Chapter 2: The Chain

The heat inside Rearden Steel's Number Four Furnace was two thousand eight hundred degrees Fahrenheit, which was, Hank Rearden thought, the most honest thing in the world.

Metal did not dissemble. Metal did not form committees. Metal did not ask how you were feeling or suggest that perhaps you might consider the perspectives of stakeholders. You gave metal the right conditions and it became what it was capable of becoming, and if it failed, the failure was visible and measurable and traceable to a specific error in a specific process, unlike, for example, the failure of his marriage, which had been traced by three different therapists to three entirely different specific errors, which suggested to Rearden that the diagnostic framework was insufficiently rigorous.

He stood at the viewing platform above the furnace and watched the first pour of Rearden Metal—his metal, ten years in development, the alloy he had worked toward through four thousand individual experiments, each documented in notebooks that filled two lateral file cabinets in his home office—flow orange and inevitable into the molds below. His hands were in his pockets. His jaw was set. He allowed himself, for a moment, the private luxury of being right.

The notebooks were real. The work was real. This should be said clearly, because the temptation of parody is to take everything away, and that is not quite honest either. Hank Rearden had spent ten years on Rearden Metal and he was a genuinely gifted metallurgical engineer and the alloy was, by the measures that mattered—tensile strength, thermal stability, corrosion resistance at high pressure—better than anything currently on the market by a margin that was not incremental but categorical.

He had also, and this is the part that required a separate set of notebooks to document:

Received $14.3 million in Department of Energy grants between 2011 and 2019 for "advanced materials research for infrastructure applications," applied for through a subsidiary called Rearden Advanced Composites LLC, which appeared in no press materials about the invention of Rearden Metal.

Employed, at various stages of development, forty-seven researchers and engineers whose terminal degrees were earned at public universities subsidized by federal and state governments to the tune of, collectively, several million dollars in per-student educational expenditure.

Used, in the refinement of the alloy's production process, a crystallographic modeling technique developed at Argonne National Laboratory and published in the open literature, without which, his lead materials scientist had noted in an internal memo he had subsequently asked her to revise, the timeline would have been "probably another eight years, minimum."

Held seventeen patents on the manufacturing process, enforceable because the United States government maintained a patent system staffed by examiners and backed by federal courts.

Operated in a municipality with roads, water treatment, electrical grid infrastructure, and a fire department, none of which he had built.

None of this diminished what he had done. The synthesis was his. The insight was his. The ten years were his, and they had been hard, and they had cost him, among other things, his first marriage, his sleep, and his relationship with his brother Philip, who was a secondary character and would be introduced shortly.

But the word "his" was doing a great deal of work in his internal monologue, and it was the kind of work that, if you asked it to show its calculations, would produce documentation that was interesting to read.

The metal cooled. His plant manager, a man named García who had been with the mill for fourteen years and who knew the furnace's idiosyncrasies the way a musician knows an instrument, began the quality inspection. Rearden did not watch this part. He went to his office.

On his desk was a draft of the lobbying brief.

The brief had been prepared by a firm called Whitmore, Crane & Associates, which described itself on its website as "a strategic government relations consultancy serving the interests of American innovation." It cost Rearden Steel four hundred and twenty thousand dollars a year on retainer, plus success fees, which were not itemized in the annual report in a way that made them easy to find.

The brief was titled: Protecting American Infrastructure: The Case for Material Safety Standards in Federal Rail Construction Projects.

Rearden read through it. The language was careful. It spoke of "performance thresholds" and "independent certification requirements" and "the need to protect public safety in critical infrastructure applications." It did not, in its forty-two pages, mention Rearden Metal by name. It did not need to. What it did, with the precision of a man who has spent years in the business of this kind of precision, was describe a set of technical requirements that Rearden Metal satisfied and that its three closest competitors—products from a Chinese state-owned materials company, a German conglomerate, and a startup in Ohio—did not.

