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When Glenn Powers graduated from Kent Law School in the late 1920s, no one whispered a “magical word” to him about the future demand for materials. In fact, according to his son, Jim, it was a “lousy time to be a lawyer”, so he found work at Western Electric.

As he began to develop an understanding of the electrical industry, Glenn Powers also practiced his chosen profession, and assisted a client who owned several North Carolina Mica mines. Glenn traded his expertise for a partial ownership in the mining interests and found himself on the ground floor of a soon-to-burgeon industry.

That stroke of luck had nothing to do with magnetics. Instead, Glenn became part owner of a Mica mining and processing enterprise in North Carolina; subsequently owning the Buster mine, (the largest Mica mine in the world in the 1940s), in South Dakota.

In 1941, the Perfection Mica Company opened offices in downtown Chicago in the Civic Opera Building, the “architectural masterpiece of the age” at the time.

World War II drove the demand for Mica in the 1940s. Electron tubes required it, as did early electrical appliances, such as toasters. Because mica is transparent in thin layers, it was used during wartime in the eyeholes of gas masks, road goggles, and armored car peepholes. Its resistance to heat allowed it to be used instead of glass in windows for stoves and kerosene heaters.

Mica has a high dielectric strength and excellent chemical stability, making it a favored material for manufacturing capacitors for radio frequency applications. It has also been used as an insulator in high voltage electrical equipment. Mica is still being used today in cement blocks and asphalt roof shingles. It is also used in lipsticks and fingernail polish. Most anything that sparkles contains mica.

Large deposits of the “wonder mineral” as Mica was known then, were discovered in Africa, South America and India in the 1950s. Values dropped as production costs increased, making Mica mining less than a desirable business.

The next enterprise

Developing concurrently with the early Mica days, on December 20, 1939, Russell Robinson led a National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NASA) work crew in turning the first shovel of dirt on the corner of Moffett Field that would become the NACA Ames Aeronautical Laboratory.

The objective was space travel, and the need for precision control of magnetic fields began to emerge.

Television also created a demand for minimizing or eliminating magnetic field influence on vacuum tubes and the Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) – the heart of Televisions.

Perfection Mica Company created a division charged with developing magnetic shields.

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Photo credit www.ci.chi.il.us/Landmarks/chicago - hosted by City of Chicago.