When was steel

The open hearth technique overcame the insufficient temperatures generated by normal fuels and furnaces, enabling steel to be produced in bulk for the first time. These developments have continued ever since, with steel becoming increasingly ubiquitous in the modern world. Give us a call today. Our team of experienced and knowledgeable professionals will ensure that whatever you need will be fabricated to the highest standards, according to your specifications, and delivered when you want and need it.

Hit enter to search or ESC to close. Many American steelworkers were laid off, yet the railroads continued to expand across the country and steel cans remained popular, so the steel mills remained open to meet those needs.

The world has become a very different place in the last half-century, and yet the need for steel remains high. One of the most significant changes in the industry has become the practice of melting down scrap steel for reuse rather than mills making steel from scratch. Most steel is now produced in mini-mills. These mills use an electric arc furnace that uses carbon electrodes that create an electric charge to melt the metal down. They have also served as a critical step in recycling old steel, yet much remains to be done before the industry can achieve sustainable smelting techniques.

It is the material that makes much of contemporary life possible. Click here to see 10 major industries that benefit from Teflon coating. The Origin of Steel You would have to go back billions of years to really discuss the origin of steel. This period in American history saw the first skyscraper and the first steel suspension bridge. The Modern Age of Steel The world has become a very different place in the last half-century, and yet the need for steel remains high.

Search for:. Around 1, BC, a people along the Black Sea called the Chalybes wanted to fabricate a metal stronger than bronze—something that could be used to make unrivaled weapons. They put iron ores into hearths, hammered them, and fired them for softening.

After repeating the process several times, the Chalybes pulled sturdy iron weapons from the forge. What the Chalybes made is called wrought iron, one of a couple major precursors to modern steel. They soon joined the warlike Hittites, creating one of the most powerful armies in ancient history. Beginning around BC, Chinese metalworkers built seven-foot-tall furnaces to burn larger quantities of iron and wood. The material was smelted into a liquid and poured into carved molds, taking the shape of cooking tools and statues.

Neither wrought nor cast iron was quite the perfect mixture, though. Chinese cast iron, with 2 to 4 percent carbon, was more brittle than steel. The smiths of the Black Sea eventually began to insert iron bars into piles of white-hot charcoal, which created steel-coated wrought iron. But a society in South Asia had a better idea. India would produce the first true steel. Around BC, Indian metalworkers invented a smelting method that happened to bond the perfect amount of carbon to iron.

The key was a clay receptacle for the molten metal: a crucible. The workers put small wrought iron bars and charcoal bits into the crucibles, then sealed the containers and inserted them into a furnace.

When they raised the furnace temperature via air blasts from bellows, the wrought iron melted and absorbed the carbon in the charcoal. When the crucibles cooled, ingots of pure steel lay inside.

Indian steel made it all the way to Toledo, Spain, where smiths hammered out swords for the Roman army. In shipments to Rome itself, Abyssinian traders from the Ethiopian Empire served as deceitful middlemen, deliberately misinforming the Romans that the steel was from Seres, the Latin word for China, so Rome would think that the steel came from a place too distant to conquer.

The Romans called their purchase Seric steel and used it for basic tools and construction equipment in addition to weaponry. The fiercest warriors in the world would now carry steel. According to legend, the great sword Excalibur was imposing and beautiful. The word means "cut-steel. From the age of King Arthur through Medieval times, Europe lagged behind in iron and steel production. As the Roman Empire fell officially in , Europe spun into chaos.

Knights brandished specially crafted swords. They were forged by twisting rods of iron, a process that left unique herringbone and braided patterns in the blades. The best swords in the world, however, were made on the other side of the planet. Japanese smiths forging blades for the samurai developed a masterful technique to create light, deadly sharp blades.

The weapons became heirlooms, passed down through generations, and few gifts in Japan were greater. The forging of a katana was an intricate and ritualized affair. Japanese smiths washed themselves before making a sword.

If they were not pure, then evil spirits could enter the blade. The metal forging began with wrought iron. A chunk of the material was heated with charcoal until it became soft enough to fold. A swordsmith used clay, charcoal, or iron powder for the next step, brushing the material along the blade to shape the final design.

Patterns emerged in the steel that were similar to wood grain with swirling knots and ripples. Along the Rhine Valley in present-day Germany, metalworkers developed a contraption that stood about 10 feet high, with two bellows placed at the bottom, to accommodate larger quantities of iron ore and charcoal.

