When Rod Bagley needs a breath of fresh air, he doesn't head into the mountains. He strolls down to the overpass near his home and watches the traffic go by.
He can do that because inside nearly every car in America is a ceramic honeycomb, which he and a partner invented, that helps convert 95 percent of the pollutants from auto exhaust systems into water vapor and carbon dioxide."Taking a walk does remind me that the air is much cleaner than it used to be," Bagley said. "People don't remember how bad the pollution was in the cities back in the '60s and early '70s. It was almost impossible to breathe."
The wondrous doohickey at the heart of the smog-busting catalytic converter was developed in 1972 and 1973 by Bagley and Irv Lachman, ceramics scientists now nearing the end of their careers at Corning Inc.
Theirs was a largely unheralded contribution to pollution control, yet possibly the most significant one.
"It made air pollution control practical for the first time," Lachman said.
Because the catalytic converter is destroyed by lead, the invention also led rapidly to the use of lead-free gasoline.
Bagley and Lachman's work remains at the center of advances being made today.
Catalytic converters don't begin working until the engine's exhaust gases are hot, so most pollution spews out the tailpipe in the first two minutes the engine is running.
Corning is now shipping prototypes of an electrically heated catalytic converter that eliminates as much as 99.1 percent of the pollutants the engine doesn't burn up.
Placing a metal, serpentine-pattern heating element in front of the ceramic core gets the process going inside of 10 seconds.
In the United States, environmental laws often run ahead of technology. When Congress passed the Clean Air Act in 1970, scientists had a race on their hands to come up with advances in pollution controls for 1975-model cars.
Lachman came up with the "miracle material" - a mixture of clay, talc and an aluminum oxide capable of withstanding immense heat and cooling rapidly without cracking. Bagley devised the manufacturing process to create thousands of the cells.
"You look back on it as kind of a dream that you had. It still doesn't seem real," Bagley said. "There were a lot of naysayers."
The honeycomb's paper-thin walls are coated with a precious-metal catalyst that reacts with pollutants. The device is about the size of a soda can but has the surface area of a football field.
Corning has sold 300 million of the ceramic devices, generating $1 billion in sales. Bagley was named a research fellow, a distinction bestowed on just 13 scientists in the company's 143-year history.
Lachman and Bagley, who have worked at Corning since the early 1960s, got a token $1 for each of their patents - 52 in all.
Lachman, 63, took semi-retirement last year. Bagley is retiring in October at 60.
"I think what we did was what was expected of scientists in a company - that's what they're paying you for," Bagley said. "I make a good salary but I think in some other countries inventors are much more adequately rewarded. I'm certainly not a wealthy person. I'm still borrowing money to put the kids through school."