Quick-Fire Quips is a questionnaire where we get to know people who stand out in the State of Alabama!
Today, Alabama Public Radio host Baillee Majors talks with Dr. Raymond Thompson, spent over six decades shaping the landscape of metallurgy, education and community in Birmingham.
As a celebrated Engineering Professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), he mentored generations of engineers while serving in key leadership roles, including President of the UAB National Alumni Society.
He founded Vista Engineering, a firm specializing in forensic engineering, product liability, failure analysis and design.
He's also the founder of an exhibit opening in Birmingham this month that showcases the hidden beauty inside of metals.
Baillee: Hey, Dr. Thompson. How are you?
Raymond: Hey, Baillee. I'm great! How are you doing today?
Baillee: I'm doing great. I'm so excited to chat with you today!
Raymond: Same here.
Baillee: You're the founder of Symphony of Elements. For people who are unfamiliar with what that is, can you please explain?
Raymond: Symphony of Elements was founded to really do one thing.
For about 50 years, I've had the pleasure of working as a materials engineer, metallurgist and scientist at UAB, and then in my own company. I got to look at these beautiful structures of metals all the time— because we're always doing engineering analysis, forensic analysis and the design of materials.
We change the atomic structure, and we have to check that structure. We do that by a process called metallography, where we look at these structures under the microscope, and they have beautiful designs, beautiful textures... but nobody outside of our field really sees these... they're hidden in this microscopic world.
Symphony of Elements is an attempt to bring this microscopic world of art to the public in a large art display, tied with a little bit of the science behind it... the forum to allow the public to see what we've been looking at for 100 years, which is the beauty of metallic structures.
As far as I know, this is the first public art showing of metal art—metallographic art—that's been done. We did our first one last year, and this will be our second one this year.
Baillee: What is the date and location?
Raymond: We're going to be at Sloss Furnaces, which is a National Historic Landmark here in Birmingham.
Our opening is going to be an all-day festival on the grounds. Live music, DJ and food trucks. The exhibit is going to be opening at the exhibition hall at Sloss Furnaces on Saturday, May the 23rd.
We'll have representatives from The University of Alabama and from UAB in materials engineering to talk to students and other people about the field of material science. The Sloss people will be doing castings and forgings on site, so you get to see some metal flying and art being made there.
We'll have some people telling the story of the steel industry in Birmingham in the lecture hall at Sloss, and so we'll have three or four well-known individuals who will be telling that story throughout the day, so big plans for that.
And the exhibit will run through the summer.
Baillee: If people want to know more, are you on Facebook, social media? What's the website? What can we... what can we link up?
Raymond: Our website is Symphony of Elements.org. That will show you some of the pictures, prints and images that you'll get to see at the exhibit.
But hey, other than that, you have to come out to Sloss Furnaces and see the exhibit! There'll be information along with each photograph that tells you what the photograph is.
We're going to have hardware—a number of the companies around town, the steel industries, Nucor, CMC Steel, and Nortrak are providing us with hardware that's typical of their processes—and the pictures then will represent what that metal looks like inside of that.
Baillee: Awesome! Now the introductions are done. Let's get you warmed up for the questionnaire, and to do that, I want you to say Quick-Fire Quips three times fast.
Raymond: Quick-Fire crypt Quips, Quick-Fire Quips, Quick-Fire Quips.
(Raymond and Baillee laugh)
That wasn't even close. That wasn't even close.
Baillee: You know, you tried your best! It's harder to say than people might think. Okay, here's the first question: What comes to mind when you hear "Alabama"?
Raymond: Hometown, love people, great folksy place compared to the rest of the world, very friendly and very warm.
Baillee: Describe Alabama in one word.
Raymond: Green.
Baillee: That's a good one! What is a hidden gem in Birmingham that you think more people should know about?
Raymond: Oh gosh, there's so many.
Baillee: There are!
Raymond: I would say Sloss Furnaces. I've come to love it more recently.
