In 1902 Brearley cowrote his first book with Professor Ibbotson. It was called The Analysis of Steel-Works Materials. That same year, he teamed up with his old operatic lab mate, Colin Moorwood, and started a company, the Amalgams Co. He’d developed a unique claylike material, and they profited selling it to a local business. He and Moorwood spent every evening and weekend toying with new materials, and made a mess of one room in his house. Within a year, he’d written his second book, The Analytical Chemistry of Uranium.
Steel business was good, and in September 1903, Brearley’s old employer, Thomas Firth & Sons, bought a steelmaking plant in Riga—Russia’s second largest port, on the Baltic Sea—in order to produce steel for the massive Russian market without having to pay export tariffs. On Moorwood’s recommendation, Brearley was hired to be the chemist. Arthur Brearley would join them too, probably on his brother’s recommendation. Moorwood would be the general manager. Together Brearley and Moorwood traveled there in January 1904, in the dead of winter.
The Salamander Works, as the factory was called, was a bright, roomy place, covering forty acres on the southern bank of the Jugla River, between two lakes. It was six miles northeast of town and not well equipped. There was no gas or water; the latter had to be brought inside in buckets. It was so cold that Brearley wore an overcoat and tall rubber boots all day and took a portable paraffin stove to wherever he was working.
Worse, there were no experienced workers, at least none who knew how to properly forge, anneal, machine, and harden steel. With the Russo-Japanese War under way, the Salamander Works had been contracted to make armor-piercing shells for the Russian navy. Firth sent an Englishman named Bowness to oversee the process. He turned out to be incompetent. At firing tests, in Saint Petersburg, the shells he’d produced failed miserably. According to Brearley, the “expert hardener” explained his masterly technique thus: the secret in hardening, Bowness said, was “to heat the buggers.” Brearley was put in charge, promoted to heat treater.
Brearley and his brother set about determining the temperature range at which the shell steel could be hardened without ruining it. The sweet temperature spot could be determined by examining hardened steel for smooth, fine fractures. A problem arose: the works had no high-temperature pyrometers, or quick source of them. Brearley figured he and his brother could eyeball it, but he also realized the two of them couldn’t possibly be present for all the work that lay ahead.
So they improvised. Brearley mixed together combinations of a wide variety of chemicals and metals, including coins, and created three salt-based alloys that melted in the desired temperature range. He melted a collection of these, then cast them into small cylinders and cones about the size of a little toe, and coated them with brown, green, and blue waxes. He called these sentinel pyrometers, because by balancing them on porcelain dishes inside the furnace, a worker could easily see if one was melting or not. If the first, brown sentinel melted, the furnace was at the temperature just high enough to harden the steel; if the green sentinel melted, too, the temperature was right on; and if the blue sentinel melted, they’d know that they’d overshot their mark and that the steel would be ruined. Using the sentinels as guides, Brearley produced a second batch of hardened shells, and they passed the firing test, as did every batch made after that—even those made by his novice metal workers.
His style was casual. Men swapped roles, worked as a team, and were free to divulge their opinions. There was no organizational hierarchy. No mechanical precision. No engineered plan drawn up on paper. Moorwood okayed the arrangement, and agreed not to interfere. Under such management, Brearley found that he preferred novice steelmakers. They weren’t biased by previous experience, or hamstrung by any preconceived notions. In time, he credited the Latvian peasants with skills rivaling those of his Sheffield pals.
He sent the formulas for the sentinel pyrometers back home, and Amalgams Co. sold thousands. Within the year, he was promoted to technical director, and put in charge of building a crucible furnace. He ordered some plans. The plans were wrong, but his furnace was right. He was also put in charge of selling high-speed tool steel. He surprised many customers by stripping from his business attire and working in the furnace, just like any of the other men, to demonstrate his product. Who was this Brearley: a technical director or a technician?
With his long, boyish face, and big, dark, owlish eyes, Brearley still looked like a teenager. He was clean shaven, with short black hair parted down the middle. He wore wire-frame spectacles. His ears were not lacking in prominence. By now, his adult persona had emerged: he was deliberate and devoted; confident but not dictatorial, and definitely not greedy. He was earning plenty of money, but he remained thrifty, never yearning for a big house or fancy cars or fine food. He was certainly no public speaker, and had no stomach for politics. He wasn’t much of a salesman, as he had no ornamental graces, and few cultural graces. In fact, he possessed few social skills: invited to a masked ball, he was advised to let himself go in order to enjoy the occasion. He had no idea how to do that. At another party, he stood aloof, a wallflower. He was incapable of flirting. But he was good at his work.
The revolution came in 1905. The political and cultural revolt didn’t bother Brearley so much; in fact, he wasn’t especially repelled by socialism. (He’d joined the International Labor Party in England.) But the strikes made it impossible to produce steel, and this bothered him. The furnaces had to run constantly, or not at all. He couldn’t start and stop them as the vagaries of politics demanded.
