete automobiles at their proving grounds in Detroit. They found no benefit from Rust Evader. Baboian published his results.

  “It didn’t work,” he recalled. “It was really a scam. An absolute scam. Just awful.” The voltage in Rust Evader’s anodes was so low that they protected only a couple of inches of steel rather than the whole car. “For this product to work, you’d have to string anodes all over the vehicle, two inches from each other,” he said. Or live and drive underwater. McCready sent a letter to the president of Texas Instruments, alleging that Baboian didn’t know what he was talking about. Texas Instruments stood behind Baboian.

  In 1995, after looking at customer complaints and talking with Baboian, the FTC investigated. “They used to do demos in aquariums,” explained Michael Milgrom, an FTC lawyer on the case. “I asked if someone had gotten it to work in cars.” The FTC charged McCready with false advertising. When McCready denied the charges, the FTC prepared a case against him. The FTC had scientific evidence. Says Baboian: “It’s not like we were just saying it. We had concrete data.” The federal agency asked McCready what evidence he had.

  McCready didn’t respond to discovery requests. By April, fearing a civil penalty and/or fine, he relented and consented to a settlement. That summer, the FTC told McCready to stop claiming in any manner that Rust Evader was effective in preventing or substantially reducing corrosion in cars, and to stop making representations without true, competent, and reliable scientific evidence. To cap it all off, the FTC told McCready he was liable for $200,000 in consumer redress. The agency told him he had five days to come up with the money, and that if he wasn’t able to sell his house in that time, it would take 20 percent now and give him six months for the rest.

  Since then, McCready has moved to Arizona and back and taken up selling horological devices, also known as wristwatches. He and his wife sell them for $142.50 to ten times that under the brands Davosa and WestWatch. According to his websites, they’re Swiss watches inspired by the American West and assembled in China. According to the same websites, McCready goes by d.freemont, has a nice mustache, and recently self-published a memoir in which he describes his “dislike of college purpose [sic] and posture” and his “rebellious nature towards narrow doctrine and limited points of view.” The memoir does not mention Rust Evader.

  When I finally tracked down McCready, I asked him why not. He said it wasn’t an important part of his life. He said the FTC complaint was part of a conspiracy, that other products actually enhanced rust, and that politicians with great influence wanted McCready out of their hair. “I don’t like being controlled by anybody,” he said. Then he said he didn’t even want to think about it, and asked that I not call him back. He said I’d need to pay him for his time.

  Twenty-five minutes later, he called me back. “This is a painful part of my life,” he said. “It’s just like heartburn. I’m not interested in revisiting it. It’s distasteful. There’s a lot more than just the FTC and Rust Evader.” Then he wished me luck with my book, said he had better things to do, and hung up.

  Rust Evader is not dead, though. In Indonesia, it lives on under the name Neo Rust Evader. It comes with an eight-year guarantee. On a priceless company YouTube video that takes misrepresentation to the next level, the product is hailed as “US Technology.” When I told Baboian about Neo Rust Evader, he said, “Now they can get away with it because cars are corrosion resistant. You put it on, and the person says, ‘Wow, isn’t this wonderful!’ But if they don’t have the product, the result’s the same.”

  Back in Wisconsin, calls about rust still surprise John Carmona. Every week there’s an oddball request, a question from a museum curator, or the head of maintenance at a golf course, or someone trying to get rid of rust stains at Lucas Oil Stadium, where the Indianapolis Colts play. Fielding a call from a guy with a driveway full of iron stains—“His wife’s on him, and he’s looking to patch his marriage up”—Carmona may joke around. Otherwise it’s a pretty serious business.

  “It’s not like we get a lot of celebrities calling. Our customers are more middle income on down. People with millions of dollars don’t typically have rusty things. Our customers tend to be pretty practical; they need help.” They need help removing rust stains from their sidewalks. They need help restoring their tools, their cars, their houses. He recently answered a call from a guy restoring a Civil War canteen. “It literally looked like a big pile of rust,” Carmona said. Indeed, a video of that restoration, on YouTube, attests to that.

  In 2009, soon after Obama took office, Carmona got a handful of calls about preventing corrosion in guns. Rumor had it—at least in some places—that the feds would be knocking on doors, taking away firearms. So more than a few people decided to bury their guns in their backyards, and planned to keep them there until Obama left office. First, they wanted technical help, so they called the Rust Store. Carmona fielded the calls diplomatically. “We don’t offer political advice,” he told me, “but in this case, we’d still recommend not burying anything in the backyard.” He thought a safe was the way to go. Still, he recommended an eleven-ounce aerosol can of Cortec CorrShield Extreme Outdoor Corrosion Inhibitor ($23.51) for the body of the gun, and a seven
-ounce aerosol can of Lubricant & Rust Blocker ($10.99) for the lubricated parts, with the gun wrapped in a plastic bag before being placed in the dirt. (The Cortec stuff is also available in five-gallon containers, for those with really big guns, or a lot of them.)