As a young man and boy, I would drive by the overpass where Sloss is now, and you'd see the metal pouring out onto the ground, and you'd see all these beautiful red burning embers flying all over the place, fire and stuff.
To see it really in action now, you see it as a historic landmark, kind of quiet and a little bit dead compared to what it was like when it was alive.
Baillee: I agree. It's very pretty. What's something that you don't like about living in Alabama?
Raymond: Traffic between Birmingham and Hoover.
Baillee: What is your favorite thing about living in Alabama?
Raymond: Oh, family. Family.
Baillee: What is a bad stereotype or something that people get wrong about Alabama?
Raymond: Social injustice.
Baillee: What is your favorite getaway spot in Alabama?
Raymond: My basement is one place. A little man cave!
(Raymond and Baillee laugh)
For the getaway, any place outside where you can walk around in the Birmingham area—you go to Oak Mountain, you go to Ruffner Mountain—that's time well spent.
Go see the Cahaba lilies one year when they're in bloom.
Baillee: Yes, biodiversity! We have so much of it... Let's talk more about the Symphony of Elements. The theme is Forged in Steel. What inspired that name?
Raymond: It's an exhibit of metal, and this year, in particular, we're doing the iron and steel of Alabama, and forging is a huge part of that process: cast, forge, product.
Baillee: Alabama was built on iron and steel, but if you had to pick one element to represent the state, what would it be?
Raymond: That's a tough one. Iron carbon.
Baillee: Why?
Raymond: Iron is what the industry comes from—the element iron—and to make steel you have to have carbon, both for the steel to be strong and also to heat the ingredients to make the steel to begin with.
So, those two things are critical to what the state of Alabama became. And it's still perfect.
Baillee: Birmingham is the only place where the three ingredients for iron are found in close proximity. That's iron ore, coal, and limestone. Which is the most photogenic element?
Raymond: I'm gonna go with limestone. Any of those minerals, done right, can be beautifully photographed.
Baillee: Can you talk about some of the different patterns that will be at the exhibit?
Raymond: Snowflake patterns. You'll see a lot of snowflakes. A snowflake is a solidification of water into solid ice. When we solidify metals, we get similar patterns.
I have about half a dozen of those patterns. They're so unique, but typically reproduced in steels, as well as in other materials.
Forging creates a whole new set of images, a whole new set of designs and patterns that we get. In different metals, they show up a little bit differently. When we're doing iron and steel, we're looking at three or four different structures.
Combinations of just the iron metals tend to segregate to a certain extent. In an iron, you'll see the groupings of carbon, you'll see groupings of iron, you'll see groupings of combined iron and carbon. You might also see silicates and other things.
When you look at one of our pictures, what you'll see is a lot of different little things in there, and it's the different combinations and formations of the different elements, and they lead to different shapes, different colors, different enjoyable designs to look at.
We're looking at nature's idea of abstract art.
Baillee: So, this might be an unfair question.
Raymond: It will be now! You've already prefaced it.
(Raymond and Baillee laugh)
Baillee: Well, do you have a favorite photo that's being showcased in the exhibit?
Raymond: Oh gosh, I got three or four. So, I've had one up in my house for about two years now, and our prints are pretty big.
one of the big ones up in my house—and it's going to be in the show this year—is a cast of ductile iron, like you might find at our different foundries, like ACIPCO or those types of casting places.
And I've got a new one, which is going to be in this year's show, which is a magnesium crystal that has some unique growth shapes on it.
Baillee: The pictures that are being showcased, are those all the ones that you've taken? Are there other artists, too?
Raymond: Let's start with last year. We had a group of students from UAB, about six of them. Most of those [photos] are at our website. You can buy them, by the way, if you like them. You can purchase them off the website.
I did some, and some of the people at the company—Vista Engineering—people here volunteered a lot of their time and effort to make those pictures.
This year, we're using a lot of international photographs. These are photographs that the International Metallographic Society has made available to us, and so we've picked out some what I feel are some of the best pictures of iron and steel from around the world to go along with a few of ours. Yeah, so I mean they'd be good.
