Abrasives are an important but rather traditional technology. Grinding wheels, abrasive papers and loose powders all exploit tiny particles of grit made by crushing larger chunks of the material. These grains tend to be roughly spherical; few have any acute, sharp cutting edges. Worse, their orientation in use is entirely random. Only a tiny minority do anything to shape the workpiece at all.

Daedalus now wants to make sharp and spiky abrasive particles directly. He points out that gases conduct heat very badly. Thus a snowflake growing in air cannot readily get rid of its latent heat of condensation. Its points and edges are much better cooled, and therefore grow much faster, than its core. Hence the highly branched, dendritic form of snowflakes. Accordingly, to make an ideal sharp and spiky abrasive powder, condense it from vapour in a large mass of air or inert gas. Indeed, when some metals (such as zinc) burn in air, the resulting smoke consists of fine, highly branched and pointed single crystals of metal oxide.

DREADCO chemists are now exploring these ideas. Abrasives such as aluminium oxide might be made by burning the parent metal in carefully controlled conditions. But others, such as silicon and tungsten carbides, cannot. So the team is burning derivatives such as aluminium trimethyl, silicon tetramethyl, and so on, in limited concentrations of strongly preheated oxygen. The desired abrasive should form by reaction in the intensely hot flame. Its vapour will cool into a micro-snow of tiny, dendritic, sharp-edged, ferociously abrasive single crystals.

DREADCO's dendritic abrasives will transform the technology. No matter what its orientation, each particle will present one or more cutting edges to the workpiece; and lacking grain boundaries, the single crystals will be immensely strong. Grinding wheels formed from them will carve effortlessly through metal and masonry. Machinists, production engineers and even burglars will rush to exploit their irresistible cutting power. Dendritic abrasives will even make headway through modern engineering ceramics, many of which are so hard that at present they are almost useless. Taking his vision to its limit, Daedalus even dreams of striking a carbon arc in ultrahigh-pressure xenon. Formed under extremes of pressure and temperature, the resulting carbon vapour should condense into the most abrasive snow of all — dendritic diamond dust.