Petri Bryk was a long-serving managing director of Outokumpu Ltd and an innovative metallurgist whose inventions, especially flash melting, have left their mark on technology abroad as well as at home.
Background
Bryk had had a multicultural upbringing and education. He was born in Sortavala in Ladogan Karelia. From there his family moved to Stockholm, where he was enrolled at a classical grammar school. The family soon returned to Finland, where he continued his schooling, doing his university entrance examination at the Swedish-Language Ruotsalainen normaalilyseo school in Helsinki. His background in Classics, which had become rare in the engineering world, left its mark on the way in which Bryk handled and described technical phenomena. This schooling was complemented by the lifelong interest in nature awakened by his father, an expert on butterflies.
Career
Petri Bryk entered the service of Outokumpu in 1938 as a freshly graduated chemical engineer. The company's managing director Eero Makinen (1686 -1953) hired his nephew, who had a grasp of both theory and practice, as a metallurgist at the Imatга copper factory. Bryk, who had originally thought of becoming a doctor but had then followed in his brother's footsteps by starting ro study Civil Engineering, had proved to be a talented chemical engineer as well. His final results were excellent. The young metallurgist had also already gained experience of blast furnaces at the Wartsila steelworks.
The Imatra copper smelting plant was a splendid facility, at the cutting edge of smelting technology even by international standards, and it would have provided work enough for Bryk. But Makinen's plans led Bryk into the future. He was immediately sent to the USA and Canada to study electrolysis, the next phase in the refining of copper. When he returned from two years abroad, Bryk directed the planning of an electrolysis plant for the metal factory at Pori and then became its technical manager. He now moved with practised ease in the fields of both smelting (pyrometallurgy) and solutions and electric charges (hydrometallurgy). During the war, as Bryk himself related, he improvised a merhod of treating nickel ore from Petsamo; it involved using an electric furnace as an exceptional first phase of electrolysis. The practical benefit of rhe first patented (1943) method was notable for Finland's wartime economy, since nickel represented a really valuable source of hard cash.
Bryk became Outokumpu's chief metallurgist in 1947, a member of the board in 1949 and managing director in 1953 following Makinen's death. He continued his predecessor's policy in at least two ways. He further developed the production and processing chains of the national mining concern, which had begun to exploit eastern Finnish copper ore, and he also acquired new ore supplies for its use. And like Makinen, Bryk favoured technological development work based on scientific research. In some fields Outokumpu even conducted university-level basic research. However, while doing honorary work concerned with the development of polytechnic teaching and the national technological research institute, Bryk realised that Outokumpu's increasing research commitments could be shared with such institutions. He was one of the key figures in promoting a stronger network of collaboration linking industry and tertiary institutions in Finland. His contribution to the establishment ot the Tampere University of Technology was significant. For his services in the promotion of training and research he was awarded honorary docrorates by two universities: the University of Turku (Geology) and the Helsinki University of Technology (Mining Technology).
As managing director Bryk consolidated Outokumpu's research activities. He kept research under his special protection even in cases where the firm's organisation was decentralised in other respects. Ore-dressing technology and metallurgical laboratory research, plant-level development and testing work, the production of instruments and the export of projects were organised by the late 1960s. Soon flash smelting revealed only rhe tip of the iceberg - or more precisely rhe volcano - of the technology being developed by Outokumpu. Alongside it, research and product development were leading to numerous new conquests of territory. The X-ray analysers produced by physical research launched ar Bryk's initiative won a prize as one of the world's best industrial inventions in 1968, The results of Outokumpu's research were also given a high profile by the introduction of Metor metal detectors at airports throughout the world. In professional circles Outokumpu began то acquire the reputation of a firm whose technology was capable of making even lower-grade ores a commercial proposition.
Many metallurgical innovations which had been overshadowed by flash smelting also rose high on Bryk's scale of values. When the first powder specimen from the Kokkola cobalt factory was taken to Helsinki, he had much cause to celebrate. The idea - already nurtured by Makinen - of producing this valuable metal as well had been made reality in an elegant and exacting fashion - in the view of users of the plant, perhaps too exacting. The flash melting method, the production of iron from slag, the production of selenium and cobalt, nickel electrolysis and Bryk's many other metallurgical technologies almost invariably involved an element of ambition, a departure from established practice.
It has been said of Bryk that he was exceptionally talented, a genius in a class of his own. If he was, he recognised his own peculiar nature. "My watch shows twelve'o clock. Sometimes it is on the seriousness side, sometimes on the downing iide." Bryk never left boyish tomfoolery behind him. Even as managing director he was often prankish with companions and subordinates - sometimes to the point of embarrassment. His uniquely probing humour was perhaps the impatient reaction of a "renaissance man" to a modem world in which feelings turn into things and leadership into group-work. It was difficult for an engineer who took his guidelines for life from Virgil and his metallurgical inspiration from Georgius Agricola's De Re Metallica to stay within the bounds of convention. But as a counterweight to intellectual teasing, there was always his serious commitment to work and research.
Bryk left an enduring mark on Outokumpu's - and the world's - technology. As a technological innovator he was an ingenium, a thinker of genius, a man of insight. In the world of machines he was also an artist whose hand was always visible in his creations. But... fugit irreparabile tempus. Bryk was forced to recognise that times and technologies were changing. Mostly he found change pleasant. His own inventions and also his style of leadership helped to bring new standards and a new ethos into the company. But not everything always went as he wanted. The decision on the production of stainless steel made in the early 1970s was not to his liking. The actual production of iron and steel was not the problem: he had, after all, pondered for decades on this oppportunity provided by Outokumpu's raw materials; what he could not understand was the regional policy associated with the building of a steel plant. Bryk wanted the new factory sited at Pori, but the majority shareholder, the Finnish State, ordered Outokumpu to build it tn unemployment-plagued northern Finland.
Perhaps the disappointment was too great for a managing director accustomed to arriving at independent - even idiosyncratic - solutions. In January 1972 Bryk announced that he was resigning from his position in the company's management for reasons of health. The announcement came as a surprise; not even his closest associates had known of his intention. In retirement Bryk received the international James Douglas award, but he did not live to see Outokumpus domestic 'iron process' finally carried through to a conclusion that really did credit to the metallurgist. The Tornio stainless steel plant, built near Kemi's large chrome mine, became one of the world's most efficient.