Rust: The Longest War

by Jonathan Waldman

  Yet much in the field remained enigmatic. Francis LaQue, another pioneer in the science of corrosion, said before his death in 1988, “Corrosion engineers, like economists, know enough to provide plausible explanations of what has happened without being equally adept at predicting future occurrences.” That almost sounded like Pliny.

  3

  KNIVES THAT WON’T CUT

  Sometime in 1882, a skinny, dark-haired, eleven-year-old boy named Harry Brearley entered a steelworks for the first time. A shy kid—he was scared of the dark, and a picky eater—he was also curious, and the industrial revolution in Sheffield, England, offered much in the way of amusements. He enjoyed wandering around town—he later called himself a Sheffield Street Arab—watching road builders, bricklayers, painters, coal deliverers, butchers, and grinders. He was drawn especially to workshops; if he couldn’t see in a shop window, he would knock on the door and offer to run an errand for the privilege of watching whatever work was going on inside. Factories were even more appealing, and he had learned to gain access by delivering, or pretending to deliver, lunch or dinner to an employee. Once inside, he must have reveled, for not until the day’s end did he emerge, all grimy and gray but for his blue eyes. Inside the steelworks, the action compelled him so much that he spent hours sitting inconspicuously on great piles of coal, breathing through his mouth, watching brawny men shoveling fuel into furnaces, hammering white-hot ingots of iron. He was mesmerized. Day after day, he watched men forge, cast, ground, buff, and burnish metal until it was shiny and bright. Sparks were flying, probably in Harry’s mind, too.

  There was one operation in particular that young Harry liked: a toughness test performed by the blacksmith. After melting and pouring a molten mixture from a crucible, the blacksmith would cast a bar or two of that alloy, and after it cooled, he would cut notches in the ends of those bars. Then he’d put the bars in a vice, and hammer away at them. The effort required to break the metal bars, as interpreted through the blacksmith’s muscles, could vary by an order of magnitude, but the result of the test was expressed qualitatively. The metal was pronounced on the spot either rotten or darned good stuff. The latter was simply called D.G.S. The aim of the men at that steelworks, and every other, was to produce D.G.S., and Harry took that to heart.

  In this way, young Harry became familiar with steelmaking long before he formally taught himself as much as there was to know about the practice. It was the beginning of a life devoted to steel, without the distractions of hobbies, vacations, or church. It was the origin of a career in which Brearley wrote eight books on metals, five of which contain the word steel in the title; in which he could argue about steelmaking—but not politics—all night; and in which the love and devotion he bestowed upon inanimate metals exceeded that which he bestowed upon his parents or wife or son. Steel was Harry’s true love.

  By the time he retired, Harry Brearley knew intimately every facet of steelmaking. Having earned a reputation, he—like Frank Sinatra begrudging the popularity of the Beatles—grew defensive, and then reactive, as technology evolved. The emotion got to him. Near the end of his days, he yearned to have been a generalist, and wrote that if he could do it all over again he’d be a doctor, and none too specialized, so that he could see all the colors of life. “There is nothing deader than a list of the chemical elements,” he wrote, “whose vitalised dances are supposed to make life.”

  The man who discovered stainless steel was also a rebel, and fittingly so, for what he found was contrary to nature. The runt of a large family, largely ignored and taught chores so as not to be a burden, Harry Brearley became the successful one—the one whose name lives on. He was a chemist who never attended a single course in chemistry; yet he scorned official titles. And rather than consider himself a chemist, analyst, or research director, he preferred to think of himself as a “competent observer,” a “professional observer,” and an “experimentalist.” Self-taught, he refused to subject his own son to what he called the mashed-potato educational system. He abandoned church, except to flirt with his would-be wife. A product of the gutter, he rose from the factory to the boardroom, and once there, stepped down so that he could go back to the ground floor of the factory.

  After a long career as a scientist, he insisted that he was an artist, because he thought about steel with his heart rather than his head. Questioning chemists’ test results, he called their reports “bogey tales” of “bluff and bunkum.” He resisted modernization. He called himself “a breaker of idols and a scorner of cherished regulations.” A binary man, he had no room for gray tones. He was curious but opinionated, flexible but intolerant, innovative but persnickety, knowledgeable but overconfident, and determined but obstinate. He was patient with metals and impatient with masters. He even became a class warrior—a lover of underdogs like himself—and then somewhat paranoid. All because of steel.