An impromptu public meeting was held on a vacant floor of the factory. Two thousand men showed up. Before the meeting started, revolver cartridges were distributed. Not long after, the foreman blacksmith was murdered outside his apartment. A half dozen factory workers were arrested and imprisoned. The state of affairs terrified many; three engineers fled the country. So did Moorwood. Brearley took his spot as general manager and kept it for three years. He sat in Moorwood’s chair, at Moorwood’s big horseshoe-shaped desk, in Moorwood’s clothes, smoking Moorwood’s cigars. It was the most extravagant thing he ever did.
With Brearley in charge, new equipment was in order. He bought a microscope, a galvanometer, and a thermocouple, and spent weeks toying with the latter instrument in a cellar. The cellar became the Friday-evening meeting-place for people who wanted to talk about steel rather than the revolution. The meetings sometimes went on clear through the night, adjourning when it was time to work the next morning. During a strike, with nothing better to do, the cellar crew made a temperature recorder out of an old clock and a biscuit tin. They collected pieces of steel that had been hardened at different temperatures, fractured them, and compared them. They savored the mysterious specimens. They sought bewilderment for the sake of discussion. They argued into the night.
Cut off from England and its supplies during the long winters, they were forced to adapt, innovate, or use substitute materials. In this way, they gained experience, and what remained in Brearley of any old steelmaking dogma faded away.
When Brearley returned to England in 1907, he was offered a position running the Brown-Firth Research Laboratories, a new joint operation run by John Brown & Company, which built battleships, and Firth’s, which was working on armor plates. Notably, as research director, Brearley was given great freedom; he and his employer agreed, before he took the job, that he could turn down any project that didn’t interest him. More importantly, on account of Brearley’s interest in Amalgam Co., they also agreed to split ownership of rights to any discoveries.
The research was not all excitement; there was plenty of donkey work. But he also fixed what others thought was unfixable. He found a pile of train wheels that had been rejected and tossed into a scrap heap, and hardened these as they had learned to do in Riga. The resulting wheels, the ex-rejects, were better than all of those that had been approved by the railway company.
Yet Brearley was troubled by new changes in steelmaking. Science was replacing art. He thou
ght modern metallography, with its focus on the minute compositions of sulfur and phosphorous, was hype, and misleading. “The chemical clauses,” he later wrote, “do not ensure the quality of the finished article, any more than the list of the ingredients ensures the quality of a kitchen dish.” He elaborated: “What a man sees through the microscope is more of less,” he wrote, “and his vision has been known to be thereby so limited that he misses what he is looking for, which has been apparent at the first glance to the man whose eye is informed to the experience.” Theory was gaining traction over experience, and Brearley began to wax nostalgic for the old days, when there were men who could fracture an ingot and tell you, within 0.03 percent, its composition. He saw amateurs making bad predictions, when, as he knew, predictions were worthless. “The man who sets himself up as a metallurgical Solomon,” he wrote, “has great odds against him.” Most troubling was the advent of new steelmaking technology. Brearley was an old-fashioned steelmaker—maybe the best of them—and the company he worked for wasn’t an old-fashioned steelmaking company anymore.
Since 1742, when Benjamin Huntsman devised the crucible process, Sheffield steelmakers had been making steel the same careful way. They melted bar iron in a clay pot, over a coke furnace, and poured it into ingots and molds.
Until then, the only method of making steel was crude, slow, and expensive. Called cementation, it entailed baking bars of Swedish wrought iron in a stone pit full of charcoal until it absorbed enough carbon. (Steel is iron with a carbon content from 0.1 percent to 2 percent.) It took a long time: a few days to get up to temperature, another week of firing, and a few more days of cooling. It took three tons of coke to make one ton of steel. Steel made this way was called blister steel, because carbon deposits on the outside often looked like blisters. A slight improvement could be had by forging many layers of this steel together, to get shear steel, or double shear steel, but that took even more time and labor.
Compared with cementation, the crucible process was a breakthrough. It was careful, precise, and produced steel of a uniform quality. But it was too slow, small scale, expensive, and labor intensive to last. The melters, pullers-out, cokers, pot makers, converters, and nippers were bound to vanish.
The vanishing began in 1855, with the invention of the Bessemer process. By injecting cold air into a chamber of molten iron—a chamber that looked like a big black egg, or maybe a huge grenade—steelmakers were able to burn off carbon and most other contaminants in a white-hot reaction. Then they added some carbon, and voilà: they’d done in twenty minutes what had once taken a week, using one-sixth of the fuel. And they could make fifteen tons at a time, instead of seventy-five pounds. To steelmaking companies, it was like being able to sell in barrels instead of pints.
The only problem with the Bessemer process was that iron ore rich in phosphorous—as most was—resulted in brittle, granular junk. It came out rotten, as the blacksmith would say. It was twenty years before a young Welsh chemist named Sidney Gilchrist Thomas figured out a process—known as the Basic process—to precipitate acid phosphorous. Three-quarters of the steel made on England’s northeast coast in 1883 was made via the Bessemer process; by 1907, the Basic process had almost replaced it. By then, Carl Wilhelm Siemens and Pierre Emile Martin figured out how to recycle waste-gases to superheat iron, in a regenerative, or open-hearth, furnace. It was a little slower than the Bessemer process, but the steel produced had fine-grained structure, the result of slower cooling, and was much more durable.