The blast furnace got blazing hot, the iron absorbed more carbon than ever, and the mixture turned into cast iron that could be easily poured into a mold. It was the ironmaking process the Chinese had practiced for 1, years—but with a bigger pot. Workers dug trenches on the foundry floor that branched out from a long central channel, making space for the liquid iron to flow.

The trenches resembled a litter of suckling piglets, and thus a nickname was born: pig iron. Iron innovation came just in time for a Western world at war. The invention of cannons in the 13th century and firearms in the 14th century generated a hunger for metal.

Pig iron could be poured right into cannon and gun barrel molds, and Europe started pumping out weapons like never before. But the iron boom created a problem. As European powers began to stretch their power across the globe, they used up tremendous amounts of timber, both to build ships and to make charcoal for smelting.

The British Empire turned to the untapped resources of the New World for a solution and began shipping metal smelted in the American colonies back across the Atlantic. But smelting iron in the colonies destroyed business for the ironworks in England. Abraham Darby spent much of his childhood working in malt mills, and in the early s, he remembered a technique from his days of grinding barley: roasting coal, a combustible rock. Others had tried smelting iron with coal, but Darby was the first to roast the coal before smelting.

Roasted coal maintained its heat far longer than charcoal and allowed smiths to create a thinner pig iron—perfect for pouring into gun molds. England had discovered the power of smelting with coal. Benjamin Huntsman was frustrated with iron. The alloys available to the clockmaker from Sheffield varied too much for his work, particularly fabricating the delicate springs. An untrained eye doctor and surgeon in his spare time, Huntsman experimented with iron ore and tested different ways of smelting it.

Eventually he came up with a process quite similar to the ancient Indian method of using a clay crucible. The ingots that emerged from the smelter were more uniform, stronger, and less brittle—the best steel that Europe, and perhaps the world, had ever seen.

By the s, Sheffield became the national fulcrum of steel manufacturing. Seven decades later, the whole country knew the process, and the steelworks of England burned bright. As the carbon content decreases, iron's melting point increases, so masses of iron would agglomerate in the furnace. These masses would be removed and worked with a forge hammer by the puddler before being rolled into sheets or rails.

By , there were over puddling furnaces in Britain, but the process remained hindered by its labor and fuel intensiveness. One of the earliest forms of steel, blister steel, began production in Germany and England in the 17th century and was produced by increasing the carbon content in molten pig iron using a process known as cementation.

In this process, bars of wrought iron were layered with powdered charcoal in stone boxes and heated. After about a week, the iron would absorb the carbon in the charcoal. Repeated heating would distribute carbon more evenly and the result, after cooling, was blister steel.

The higher carbon content made blister steel much more workable than pig iron, allowing it to be pressed or rolled. Blister steel production advanced in the s when English clockmaker Benjamin Huntsman while trying to develop high-quality steel for his clock springs, found that the metal could be melted in clay crucibles and refined with a special flux to remove slag that the cementation process left behind.

The result was a crucible, or cast, steel. But due to the cost of production, both blister and cast steel were only ever used in specialty applications. As a result, cast iron made in puddling furnaces remained the primary structural metal in industrializing Britain during most of the 19th century.

The growth of railroads during the 19th century in both Europe and America put enormous pressure on the iron industry, which still struggled with inefficient production processes. Steel was still unproven as a structural metal and production of the product was slow and costly. That was until when Henry Bessemer came up with a more effective way to introduce oxygen into molten iron to reduce the carbon content.

Now known as the Bessemer Process, Bessemer designed a pear-shaped receptacle, referred to as a 'converter' in which iron could be heated while oxygen could be blown through the molten metal. As oxygen passed through the molten metal, it would react with the carbon, releasing carbon dioxide and producing a more pure iron. The process was fast and inexpensive, removing carbon and silicon from iron in a matter of minutes but suffered from being too successful.

Too much carbon was removed, and too much oxygen remained in the final product. Bessemer ultimately had to repay his investors until he could find a method to increase the carbon content and remove the unwanted oxygen. At about the same time, British metallurgist Robert Mushet acquired and began testing a compound of iron, carbon, and manganese , known as spiegeleisen.

Manganese was known to remove oxygen from molten iron and the carbon content in the spiegeleisen, if added in the right quantities, would provide the solution to Bessemer's problems.