Trade secrets of the oldest family firm in the US (2012) | Hacker News Reader

Trade secrets of the oldest family firm in the US (2012)

bbc.com

94 pointsacdanger28 comments

Another secret within the Zildjian Family - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabian

Care to elaborate, what is the "secret"?

Sabian is run by the same family from the look of it, albeit a different branch after a legal dispute.

The 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.

Maybe 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?

Or I'll bet the accountant knows the formula by looking at the order books.

It 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

There 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

Sure, in the same way you can look at the ingredients of an M&M's bag and replicate the chocolate candy.

You 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.

If you centrifuge salt water you'll get a concentration gradient and if it's saturated at the end you'll get salt crystals. Alloys aren't solutions, so it won't work, but you'll still get a gradient. You could iteratively refine by removing the unwanted half from two spins and combining the wanted halves for a third spin. I'm not sure this is practical...

Do people actually do this? Can the accellerations you reach with laboratory centrifuges induce sufficient concentration gradients in salt solutions? Surely the salt begins dissolving as you stop accellerating?

No, people don't do this in practice, and I haven't seen it done, but it could be done if you had the right equipment and a salty enough solution. Just decant the water at the end, salt doesn't dissolve immediately. I don't know how fast you'd have to go.

Sarcastic comments aside, it is not just the "quantitative" or "stoichiometric" (if I may) side that counts.

In alloys, there is what is called the Phase Diagram.

Depending on how you mix stuff (proportions), the temperature you mix them at, the pressure you mix them at, and the rate at which these change during the operation, you will have completely different characteristics.

There's also what is called the Time-Temperature-Transformation diagram.

It's not enough to set parameters, how they change matters, too.

The difference between hard steel bayonnette and a flexible shaving blade comes to mind to illustrate the influence of the rate of change of temperature, for example.

And here I only talked about a binary phase diagram. In the case of the article, it's a tin-silver-copper (as far as we know). The result is a solid. In a phase diagram, if you have it easy, it is finding a point in a continuum if you want to reverse engineer the alloy 100%.

[0]http://chemwiki.ucdavis.edu/Textbook_Maps/Physical_Chemistry...

[1]http://www.sv.vt.edu/classes/MSE2094_NoteBook/96ClassProj/ex...

All those things are true, but they just make it harder to duplicate. Not impossible or even especially difficult for people who know this stuff.

Plus there are only a limited number of ways you can mix them, a few trials and checking which come closest, then refining from there would get you there as well.

The important part isn't the alloy. I mean, yeah, it gives them a leg up - but there's nobody willing to put in the time and money to figure out what's in their cymbals, because it's just more worth it to make your own.

The Zildjian name is more valuable than any of their cymbals. If you don't buy Zildjian cymbals, it's because they're too expensive, or it's because you don't like the sound. It's a better idea for a company to go and make a cymbal that fills one of the other niches in the market than to try to replace Zildjian.

It's sort of like Coca-Cola's secret recipe. If you wanted to put the time and effort into it, you could figure out what's in it. But why bother? Coca-Cola's success is due to the brand, not to the taste.

This family has apparently been doing a lot of things right from a business and operations management perspective. But their alloys are not "secret". It's actually never been a secret :) Production of cymbals is one of the lesser-known deep-rooted traditions in Istanbul.

http://www.aa.com.tr/en/culture-and-art/468267--holy-metal-i...

FWIW "Zildjian" is a mix of Turkish and Armenian. "Zilciyan" would be the Turkish spelling where "Zil" is cymbal or bell in Turkish, the -ci suffix adds a "seller-of" or "manufacturer-of" meaning and -yan == -ian, "descendant-of" in Armenian.

> 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.

Yes, poor caption.

I'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?

I'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.

>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.

400 years ago, it was a secret. Today, it's just part of their marketing.

As 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.

I 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.

MapReduce is largely described in books and papers from the 1950s.

There's a lot more to a search engine than MapReduce.

Spoiler: they don't reveal the details of the alloy mix

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