If these requirements were written into federal procurement standards for rail construction, which was the goal, then Rearden Metal would be, in practical terms, the only product eligible for contracts covering approximately sixty percent of the anticipated infrastructure spending over the next decade.

"National security," the brief said, several times, in places chosen for emphasis.

Rearden set down the brief. He looked out his office window at the mill floor below, where García was running calipers along a test section of the first Rearden Metal beam with the focused attention of a man who understood exactly what he was measuring and why it mattered.

He thought: The metal is better. The standards should reflect that the metal is better. If the standards happen to exclude the competitors because the competitors have not done what I have done, that is not my problem. That is the market working.

He thought this without irony. This was perhaps the most impressive thing about him.

The brief would go through three revisions. A senator from Pennsylvania whose campaign committee had received, through a series of legal and properly-disclosed vehicles, contributions totaling sixty thousand dollars from entities connected to Rearden Steel's parent holding company, would attach its core language as an amendment to an infrastructure appropriations bill. The amendment would pass with bipartisan support, because its language was technical and its title was "The American Materials Safety and Infrastructure Protection Act," and voting against the American Materials Safety and Infrastructure Protection Act required a floor speech that was difficult to give in an election year.

The Ohio startup would close within eighteen months. Its founder, a metallurgical engineer named Chen whose doctoral thesis had pioneered the alloy composition technique she had spent six years commercializing, would give an interview to a trade publication in which she said that the regulatory environment had made it impossible for smaller companies to compete. She used the word "looters." She was not referring to the same people Rearden used that word to describe.

That evening, Rearden came home.

His wife Lillian was hosting a dinner party. The guests included two people he respected—a physicist and a civil engineer—and four people he did not, whom he categorized collectively as "the parasites," by which he meant people who produced nothing tangible, though if pressed he would have had to acknowledge that the category included a novelist, a cellist, a social worker, and his own brother Philip, whose work in nonprofit housing development had produced, in the last three years, affordable units for approximately three hundred families in the Philadelphia area, a number which did not appear on a balance sheet and therefore did not register.

Philip was standing near the fireplace holding a glass of wine and telling the cellist something that had made her laugh.

"The new alloy poured today," Rearden said, to the room, because he had not learned yet how to enter a room without making an announcement.

"Wonderful," said Lillian. "Does it need a drink?"

This joke did not land because Rearden did not understand it was a joke.

He went to the kitchen and told the caterer—a woman named Sandra who owned her own small business and had two employees and was three years into paying back an SBA loan—that the crab puffs were good. She thanked him. He did not ask her name, because he was thinking about tensile strength.

Later, after the guests had gone, he found, on his desk, a bracelet.

He had made it himself, months ago—a single link chain formed from the first small test batch of Rearden Metal, the very first material to come out of his process, before the grant funding, before the Argonne technique, before García and the team who had scaled the process from lab to furnace. This part was entirely his. The bracelet was ugly in the way that prototypes are ugly, rough-edged and functional, with no interest in being anything other than what it was.

He held it for a moment.

He thought: Ten years.

He thought: This is what it means to create something.

These thoughts were not wrong, exactly. They were incomplete in the way that a man looking at a photograph of himself thinks: This is what I look like, without considering the quality of the light, or the camera, or the person who suggested the angle, or the friend who had called that morning and whose name he had not thought to mention to anyone because it had not seemed relevant.

He put the bracelet in his desk drawer and went to bed.

In the mill, the number four furnace cooled. García had locked up an hour ago. The quality reports were excellent. Somewhere in Ohio, in a rented lab space that would be empty by next spring, a woman named Chen was running her own tests on her own alloy, not yet knowing what was coming, still believing that the market rewarded the best product.

The market, Rearden would have told her, if he had known about her, which he did not, rewarded the best positioned product. He would not have said this as a confession. He would have said it as a lesson. He would have meant it kindly, in the way that powerful men often mean things kindly when the alternative is thinking about what they mean.