[HN Gopher] Harry Brearley, the creator of stainless steel (2016)
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Harry Brearley, the creator of stainless steel (2016)
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 74 points
Date : 2025-06-22 12:52 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nautil.us)
(TXT) w3m dump (nautil.us)
| perihelions wrote:
| > _" algebra (Taylor bought him the book, a gift Harry brought
| home to show off, and never forgot)"_
|
| If anyone was hooked by this tangent, this was[0] _"
| Todhunter's_[1] _Algebra "_ [2] (1858? 1870? 1871? 1889?) you can
| peruse for free at [2].
|
| [0] https://www.readingsheffield.co.uk/harry-brearleys-
| reading-j...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Todhunter
|
| [2] https://archive.org/details/algebraforuseofc00todhuoft
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| If you really want a tangent, Todhunter is the middle name of
| one of the best detective authors in the history of detective
| fiction: Rex Stout.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rex_Stout
|
| The Timothy Hutton shows available on YouTube are a good
| introduction if you can get over the poor transcription to
| youtube.
| LgWoodenBadger wrote:
| IMO, Stick with the books please. The tv series you mention
| mischaracterizes everyone.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| > _The range of the mind's eye is restricted by the skill of the
| hand. The castles in the air must conform to the possibilities of
| material things--border-line possibilities perhaps; or, if
| something beyond the known border is required, the plan must wait
| until other dreams come true._
|
| That's a quote that surely appeals to many here.
| anton-c wrote:
| As a jewelry maker and guitar player I am gonna enjoy this either
| way
| datameta wrote:
| And the strings of the guitar are an intersection of both
| interpretations! There are several core wire alloys used and
| many different kinds of winding wire to achieve different tone
| and magnetic response.
|
| Fun fact, a common older winding alloy for acoustic guitars was
| called 80/20 Bronze despite actually being copper/zinc alloy
| and therefore Brass!
| convolvatron wrote:
| bronze is a word used for all alloys of copper. brasses are a
| subset of bronzes.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| https://archive.ph/adMbF
| adrian_b wrote:
| While the invention of stainless steel is one of the most
| important in history, it should be noted that almost never an
| invention appears really independently, but almost always it
| appears as a consequence of a chain of prior inventions, which
| have been necessary to make it possible.
|
| Leading to stainless steel, a first step was the discovery of the
| method to produce aluminum cheaply, by electrolysis. With cheap
| aluminum available, a method for producing chromium was
| discovered, by reducing chromium compounds with metallic
| aluminum.
|
| With metallic chromium easily available, after a century from its
| discovery, during which making metallic chromium had been
| impossible in great quantities, it has become possible to
| investigate the properties of the chromium alloys with the other
| available metals.
|
| Soon, it has been discovered that chromium can produce
| interesting alloys with cobalt ("stellite") and with nickel, and
| that these alloys are the first metals that can rival the
| platinum-group metals in chemical resistance.
|
| It has been suggested that these chromium alloys could be used
| for stainless cutlery, but the high prices of cobalt and nickel
| have prevented the use of such alloys, except for special
| applications where the cost was unimportant.
|
| More than a decade later, the next logical step has been the
| discovery that the expensive cobalt and nickel can be substituted
| with cheap iron, without diminishing much the chemical resistance
| of the alloys.
|
| It should also be noted that while Brearley has invented the
| ferritic stainless steel, which has only small amounts of any
| other elements besides iron and chromium, almost simultaneously a
| different kind of stainless steel has been invented in Germany,
| austenitic stainless steel, which also has significant amounts of
| nickel, besides iron and chromium, with enough nickel to change
| the crystal structure of the steel.
|
| Austenitic stainless steels have various advantages, especially
| that they are much more suitable to cheap processing by plastic
| deformation, so nowadays they are much more widely used than the
| kind of stainless steel invented by Brearley.
| pfdietz wrote:
| > Leading to stainless steel, a first step was the discovery of
| the method to produce aluminum cheaply, by electrolysis. With
| cheap aluminum available, a method for producing chromium was
| discovered, by reducing chromium compounds with metallic
| aluminum.
|
| Are you sure about that? Chromium is produced (as ferrochrome,
| a FeCr alloy) by carbothermic reduction of chromite. This is
| done in an arc furnace, so electrical energy is needed, but no
| aluminum. Pure chromium (without the iron) is not needed for
| production of stainless steel.
