O.C. Scientist Enjoys Fruits of Discovery
Like Newton, the apple and gravity, fruit once again has played a big role in a scientific discovery. But instead of getting bopped on the noggin like Sir Isaac, Ray Turner reached into his refrigerator for a lemon and came away with a startling solution to one of the more daunting environmental dilemmas facing mankind.
After a few false starts one evening at his La Habra home, the longtime Hughes Aircraft Co. employee cooked up a citrus-based substitute for a widely used industrial chemical blamed for the erosion of Earth’s protective ozone layer.
Turner’s kitchen coup, backers say, should provide the defense electronics industry with a long-sought replacement for the chemical, prove a cheap and reliable alternative for other high-tech manufacturers--and put a healthy dent in the stubborn problem of ozone depletion.
In the months since his startling breakthrough, the avuncular aerospace manager and a team at Hughes have demonstrated that a simple brew of citrus juices and water can work in an industrial setting as a ready replacement for chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, the troublesome chemical used in the manufacture of most electronic circuit boards.
As officials at Hughes formally unveiled the discovery Thursday with dual press conferences in Los Angeles and Washington, the public spotlight finally shined on Turner, the folksy native of Kansas City, Mo., who proved that sometimes there are low-tech answers to high-tech problems.
“I have a great deal of respect now for my refrigerator,” said Turner, 62, a self-described “bumpkin” with silver-rimmed glasses and a penchant for an occasional one-liner. “I was determined to find a simple solution to a complex problem. And I figured that if it failed I could at least mix flour with it and make cookies.”
W. Scott Walker, a Hughes senior vice president and chief of the company’s Fullerton complex, called Turner “a delightful fellow” who likes to keep a low profile and is nervous about all the attention.
“He approached it from a citizen’s view of the world,” Walker said. “He really wanted to do something about CFCs.”
Turner flatly acknowledges that much of the motivation for his discovery stems from his love of the outdoors. The father of five grown children, he served for four decades as a Boy Scout troop leader, learning to cherish the natural landscape as he trekked with coveys of Scouts on camping trips.
“I have a deep appreciation for the environment,” Turner said one day during an interview at his cramped office deep inside the beehive-like Hughes Ground Systems Group complex in Fullerton. “I recognized we were polluting the ozone layer. I knew the direction the industry was traveling wasn’t one we should be continuing.”
Seated behind his desk in a blue lab coat, Turner hardly has the look of a noted inventor. This is more the mild-mannered guy next door. His gray hair is plastered neatly. His face is clean-shaven and retains a serious formality until a joke curls from his lips and a smile raises his rosy cheeks.
Turner spends much of his free time working on old televisions and radios, replacing tubes and sorting out twisted wiring before selling them at garage sales. For years he ran an electronics repair business out of his garage to help augment his aerospace salary and keep up with the cost of raising his family.
“The TV companies would send me their dogs and I’d fix them,” said Turner, who has no formal college degree and instead learned his trade on the job, through correspondence courses and at a junior college.
A confessed workaholic, he has been with Hughes since 1969, and his job now involves looking for ways to improve the production process. Before that he worked with North American Rockwell on the Minuteman missile project.
But nothing has thrilled Turner quite like the little citrus discovery, which came on a Friday night in November of 1989.
It had been a trying day. A regional air quality inspector had discovered a minor violation on a contraption containing CFCs, and Turner was troubled by the finding.
On the drive home, he got a bee in his bonnet and decided to take a crack at the impossible. He would come up with a replacement for CFCs.
The chemical, which is also used in automobile air conditioners, has been a prime ingredient since the 1950s in the manufacture of electronic circuit boards, the graham cracker-size wafers used to lace together transistors and other tiny components. To prepare the boards for soldering, compounds known as fluxes are applied to clean off an oxidized film that covers metal. The CFCs are then used to remove the fluxes from the boards.
CFCs react in the stratosphere and eat a hole in the Earth’s ozone layer, the atmospheric shield that safeguards the planet from ultraviolet radiation. The solar radiation can cause skin cancer and cataracts as well as upset the world’s ecosystems.
