The Rise of Steel Production

Abstract

Steel is intermediate in carbon content between wrought iron and cast iron. Attempts to make it cannot have been influenced by this knowledge before the late 1780s, when it was established in a famous paper by leading French scientists (Vandermonde, Berthollet and Monge, 1786). Similarly the carbon difference between pig and wrought iron had not been known to those in Britain who had, entirely empirically, developed successful new ways of converting pig iron to wrought. The effective superiority of empiricism to science at this period can be seen from the fact that the new knowledge of carbon content did not help the French to make good steel, an area in which they made great efforts but continued to be very backward. The English, however, had made great strides in steelmaking from the middle of the seventeenth century and in the middle of the eighteenth century they developed a new steel of great future importance.