Baillee: This is an exhibit. It's very visual, but can you explain the significance of showcasing elements and the history of these metals in Birmingham. Why that is something that people should know about?
Raymond: The art's great, we love the art. Just the personal desire to get them out for the public, and because the public has never had the opportunity to see these before. I think it's a shame that in the 100 years of our societies that nobody's put on a public art show of these photographs.
I sat down with the national organizations, which I've been a member for many, many years, and they said, "Yeah, it's about time." And so everybody's helped, everybody's kind of pitched in, said, "Let's do it."
The local industry has pitched in. We have to raise about $60,000 a year to put the show on. They have stepped up to help do that.
Also this: if you look at a number of our industries—ACIPCO, U.S. Steel, McWane [Science Center]—these companies, built Birmingham, are all hitting their 125th anniversary in the next couple of years. We got about five companies here that are still here, in one form or another, that built this city 125 years ago, and so I thought that was also interesting and good timing for the exhibit.
Baillee: People might not know—and I only recently found out about this as a Birmingham native—Birmingham is famous for pig iron, but again, the three ingredients for iron being in close proximity to each other.
Can you do a little bit of a history lesson? Like "Hey, if you don't know this about Alabama and Birmingham and these medals. Here's something you should know."
Raymond: I wish my memory would allow me to just rattle these off right now, but there were great people that started these industries way back when.
There were great people that worked in the mines, and these people didn't get paid well. Some of them were almost indentured servants. Some of the history is not a pleasant history going back, but it's a history of people, and these people sacrificed a lot to make what we have today.
Over the years, the industry became just more thoughtful and more people-friendly, if you will, but still created a tremendous amount of pollution and other things. So, there's a lot of darkness that goes along with any industrial revolution, which is what we had here in Birmingham.
Today, things are much cleaner. You don't see smoke; you see steam coming out of stacks. People are well paid. ACIPCO is owned by employees. That's something most people don't know about, is that it's an employee-owned company.
It's amazing that we have this material wealth so close to us. Red Mountain is called Red Mountain because of the iron content in the soil, in the rocks. So it's definitely a mineral-rich area.
So that's our opportunity and our history as we go forward. We see now that that pig iron has now changed into high-quality steel products made in electric arc furnaces. We don't burn coal anymore. These are technology changes. We see the growth of the space industry in Huntsville, and all the materials.
Those are wonderful materials engineering opportunities. As a matter of fact, they moved the Materiel Command of the US to Huntsville. So, Alabama is steeped in history, and its future is going to be steeped in materials and materials technology from the Gulf Coast to our northern border.
Baillee: You mentioned Sloss Furnaces as the venue for the exhibit. It seems the perfect place to showcase the Symphony of Elements. Was that a handpicked venue?
Raymond: Absolutely hand-picked. I was involved back in the day when we were trying to make it a National Historic Landmark—so Sloss has developed with this beautiful exhibit area. They have a lot of events there.
People may not know this, but Sloss attracts 1,000 people a month. We tracked last summer when we had our exhibit up, we had about 3,500 visitors that came through the desk in the area where the exhibit is... About half were from the Birmingham area, about a quarter were from Alabama outside Birmingham, and about a quarter of those people were from outside the state, national and international places.
So, it's a great place for our exhibit. A lot of foot traffic, a lot of history, steeped in history, and so we try to make the exhibit kind of reflect that.
A lot of our exhibit is not shiny metal with pictures hanging up; it's welded steel exposed. As one of my colleagues said as we were putting it up, he said, "We don't want to make it too nice, we have to Slosserize it."
We Slosserized it so that it looks like the iron and steel industry that we're kind of projecting.
Baillee: The website says that Symphony of Elements is your gift to Birmingham, but it also seems like it's almost like a love letter to Birmingham.