  “I just got an email from a lady who had a rust stain on a pink shirt—her favorite shirt. She was very skeptical, because she tried other products already, and we told her our products are guaranteed, and she reluctantly tried it, and a week later we got an email from her that said it worked great. She’d already bought another of the same shirt, so now she has two of her favorite shirt.” This makes Carmona feel good. “We’re not selling Rolexes,” he explained. “Our products don’t make Christmas lists. A gallon of rust remover isn’t necessarily exciting.” So he finds meaning in helping people. He’s happy just to offer advice. “I would rather be honest than just get a sale that doesn’t help anyone.” On the other hand, he will ship antirust products anywhere in the country, by whatever means necessary. To small businesses, he’s shipped orders that exceed a thousand pounds. He’s taken thousands of calls. “Now when I look at a map, like Texas, I know of this city, or this town in Pennsylvania.”

  Carmona likes rust. He collects rusty things, buys rusty objects. He asks his buddies to bring in rusty stuff from their garages. They oblige, bequeathing old tractor parts, wondering what they’ll look like without rust. He held a rusty tool contest on the store’s website to raise the stakes. He keeps a stash. The stash is in two clear plastic tubs on a shelf in the warehouse. It contains a coffee can full of rusted nuts and bolts, pulleys, old saws, and rusted stainless steel, which he calls “a real treasure.” He’s on the lookout for a good piece of rusty chrome. “It’s not like the fifties, when every car had chrome on it. Rusty chrome is not as easy to come by. I’ve got friends with motorcycles, but they don’t want me testing on their motorcycles.” He never goes to boneyards to look for rusty things. That’s too easy, almost like cheating. Instead, he leaves tools in his driveway overnight—a hammer, say—then practices removing the rust from the hammer and removing the rust from his driveway. His staff practice too, with almost every product they sell. “Each time you remove rust from something, you gain a little bit more knowledge,” he says.

  For what it’s worth, NACE recommends ammonia, hydrochloric acid, or oxalic acid for getting rid of red rust (Fe2O3, or hematite). For getting rid of black rust (Fe3O4, or magnetite), it recommends acetic or citric acid. But many variations will do.

  “There’s two groups of people that understand our business,” Carmona said. “One says that’s the greatest idea in the world, and another that doesn’t deal that much with rust, and thinks, that’s like the most bizarre idea I’ve ever heard of. You know, if you live in a city, in an apartment, you never deal with rust. If you live in the country, or on a farm, or work on cars, or live in the rust belt like I do, or on the coasts . . . Put it this way: we don’t have a lot of customers from Arizona.” About the business of rust, Carmona recognizes that a great portion of the country’s rust problems are entirely preventable.

  Carmona did not have a booth at Corrosion 2012 because he’s not really in the corrosion industry the way the big players are. He’s rust’s Johnny Appleseed, a door-to-door rust salesman (via the internet). Aside from tool restorers, most of his customers are onetime only. He doesn’t advertise much, because his customers find him when they need him. This suits him fine. In a world where few hardware stores have employees who know what they’re talking about, where most read the copy on the package and consider that service, and no store carries hundreds of different rust products, his tiny piece of the market seems secure. “We have a lot of skeptical customers, and rightfully so,” he said. “There’s a lot of snake oil out there.”

  11

  THE FUTURE

  At the International Time Capsule Society, at Oglethorpe University, in Atlanta, they’re serious about the future. They keep a detailed registry of all known time capsules and encourage amateur time-capsule builders to sign it. They search for clues leading to the nine most-wanted time capsules, which, as fate would have it, have been lost to history. Most importantly, they advise time-capsule builders on archival storage techniques. They recommend a good, strong steel safe to create a cool, dry space in which to preserve artifacts. Get into details, and they’ll recommend a product called Ageless Z100. Ageless Z100 is an oxygen absorber, used to create a hypoxic, or anoxic, environment for maximum preservative powers. The product comes in sachets about the size of a wallet. The packets are inexpensive, because they consist of nothing more than iron filings in a permeable pouch, labeled NOT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION. The idea is that the iron will reliably, eagerly react with any oxygen in the time capsule, thereby keeping pesky oxygen from damaging any of the valuable artifacts also trapped within. Ageless Z100 thus becomes its own unintentional historical artifact. For in fifty, one hundred, five hundred, or a thousand years, when our descendants open our time capsules and find articles and documents and relics revealing our culture, creations, and achievements, they will also discover those small white packets of iron oxide. Those little bags of rust. They’ll know, almost before they know anything else about us, that oxygen was our enemy. That rust was our plague.