  Harry Brearley’s rebelliousness was almost his undoing. Despite advances in the industry, he frowned upon modern, high-volume steelmaking technologies as much as he disparaged old beliefs that persisted without regard to logic. He knew both were wrong; he felt it. His soul rooted for man over machine, flexibility and ingenuity over rigid process and operation, skill and judgment over precision. Any other framework made him queasy. He resented that metallography (“taught by professors and text-books”) was becoming more valued than metallurgy (“practiced in the works”). He understood that the best steelmaker could know nothing about chemistry, and vice versa, and he hated that the analyst was revered, while the steelworker was underappreciated. Steelmaking, of all things, he figured, should be meritorious. His knowledge commanded respect, but business-wise, he was naive. An anachronism at work, he became, to his bosses, almost a liability. Yet he was proud that he’d had “the courage to ignore time-worn precept and reach success by roads which . . . should lead to direct failure.”

  The road almost led to failure, for the discovery of stainless steel was not obvious; many others had missed it, and Brearley almost overlooked it as well. Success, too, was not immediate; and Harry Brearley’s name, which had been respected if not esteemed, all the while suffered. Before the commercial success of stainless steel, Harry Brearley was briefly known as “the inventor of knives that won’t cut.” His doggedness in pursuing that commercial success cost him his job, killed a business relationship that had lasted thirty years, and compelled others to try to appropriate the credit due him. He was almost outmaneuvered.

  Patenting his discovery took more effort than he thought it would, and commercializing it brought further difficulties. He later wrote that the “malodorous happenings” involved “used up parts of my life that might have been used more enjoyably.” On the other hand, the discovery—or at least the popularization—of stainless steel made him rich, earned him one of the highest awards in metallurgy, and etched his name into history. He was a devoted, studious, and attentive artisan, and even if he wasn’t the first to create or discover or patent or commercialize stainless steel, he deserves the reward for it, because his persistence was more than commensurate with the trouble it caused him.

  Harry Brearley was born on February 18, 1871, and grew up poor, in a small, cramped house on Marcus Street, in Ramsden’s Yard, on a hill in Sheffield. The city was the world capital of steelmaking; by 1850 Sheffield steelmakers produced half of all the steel in Europe, and 90 percent of the steel in England. By 1860, no fewer than 178 edge tool and saw makers were registered in Sheffield. In the first half of the nineteenth century, as Sheffield rose to prominence, the population of the city grew fivefold, and its filth grew proportionally. A saying at the time, that “where there’s muck there’s money,” legitimized the grime, reek, and dust of industrial Sheffield, but Harry recognized later that it was a misfortune to be from there, for nobody had much ambition.

  The men there were all laborers—joiners or wheelwrights or blacksmiths—and they’d all come to the city enticed by higher wages. The women worked hard to support their families. All
appeared worn down, beset with the aches of manual labor and respiratory problems like “grinders disease,” the result of inhaling sandstone and steel particles all day. Harry’s mother, Jane, an unrefined but direct woman with quick, brown eyes and a firm mouth, was the youngest daughter of a blacksmith. She’d had six months of schooling, and never learned math. She could read, write, and reckon. She wasted nothing. His father, John, a tall, strong, and bulky man with curly brown hair and blue eyes, was a steelmaker. At times dreamy, he offered a hint of a poetic streak, but he was by no means intellectual. He was also a drinker, and short of work.

  There were eight houses in Ramsden’s Yard, four on either side of a hard-packed square black as night with soot. The doors of most of the houses were always open, full of restless children, of which there were many. The Andrews family had four kids, the Whiteheads had three, the Linleys had five, the Brayshaws had five, and the Brearleys had nine, including Harry, the youngest. There was also an old lady, and a young woman, but nobody ever saw them. Like their fathers, many of the boys were bow-legged and stooped, from sitting in factories, cutting file blanks all day.

