10 ms·
Trade secrets of the oldest family firm in the US (2012)
- hayksaakian 11y agoSpoiler: they don't reveal the details of the alloy mix
- NegativeK 11y agoI'm a little confused -- I thought identifying element proportions was a solved problem. Perhaps it's the contents of the mixture as well as the process?
- CaveTech 11y agoI'm sure its composition could be determined by anyone who really wanted to know. But as a business owner you don't want to talk about that; being a one of a kind, 400 year old secret formula is way better business.
- jsprogrammer 11y ago>But as a business owner you don't want to talk about that; being a one of a kind, 400 year old secret formula is way better business. Pure speculation; presented as fact.
- alfiedotwtf 11y ago400 years ago, it was a secret. Today, it's just part of their marketing.
- _mgr 11y agoAnother secret within the Zildjian Family - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabian
- klapinat0r 11y agoCare to elaborate, what is the "secret"?
- ohashi 11y agoSabian is run by the same family from the look of it, albeit a different branch after a legal dispute.
- sjtrny 11y ago> Nearly 400 years ago, in 1623, Avedis Zildjian founded a cymbal-manufacturing company in Istanbul. That text next to a picture of "Avedis Zildjian" confused me for a while before I visited wikipedia. Did a time travelling photographer take that picture? No it's just Avedis Zildjian the third.
- jsprogrammer 11y agoYes, poor caption.
- Vadoff 11y agoMaybe I'm just ignorant, but isn't it easy to just smelt the metals down, put it through a centrifuge of some sort, and find out the alloy composition?
- olympus 11y agoOr I'll bet the accountant knows the formula by looking at the order books.
- Turing_Machine 11y agoIt may not be just the composition (which could easily be figured out with a mass spec or the like). How metal alloys are formed and treated can have vast effects on their properties. For instance, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wootz_steel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wootz_steel
- rjsw 11y agoThere are machines [1] designed for this sort of thing, my father used to "own" a JEOL one that he used for research on all kinds of stuff from Iron Age artifacts to gas turbine blades. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_microprobe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_microprobe
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- gavazzy 11y agoSure, in the same way you can look at the ingredients of an M&M's bag and replicate the chocolate candy.
- wycx 11y agoYou can't centrifuge molten metal to separate the constituent elements in the same way you can't centrifuge salt water to get the salt out. However, you could think of a mass spectrometer as working slightly along those lines: send charged ions though a curved magnet, and vary the magnetic field to steer the mass (i.e. the element) you are interested in to the detector. The easiest way to determine the composition of a cymbal would be to use a handheld XRF analyser-that is a convenient method scrap metal yards use to identify alloys. If you are willing to trade time for precision & accuracy, you could use ICP-MS or ICP-OES or laboratory XRF.
- keypusher 11y agoAs a longtime drummer, I respect Zildjian for being a market leader that still makes a quality product. The music industry can be fickle and might quickly transition to another brand if the quality dropped or if Zildjian just wasn't "cool" anymore, but that never seems to have happened.
- atarian 11y agoI can't think of any tech company, other than Google that has a "secret sauce" (like a search engine algorithm) that they can hand down generation after generation.
- ArkyBeagle 11y agoMapReduce is largely described in books and papers from the 1950s.
- mcculley 11y agoThere's a lot more to a search engine than MapReduce.
- unknownzero 11y agoThe comments here seem to be very focused on the "secret" alloy. What I took away was the success of keeping Zildjian a profitable family business is mostly due to smart processes in how to involve new members of the family. IE, no reporting to another family member, must work outside the company first to gain another perspective to bring back to the company, no hiring spouses. I'm not an expert on the matter but I'd imagine that nepotism and having limited outside insight are big problems for most multi-generational family businesses.