Raymond: Oh, it absolutely is. I grew up over on the western side of town from ordinary folks. There were two things I wanted to do when I graduated from high school: one was to either become a firefighter or to go to college. There was nobody in my family who had been to college before.
UAB gave me a scholarship, and it turns out I got lucky and got married as a teenager. [UAB] gave my wife a scholarship, too, so we both went to UAB on scholarships, and I got an engineering degree.
Then a UAB professor arranged for me to go to graduate school at Vanderbilt, and I got to further my education. So, UAB and Birmingham were a great growing experience and formed who I was going to be.
After I graduated, UAB asked me to come back and teach, and so I got to come back and do what I love, which was just to do materials science and engineering from an educational standpoint for 20 years.
For the last 26 years, the area has allowed me to have my own little sandbox where I have my lab and my microscopes, and my fellow engineers who work with us here.
So yes, Birmingham, UAB, the surrounding facilities, and the industry have allowed me to live a very lovely and interesting and exciting life, and definitely a love letter experience.
Baillee: The is the second year of the exhibit. What is it like seeing people engage with the photos and get really curious and want to know more?
Raymond: You know, Baillee, if one person, especially if one young person looks at that and says, "I want to learn more about that," then you know my heart goes, 'bum bum bum.' That's what we want to do.
Baillee: The exhibit is called Symphony of Elements. If iron was a musical instrument, what instrument would it be?
Raymond: Saxophone, come on!
Baillee: Saxophone?
Raymond: All great Jazzy stuff like metals and iron is going to be a saxophone.
Baillee: Speaking of iron, What is the proper way to clean an iron skillet?
Raymond: Oh, well, proper way to clean the iron skillet is to give it to your significant other and tell them to do it.
(Raymond and Baillee laugh)
Baillee: Growing up, my grandmother had a lot of different iron skillets, and I remember letting one soak in the sink, kind of soaking it with soap, and I got into trouble.
Raymond: I'm wiggling my finger at you, Baillee, because she's right.
The way you clean a cast iron skillet is to get some warm water and scrape out the nasties that you have in it, but don't dig anything out of the pores.
Don't soak it, don't put a lot of detergent and stuff in it, just wipe it off, because the next time you heat it up, the heat's going to kill any germs that are in there.
Baillee: No soap! We don't need to mess that up.
(Raymond and Baillee laugh)
So, let's move on to some miscellaneous questions. Do you have any superstitions or rational fears?
Raymond: Me personally, absolutely. Never step on the third baseline when you're walking off the baseball field.
If something good happened when you wore that shirt, and you need something good to happen again, wear that shirt.
Baillee: I get that! Ok, tell me something on your bucket list.
Raymond: Oh, on my bucket list... see seven major league baseball games in seven days. The only place you can do that is in the Northeast, where the cities are all close together. So, I've got to go to start in Boston and see seven games in seven days. It's seven places.
Baillee: That's a big one. I think that's exciting! Okay, next question: Did you have a childhood hero?
Raymond: That's a hard one, Baillee... because, in football it was Johnny Unitas, played for the Baltimore Colts, and in baseball it had to be Mickey Mantle, and on TV, it was Superman.
Mom and dad are obvious. We'll put them aside, though, because always know it's mom and dad.
I had a Boy Scout leader named Harry Yeager, a local policeman, who made a big difference in my life.
My university professor, that got me into materials, because I had no idea what I wanted to be. What a university, I just wanted to engineering degree.
I mean, there's so many people.
Baillee: I feel like that's a blessing to have too many people to talk about.
Okay, here's the last question: What does Alabama need?
Raymond: Oh, this goes without saying. Alabama needs good leadership.
Baillee: That's it for today's Quick-Fire Quips, a questionnaire where we get to know people who stand out in the state of Alabama.
That was Dr. Raymond Thompson, founder of Symphony of Elements, on display at at Sloss Furnaces National Historic Landmark in Birmingham, from May 23 - August 31, 2026.
I'm your host, Baillee Majors. Find us at APR.org for more Quick-Fire Quips!