| hinkley wrote:
| > Chromium is produced
|
| Brearley steel debuted in 1915. The question is not how it is
| produced in 2025 but how it _was_ produced in 1915.
|
| Wikipedia partly agrees with GP:
|
| "Also in the late 1890s, German chemist Hans Goldschmidt
| developed an aluminothermic (thermite) process for producing
| carbon-free chromium.[29] Between 1904 and 1911, several
| researchers, particularly Leon Guillet of France, prepared
| alloys that would later be considered stainless
| steel.[29][30]"
|
| Though it points out a host of household names that knew of
| iron chrome alloys, including Faraday and Bunsen. Chrome
| steel existed for 75 years before Brearley came along but
| seems to have been used for things like canons, which are a
| lot more dear than cutlery. I wonder how _they_ got their
| chrome 50 years before Goldschmidt.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Ferrochrome was first produced in electric arc furnaces in
| 1893, two decades before stainless steel.
| Retric wrote:
| Chromite was mined in the US back in 1811.
|
| Ferrochrome is used to make Chrome steel and later
| stainless steel, but Chrome steel is significantly older.
| adrian_b wrote:
| The kinds of chrome steel used in the 19th century were
| very fragile, due to high content of carbon and of other
| impurities.
|
| Their possible uses were very limited in comparison with
| the ductile stainless steels discovered in the 20th
| century.
|
| Also the chemical resistance of the first chrome steels
| was modest, because it was not known which is the minimum
| content of chromium for avoiding rusting and also their
| composition was not well controlled.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Chromite was being mined then for use in chemicals,
| particularly for tanning, IIRC.
| adrian_b wrote:
| The first ferrochrome produced thus had very high carbon
| content.
|
| The only kind of stainless steel that could have had any
| chances of being made with such a ferrochrome would have
| been a martensitic stainless steel for knife blades.
|
| In any case that kind of ferrochrome was not suitable for
| researching the properties of chromium alloys. The
| acceptable compositions for alloys like stellite or
| various kinds of stainless steels have all been
| discovered, after many experiments, only by using
| relatively pure aluminothermic chromium, which was a
| strictly necessary ingredient for enabling chromium alloy
| research.
|
| Only after the required composition of a kind of
| stainless steel was understood and only if it was
| determined that such a composition can be reached by
| mixing ferrochrome with iron, the manufacturing process
| was adjusted for using cheaper ferrochrome instead of
| pure chromium.
|
| Today there exists low-carbon ferrochrome, which is
| suitable for making most kinds of stainless steels, but
| even now the low-carbon ferrochrome is much more
| expensive than the high-carbon ferrochrome from which
| only martensitic stainless steel can be made.
| dmurray wrote:
| > It has been suggested that these chromium alloys could be
| used for stainless cutlery, but the high prices of cobalt and
| nickel have prevented the use of such alloys
|
| Nickel and cobalt don't seem prohibitively expensive for
| cutlery, around $15,000 [0] per ton and $33,000 [1] per ton
| respectively. By comparison, chromium is around $10,000 and
| iron is essentially free.
|
| Even if the optimal ratio is 100% cobalt, that might add $1.50
| to the price of a dinner fork or $50 to a cutlery set that will
| last a lifetime.
|
| Walmart might not stock it, but that seems completely within
| the range of what you could charge for a premium product, if
| the nickel-cobalt-chromium alloys really do make for superior
| cutlery. Maybe it's less suitable for other reasons than cost.
|
| [0] https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/nickel
|
| [1] https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/cobalt
| datameta wrote:
| The full read particularly resonated with me from the perspective
| of a metaphor to today's rapidly changing engineering practices.
|
| > "Time was," he lamented later, "when a man made steel, decided
| what it was good for and told the customer how to make the best
| of it. Then, with time's quickening step, he just made the steel;
| he engaged another man, who knew nothing about steelmaking, to
| analyse it, and say what it was good for. Then he engaged a
| second man, who knew all about hardening and tempering steel;
| then a third man who could neither make steel, nor analyse it,
| nor harden and temper it--but this last tested it, put his OK
| mark on it and passed it into service."