  A mother’s boy, Harry was closest to his brother Arthur, who was radiant, strong, and stubborn where Harry was weak, wayward, and feeble. He was so frail that he stayed home from school often, and learned, from his mother, many domestic chores: to sew, darn, scrub, wash clothes, and shop at the market.

  The house Harry grew up in was sparse and tight; the living room measured ten feet square, with two bedrooms above it. The kids ate standing up because there were not enough chairs. There were no books, or pictures, or toys; there was no space for a desk. The Brearleys were heartily poor but not starving, yet they weren’t far from the breadline. Harry wore jackets that had been made from his father’s trousers. He helped deliver coal in a wheelbarrow in return for sweets. After school, he bundled sticks, earning a penny for a dozen bundles. He used to walk along nearby railroad tracks, collect lumps of coal that had fallen from passing trains, and bring them home to his mother. He once borrowed a book from the library, and copied it—the whole thing—by hand, because he couldn’t afford to buy a copy.

  In 1882 his parents moved down to Carlisle Street, beside the railroad tracks—a place said to be separated from hell by only a sheet of tissue paper. It was filthier, dustier, smokier. But Harry loved it, on account of the increased color and variety. There was a pigsty and stables to poke around in, and more adult conversation to pick up. On account of his curiosity, he was regularly late for school; he found too much to look at on the way. For punishment he was caned, cuffed with a wet handbag, kicked with a clog-toe, and kept inside. His schooling, too, was minimal. Well into his teens, he didn’t know who Shakespeare was. He once asked a colleague: “Is he an Englishman?” But he got away from school, at age eleven, with his “brains unshackled and his curiosity undimmed,” and was then free to work, according to the law, in nonfactory conditions.

  He was unhappy in his first jobs. He spent three days in Marsland’s Clog Shop, blacking boots and carrying things from eight in the morning until eleven o’clock at night, and hated it. He spent a week in Moorwood’s Iron Foundry, painting black varnish onto kitchen stoves, before being discharged on account of labor regulations. He spent six weeks helping a doctor, but was disheartened by the subservience the man required. Finally his father took him to work in the Thomas Firth & Sons steelmaking factory, where he worked as a nipper, or cellar boy, moving clay stands and covers wherever needed in the dark, hot ashes of the cellar, and skimming the slag from the steel. Everybody, including his father, thought he was too small and weak for the job, but he spent three months at Firth’s, working long, sweaty days, before he was once again discharged on account of violating labor regulations.

  He was then hired as a bottle washer by James Taylor, the chief chemist in a laboratory of the same steelmakers. The accomplished son of two weavers, Taylor had grown up poor and won a scholarship, attended the Royal School of Mines, worked for a professor at Owens College, studied with the German chemist Robert Bunsen in Heidelberg, and worked in Bolivia and Serbia. He was thirty-five years old, pale, and had a scraggly beard. Harry hadn’t ever heard the word laboratory before, and when he first showed up, was so overwhelmed by the amount of glassware that he figured it was a place people came to drink. At first, he found the work tedious, but his mother encouraged him to stay there, as it was undoubtedly better than the melting furnaces in the steelworks. Harry was only twelve; he would become Taylor’s protégé.

  Taylor started his training by teaching Harry arithmetic (Harry had to buy the book himself) and then, a couple of years later, algebra (Taylor bought him the book, a gift Harry brought home to show off, and never forgot). Taylor bought Harry a set of drawing instruments too. Taylor was not social, not a drinker, not a smoker, not a swearer. He didn’t even speak in the Sheffield dialect. But he was thrifty and handy, and the set of skills he displayed was formative for Harry. Under Taylor, Harry learned to join wood, paint, solder, plumb, blow glass, bind books, and work with metal. While his friends were out playing, Harry was learning new skills. (He’d dislocated a knee playing soccer at age fourteen and then steered clear of most athletic pursuits. He was not a good fisherman, and was a terrible shot. He remained amateurish in every hobby. Yet he was not clumsy, even if he did break half the flasks and beakers he grabbed in the laboratory.) This knowledge later inspired Harry to make his own furniture, stitch his own sandals, and try writing. His first attempt, an article for Windsor magazine, described the nature of various inks in creating inkblots, of which he made a few hundred; the next was titled “Bubble-Blowing as a Physical Exercise.” Some hobbies. He also attended night school, on Taylor’s urging, studying math and physics a few nights a week.

