IRON, STEEL, AND A LITTLE SOAP

As one reads the latest news about where the development of metals is going¾toward their demise¾one is tempted to look back over their history, which at times was synonymous with the history of man¾from the age of hammered copper in 8,000 B.C, to the bronze age from 4,000 to 3,000 B.C., to the beginning of the iron age in 1,000 B.C.

In the Middle Ages, two other processes were discovered to turn iron into steel¾cementing and the crucible method (see any better encyclopedia), but the energy source (charcoal) was barely sufficient for more than steel swords, and it took another two mil-lenia before the needs of the industrial revolution required a more intensive energy source to mass produce steel. It was, of course, coal¾known for centuries and occasionally even used as a fuel, but rejected for its fumes until the need for it became overwhelm-ing. (Yes, history will repeat itself: the need for nuclear energy, now artificially stymied by scheming scare mongers and stolid bureaucrats, will become overwhelming )

Strictly speaking even coal was not enough to make steel: it only permitted iron to be smelted on a large scale. It was not coal, but coke that enabled steel as we know it to be produced, and that did not happen until the 1850s, some 70 years after the Industrial Revolution had begun in England. One method, named after Sir Henry Bessemer, was to force air through molten iron in a pear-shaped convertor; the other, yielding higher-quality steel was the Open-Hearth Process, in which very hot air is regeneratively blown over molten iron, its oxygen removing the carbon and other impurities by reacting with them. The process was invented by the remarkable Siemens brothers (Friedrich, Ernst Werner, Karl Wil-helm [Sir Charles William] and August¾primarily by the last two), but the design did not work properly until combined with that of Pierre Emile Martin, and the story of the two originators sounds like a corny movie: they quarreled over who was the inven-tor, the Siemens family won in court, and Martin lost most of his property. In a bitter competition to build the furnaces, Martin lost again and sank into poverty until discovered in 1912, an 83-year old broken man, begging in the streets of a Paris suburb. Then the world's steel kings, whose fortunes he had in part made, collected a fabulous amount for him, and he lived to see the fame he deserved¾but only just: one week after being awarded the Bes-semer Gold Medal, he died in 1915. (I suppose the story is well known in France, but it is not easy to find in an American library, so I felt justified in digressing¾hoping the tragedy can be kept out of the TV sewer.)