|
| In a way it warms my heart that obfuscation in such a manner,
| perhaps even enshittification, is not a new experience for those
| watching a trade modernise. Several things come to mind: npm and
| python library dependency hell and LLM as a catalyst of skill
| atrophy in experts simultaneously with the enablement of a whole
| new middle layer of proprietors.
|
| Also the article led me to think more about the idea of
| simultaneous invention - I used to believe it to be redundant and
| wasted work. But this still can lead to different outcomes even
| with identical formulations or methods. Getting an invention into
| use in the world is perhaps as great a feat as the invention
| itself. I now believe any worthwhile invention deserves more than
| one champion.
|
| In today's hyperconnected world it is easy to discover that
| someone else has beaten you to the full flourishing of idea into
| invention, but I find that doing the novel work oneself with
| one's own mind and hands still provides the unique learning
| opportunity which can allow one to invent yet again, albeit now
| with a widened skill and knowledge horizon.
| pfdietz wrote:
| > perhaps even enshittification
|
| This is rather silly, since steel today is far superior to the
| steel of his day. The complexity he bemoans is part of that
| process of improvement.
| datameta wrote:
| I did not mean to imply that steel quality has in any way
| continued to suffer. He was talking about the process of the
| early 20st century in comparison to the late 19th when
| steelmaking was handled more end-to-end from maker to user.
|
| I am talking about enshittification of digital applications
| and services compared to the earlier years of the information
| age.
| xeonmc wrote:
| The transitory enshittified steel subsided once scientific
| formalization of their requirements emerged. I wonder if
| the transition period of vibe-coded slop will eventually be
| supplanted with formal-verification that supersede even the
| quality of cottage codesmanship, or would it forever remain
| in snakeoil-ridden limbo due to unspecifiability of
| software taste unlike that of a material's mechanical
| performance?
| hinkley wrote:
| Sometime around 1993 I was bored and picked up a Reader's
| Digest my parents had lying around. In it was an article about
| how the oil fires Saddam set in Iraq were put out in about a
| quarter of the time the crews estimated.
|
| Volunteer oil well firefighters from a host of first world and
| some developing countries showed up and started trying to work
| together.
|
| The intense heat makes for slow going, and can melt not just
| people but also equipment. It turned out every country had
| solved a different part of the problem. The Russians used
| thermal mass - they attached the hose to the barrel of a tank
| and let the armor soak up heat for a while. Someone else had
| better heat shielding. The Americans (?) had perfected
| detonation to extinguish rather than ignite a fire. And someone
| had better protective gear.
|
| All of these techniques could be combined. Heat shielding on a
| tank means the machines you can get the equipment closer to the
| fire for longer, and the suits and explosives put the fire out
| faster so the capping crew can get in there.
|
| In the end they were doing several wells per day and multiple
| sites per week, instead of a few wells per week. Parallel
| invention doesn't always end up at the exact same outcome.
| datameta wrote:
| I love this example! The unforeseen synergies of different
| methods attempting the same outcome cannot be overstated
| enough in my opinion. Each strategy has its own diminishing
| returns, and stacking them covers gaps each has.
|
| I think a great illustration of this today are SLaM methods
| that almost always seem to combine a low-drift high-noise
| technique with one that is high-drift and low-noise.
| hinkley wrote:
| I think where parallel discovery really shines is in
| operational excellence. Your best people have high
| tolerances for certain aspects of the work, the craft, and
| low tolerances for others. But to industrialize it needs to
| be accessible to tens of thousands, and they don't have
| time for this shit.
|
| I expect that was a lot of the speed up. You can't do eight
| wells a week if every well exhausts your team. Better
| working conditions mean faster cycling. Hell I bet whoever
| brought the best "Gatorade", masseuse, and entertainment
| deserves more credit than they ever got.
| gsf_emergency_2 wrote:
| From time to time, I see articles implying the medieval use of
| chromium, however sparingly, in forging weapons (near east or
| central Asia)
|
| Eg.
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03054...
| legitster wrote:
| > That Brearley is credited with discovering stainless steel is
| due mostly to luck; that he is credited with fathering it is due
| mostly to his resolve.
|
| It's interesting that most times I have heard these stories
| growing up the "discovery" aspect was always emphasized - some
| retelling even framed them as "accidents". Forgetting the parts
| where the person in question had dedicated a lifetime of study in
| pursuit of the finding.
| unixhero wrote:
| But it isn't always stainless!
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