Turner decided that he needed to find a natural, everyday ingredient that could be used instead of fluxes for cleaning the boards. Thus, any need for CFCs would be eliminated.
What better place to look, he figured, than his refrigerator. He gazed at the various foods on the shelves, determined to run through every one to find a solution. Mayonnaise? Ketchup? It didn’t matter.
First he tried vinegar. Turner put a drop or two on a corroded penny and then fired up his trusty soldering gun. It didn’t work. The solder wouldn’t stick, meaning the vinegar had failed to clean off the film of oxidation.
Next his attention turned to a lemon. Turner ground up some peel and rubbed it on the penny with a spoon. Once again, the solder stood in a benign bubble, unable to grip the penny.
Then he put a drop of the lemon juice on, figuring its acidity would eat away just enough.
The rest, as they say, is history.
“Bam! The solder flowed right out. I was jumping for joy,” recalled Turner. “I was soldering everything that wouldn’t move. My wife was beginning to wonder if I should be sentenced to Fairview (Developmental Center). She started to question my stability.”
John Reiss, the operations manager who shepherded the development of Turner’s concept, said his colleague was proud, although a bit sheepish, when he brought the formula in to the office to show it off.
“He was like a little boy. He said, ‘Look at what I have!’ ” Reiss recalled. “I was surprised how simple it was and how well it worked.”
In the months since, Turner and a team assembled by Hughes have worked diligently to perfect the technique, which is now being used on several military projects. Numbering more than a dozen, the research team has received a top company award. Turner also got a healthy bonus, which he used to buy a restored 1929 Chevrolet and some new furniture for his wife, Marie.
Turner has gotten rave reviews over the prospects of his new potion, which for a time was dubbed “Turner’s Crazy Flux” but now has a far more deferential title: HF1189 (for Hughes Formula, discovered November, 1989). His colleagues made up a coffee cup emblazoned with the formula’s label, which features a picture of the Earth covered by the words “A World of Difference.”
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has called Turner’s brew “environmentally superior,” and one top official said Hughes deserves “high marks across the board.” Although other firms have come up with new techniques to stop using CFCs, some of them citrus-based, Turner’s is the first to meet the Defense Department’s rigid specifications for manufacturing military equipment.
Times staff writer Marla Cone contributed to this story.
How CFCs Destroy the Ozone
Chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, are man-made chemicals useful to industry but damaging to the Earth’s ozone layer, a part of the atmosphere that screens out harmful radiation. Ozone Breakdown 1) Emissions: CFCs escape from industrial processes, air conditioners, refrigerating units and other sources. 2) Ozone layer: A blanket of ozone--a type of oxygen--exists high above Earth. Acting as a planetary “sunscreen,” it absorbs ultraviolet rays that could cause skin cancer and cataracts and damage crops and ecosystems. 3) Freed molecule: Ultraviolet light knocks loose a chlorine atom from a CFC molecule in the ozone layer. 4) Ozone destruction: The freed chlorine atom steals away an oxygen atom from an ozone molecule, leaving ordinary oxygen. One freed chlorine atom can damage hundreds of thousands of ozone molecules, thinning the layer. Uses of CFCs: Plastic foam: 30% Refrigeration/air conditioning: 16% Miscellaneous: 4% Car air conditioning: 16% Sterilizing medical equipment: 4% Unknown *: 19% Hughes Aircraft Co. of Fullerton has developed an alternative that may replace CFC-113 and other types of CFCs used by many defense electronics firms for cleaning circuit boards.: 11% * Unknown includes CFCs made in United States but sold overseas and unreported military uses. CFC-113 Emissions in California Nearly 5 million pounds of CFC-113 were released into the atmosphere by California businesses in 1990. The percentage of total emissions released by county: Los Angeles: 28.7% Santa Clara: 25.2% Orange: 16.9% San Diego: 12.5% Ventura: 2.8% Riverside: 1.8% Other counties: 11.9% Sources: U.S. and California EPA
Researched by Danny Sullivan / Los Angeles Times
