Industrial Research 



161 



large number of reports published in J{ussi!ui since 

 1925 fewer than 20 or 30 contain anything of real 

 value. 



Outstanding Developments in the 



World Iron and Steel Industry, 1900 to 1930 



It is not within the scope of this paper to outhne all 

 the important developments in the iron and steel 

 industry of the world for the first 30 years of this 

 century. They have been so numerous and so many 

 printed pages would be needed even to catalog them 

 that it is necessary to limit the discussion in tliis 

 section to a few outstanding examples. 



It is only necessarj* Lo note that the output of the 

 blast furnace approximately tripled between 1900 and 

 1930 to realize that a large amount of important re- 

 search has been done on this phase of the iron and steel 

 industiy. To effect this progress, extensive studies 

 have been made on the beneficiation of ores, the im- 

 provement of the quality of coke, on slag reactions and 

 their influence upon the production and quality of the 

 iron, and especially on the general design of the furnace 

 itself. Improvements in these directions have been 

 achieved in all principal iron-making countries but have 

 been particidarly pronounced in the United States. 



The most important research work in steel making, 

 which has been devoted chiefly to the physical chemistry 

 of slag-metal reactions in the basic open-hearth process, 

 was pioneered in this country by C. H. Herty, Jr., and 

 his associates under the auspices of the Metallurgical 

 Advisory Board of the United States Bureau of Mines 

 and Carnegie Institute of Technology, and in Germany 

 by H. Schenck and his associates, working at the Krup}) 

 laboratories. This work got actively under way about 

 1925 and is still going on at the KJrupp works and at a 

 niunber of places in the United States. It has had 

 important ramifications in improving the quality of 

 carbon steel and has been accompanied by valuable 

 work on gases and nonmetallic inclusions in molten and 

 in solid steel. The most comprehensive and valuable 

 work along this line in England has been that of a com- 

 mittee of the British Iron and Steel Institute which 

 started in 1925 to study the heterogeneity of steel 

 ingots; this work is also stiU under way. 



Alloy steels, the development of which started late in 

 the nineteenth century, were used rarely, except for 

 armor and ordnance, until after the First World War, 

 when the rapid development of the automotive, air- 

 craft, and petroleiun-refining industries began to require 

 relatively large tonnages. This is shown clearly by the 

 increase in production from 570,000 tons in 1910 to 

 about 4 million tons in 1930. 



Two developments in alloy steels are outstanding: 

 The "stainless" materials and the low-alloy structural 



grades. There are, as is well known, two classes of 

 stainless steels: The hard cutlery steels, containing 0.30 

 to 0.40 percent of carbon and 11 to 14 percent of chro- 

 mium, and the soft austcnitic steels, widely used for 

 structural and ornamental purposes, containing low 

 carbon and about 18 percent of cliromium and 8 of 

 nickel. Credit for the discovery of cutlery steel belongs 

 to Brearley, an Englislunan, whose research resulted in 

 the patenting of this alloy in 1913. The so-called 18-8 

 steel is a development by Strauss and Maurer, working 

 at the Krupp laboratories in 1909 to 1912.' 



The large class of low-alloy steels now being used 

 widely as structural materials, especially for railroad 

 rolling stock and to a lesser extent for ships, bridges, 

 and buildings, is an outgrowth of experience with a few 



' Thum, E. E. The book ol stainless steels. Cleveland, American Society tor 

 Mctnis, 1935, pp. 1-8. In eh. 1 the development of these steels is discussed In detail. 



Figure 40. — Research on Creep of Steel, Crane Company, 

 Chicago, Illinois 