  By the time he was twenty, he was proficient in most crafts, even though, technically, he was a bottle washer. The lab suited him; at work, one assistant sometimes sang opera or recited poems, while Taylor regularly discussed food, economics, education, politics, and social welfare. In this context, Harry grew comfortable in the presence of educated people. Despite, or perhaps because of, Harry’s reverence for his boss—which bordered on idolatry—Harry’s mother by then was encouraging him to find a job in a factory, one with a better salary, and more of a future.

  His mother died the next year. Brearley moved in with his older brother Arthur. That same year, Taylor left for work in Australia, and Brearley was promoted to lab assistant. Contemplating life ahead, he had a sudden conversion, and decided more schooling was not for him. He recognized that he had no tolerance for things he didn’t want to do. He was hardening, like steel.

  He also fell in love, and began courting his future wife, Helen, chatting her up at Sunday school. (Though, in recollecting the time, he cites his first love as analytical chemistry.) At age twenty-four, they married; he’d been promoted to an analytical chemist at the lab, and was earning two pounds a week. Together they had a total savings of five pounds. They lived on bread, onions, and apple pie, in a simple cottage south of Sheffield, but he never mentions it, or his wife, in his autobiography. He barely mentions his only son, Leo Taylor Brearley (named after James Taylor), who was born two years later. But he mentions love: “I was in love with my work, and could think of few better things than the privilege of living to continue it.” He enjoyed it so much that he said it made him feel drunk.

  So he drank: he spent the next six years reading everything he could about metallurgy, starting with periodicals and journals about chemistry, barely stopping for a lunch of bread and dates. Next he read about manganese, and every process by which it could be detected in steel. Then he read about every other steelmaking element; all the while he kept index cards detailing what he had learned from each book. He developed his knowledge carefully, procedurally, accumulating as much as he could. Lab protocol stipulated that anyone who figured out how to save time could enjoy his savings as he wanted. Brearley got his day’s work done in a couple of hou
rs, and spent the rest of the day reading and experimenting.

  In his late twenties, Brearley started writing technical papers on the analytical chemistry of metals for publications such as Chemical News. Taylor wrote from Australia, offering him a job assaying gold and silver. He turned it down. He was developing a reputation as a steel problem solver, and enjoying it.

  On Saturdays, for fun, he met up with Fred Ibbotson, a professor of metallurgical chemistry. Ibbotson would give him samples of metals, and challenge him to determine, in ten, twenty, or thirty minutes, how much of a given element they contained. What happened to blowing bubbles? On Sundays, he hung out at the lab with his brother Arthur (who’d walked three miles to get there), and together they analyzed enough steel to get proficient at it. This was the beginning of a lifelong working relationship with his brother. Twenty years later, the two cowrote Ingots and Ingot Moulds; Brearley thought it was his best work. Two years after that, when he won the Bessemer Gold Medal, the highest award conferred by the Iron and Steel Institute, for outstanding contributions to the steel industry, he credited his brother generously. His sixth book, Steel-Makers and Knotted String, was dedicated to Arthur, as “playmate schoolmate and workmate.” In it, he called his brother “a better workman, a better observer and a more resourceful experimentalist than I.”

  In 1901, at age thirty, Brearley was hired at Kayser, Ellison & Co. as a chemist to work on high-speed tool steels, which had been discovered three years earlier by a consultant for Bethlehem Steel named Frederick Winslow Taylor. Sidetracked from production problems, Taylor had begun looking at steels used to plane and bore ship plates and cannons. Ideal forging temperatures were still measured by color, and he found that steel, heated to just below dull cherry, came out strong, but the same steel, heated above that point, became weak. To his surprise, he found that if he heated it further—to salmon and yellow—the steel got superhard; so hard that machinists could run their cutting tools two or three times as fast as before, until the blades glowed red, at 1,000 degrees Celsius. It was so dramatic that at the Paris Exhibition of 1900, Taylor set up a giant lathe in the dark, so that the glowing-red cutting edge, as well as the stream of blue chips, was visible.