The Utica company that found a use for a rare metal
Indium Corporation started in 1934 in Utica after two Oneida Community chemists spent years looking for practical uses of indium.
By Owen Tafel
In 1863 two German scientists found a new element in zinc ore and named it indium, after the indigo lines it left in a spectroscope. For decades afterward hardly anyone had a use for it. Part of the reason that changed is a story from Oneida County.
William Stanley Murray, a Colgate graduate, was director of research at the Oneida Community, the silverware maker. He and technologist Daniel Gray spent years studying indium, looking for ways to alloy and electroplate with it. Murray and Oneida Community workers tested thousands of samples of zinc, silver, gold and lead ore and found no indium. He eventually found that it could be pulled commercially from zinc ore mined in Chloride, Arizona.
Many of the patents Murray and Gray received involved a method of making silver and silver plate resist tarnish. In 1934, Murray, the Oneida Community and Anaconda Mining Company formed the Indium Corporation of America in Utica. Its early work was done in Murray’s garage on Watson Place.
The company has kept growing. Indium Corporation now makes solders, fluxes, thermal materials and metals for the electronics and semiconductor industries, with factories and technical support in China, Germany, India, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, the United Kingdom and the United States.