  At MIT, they’re even more serious about long-term preservation. When conceptual artist Trevor Paglen inquired about building the longest-lasting artifacts of human civilization—a hundred ultra-archival photos somehow stored in a time capsule mounted to a geosynchronous satellite—engineers at the NanoStructures Laboratory there decided to nano-etch the images into a silicon wafer and encase the wafer in five-inch discs of gold-plated aluminum. We know why they picked gold. Paglen’s metagesture, which he calls The Last Pictures, includes many photos that bear witness to the force of nature: a dust storm over a Texas prairie, a waterspout in Florida, a typhoon in Japan, a Montana glacier, a guy surfing Mavericks. Among other things, it also features Leon Trotsky’s brain, hela cells, the Great Wall of China, the Eiffel Tower, and at least two discernible mustaches. The capsule was launched aboard the EchoStar XVI satellite in November 2012. Paglen expects the thing to last until the year 4500002012—when the sun is expected to implode.

  I asked John Scully, the UVA professor and editor of Corrosion, about advances in the field. He began with an analogy. “Did you know that in the 1850s there were fifty thousand deaths a year from exploding boilers? Then modern fracture mechanics came along.” He said that corrosion has followed the same path. “A hundred years ago, corrosion was treated as an act of God. Now auto companies give you a ten-year warranty on paint. GM doesn’t lose their shirt on that warranty, because they know damn well that it’ll last in Michigan.” He said, “The consumer can enjoy products that have safe lives. The engineer now has at his disposal bona fide winning strategies. Corrosion used to be a list of dos and dont’s. An empirical listing, and now it’s a scientific basis. It’s almost equal to any other field. It’s been transformed from act of God to empirical understanding, sort of like the medical field.”

  Yet according to a 2011 National Academies report called Research Opportunities in Corrosion Science and Engineering, to which Scully contributed, the field remains poorly defined and inadequately respected. Privately employed old-timers possess much of the field’s institutional knowledge and pass it on slowly. Courses like those offered by NACE aren’t far-reaching enough for mainstream engineers. As such, engineers tackling corrosion remain unaware of what they don’t know. They overlook the field’s various scientific journals, and certainly don’t go to the technical research symposia at NACE or the Electrochemical Society. Corrosion is such an interdisciplinary field that most engineers fail to keep up with a fraction of research advances. According to Scully, many have horse blinders on. As a result of this gap, engineers keep making the same mistakes. “We’re still in a response mode,” he said.

  There’s an engineering joke about an old man who, as he aged, developed some serious health pro
blems. He had trouble with his sphincter. To relieve him of his aches, doctors and engineers combined forces and devised an implant made of a fancy and expensive alloy. It worked and gave him ten more years of life. Two hundred years after he died, researchers exhumed his body. All they found was his asshole.

  It’s a joke about overdesigning. The world doesn’t need $150,000 stainless steel or platinum-chromium assholes. It’s a waste.

  Gold-plated aluminum space discs aside, ask any engineer about the notion of the ultimate thing. If he’s honest, he’ll admit that it doesn’t exist. Whenever we build something, we balance material properties (strength, weight, ductility) with human constraints (cost, durability, buildability, repairability). The science, or art, is finding the right balance. That’s the job of an engineer. The responsibility of mature nonengineers is not to expect everything from every thing. If we accept imperfection and impermanence, upkeep becomes tolerable.

  Yet we’d prefer to fastidiously tend to our upper lips more than our bridges and pipelines. Somehow, replacement—unaffordable as it is—remains more attractive than maintenance. Bhaskar Neogi thinks the conundrum has roots in American culture. He thinks Americans have illdefined “macho.” Macho, to him, isn’t fighting power but thinking power. Mike Baach, the former corrosion industry executive who suggested a university corrosion program to Dan Dunmire, attributes the situation to recklessness. “We’ve been a reckless society,” he said. “The more money you have, the more reckless you are.” Everything degrades, he observed, but it’s not just dollars at stake. “We can’t afford it anymore. Is it a moral issue that our kids are gonna starve? Is it a moral issue when a busload of kids will get killed when a bridge falls? You can’t separate them. It’s moral, and it’s economic.” He pointed out that with exercise, you can get more physically fit, but you can’t stop aging. “With corrosion,” he said, “you can’t get time back, but you can stop the clock.”