Charcoal, too, was on the way out. The gas furnace, invented in 1880s, was the first threat; the electric furnace, invented about 1900, sealed charcoal’s fate. The new furnaces caught on in the United States right away; not so in Sheffield. The city was reluctant to modernize, even though new electric furnaces cut down on impurities from burning, made temperature control much easier, and allowed steelmakers to start and stop firing whenever they wanted. (The revolutionaries in Riga would have approved.)
In 1916 more than half the steel in the United States was made via electric furnaces; the next year it was 66 percent; by 1930, more than 99.5 percent of the steel in the United States was made in electric furnaces. In England, it was almost the opposite: the first electric furnace was not used until 1910, and the technology caught on slowly, before it regressed. England produced less steel by electric furnace in 1930 than it did in 1917.
By the end of the nineteenth century, only 1 percent or 2 percent of all steel in America and England was made via the crucible process—but that was no small amount. England exported more than £100,000 worth of crucible steel each month. It tended to be tools and machinery, with high-quality edges, and had a strong reputation even in America. Yet while England’s steelmakers may have been reluctant to change, those at Firth were not. Firth began using a gas furnace in 1908 and obtained an electric furnace in 1911. In 1916 the company got seven more—to keep up with demand for munitions and armor needed for the Great War.
Brearley would soon be a dinosaur. But, as a quasi-free-agent analyst at Firth’s, his knowledge surpassed that of many other analysts. Other steelmakers described good steel as having “body,” attributing it to the type of clay in the crucible, or the source of the water, or the mine from which the ore came. Good steel was therefore mysterious, requiring interpretation. (One Sheffield crucible steel recipe called for the juice of four white onions.) When one steelworker, Henry Seebohm, suggested introducing colored labels to denote the carbon content of steels, Sheffield steelmakers objected. It was too scientific; it eliminated them as translators of intrigue.
John Percy, the author of the 934-page treatise Metallurgy: The Art of Extracting Metals from Their Ores, and Adapting Them to Various Purposes of Manufacture, summarized the situation: “the science of the art of steelmaking is still in a very imperfect state, however advanced the art may be.” That was in 1864. That same year, by examining the structure of a polished piece of metal with a four-hundred power microscope, Henry Clifton Sorby introduced metallography. Twenty years later, the Sheffield Technical School began offering formal training in metallurgy. Not much had changed fifty years later, except where Brearley was employed.
Brearley knew qualitative descriptions were bogus misapprehensions, leftover ignorance from an age when science offered little insight. He staked out his turf, relying on skill and science—but not to the exclusion of experience. He ordered two of the earliest Izod notched-bar impact testing machines, each of which, with a calibrated pendulum, quantified the blacksmith’s biceps. (The machines are still used today.) He didn’t talk about body. He talked about Krupp-Kanheit, the result of cooling a nickel-chromium alloy too slowly, leaving it liable to fracture with a brittle, crystalline face.
Brearley saw himself as steel’s savior, its priest. He valued depth over breadth. He examined details, concerning himself with quality. But he missed the big picture, and at Firth, had the wrong priorities. Firth cared about volume. Scale. Margin. Market.
Brearley knew that, as far as physical properties of steel go, there’s no difference between an axle with 0.035 percent sulfur and one with 0.05 percent sulfur. But he missed the point: the difference, a manager told him, was £2 a ton. It was a lesson in politics as much as commerce; it didn’t matter if the steel was no better. It only mattered that people thought it was better, and were willing to pay more for it.
But the lesson didn’t stick; if anything, the business of modern steelmaking only hardened his resolve that it was all hogwash. “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.” It was a disgra
ce.
To Brearley, progress seemed like regress. Nobody cared about D.G.S. anymore. He felt like he was the only steelmaker left with his head screwed on right. His expertise was careful and deliberate, untainted. His index cards didn’t lie. In 1911 he wrote The Heat Treatment of Tool Steel, his third book—and dedicated it to his employer: “To Thos. Firth & Sons, Limited, in whose service labour and learning have been agreeably combined, from 1883 to the present time, these pages are respectfully dedicated by the author.” In later editions, this dedication was deleted—a sign of the acrimony that was to come.
In May 1912 Brearley traveled 130 miles south, to the Royal Small Arms Factory in Enfield to study the erosion of rifle barrels. He examined the problem, then wrote, on June 4, “It might be advisable to start a few erosion trials with varying low-carbon high-chromium steels at once . . .” He spent most of the next year making crucible steels with chromium from 6 percent to 15 percent, but they didn’t stack up. Then, on August 13, 1913, he tried the electric furnace, probably grudgingly. The first cast was no good. The second cast (number 1008), on August 20, turned out better. It was 12.8 percent chromium, 0.24 percent carbon, 0.44 percent manganese, and 0.2 percent silicon. He made a three-inch square ingot and then rolled it into a one-and-a-half-inch-diameter bar. It rolled easily and machined well. From that, he made twelve gun barrels, which he sent to the factory.
Rust: The Longest War Page 7