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The Twentieth-Century Metal
| Article
# : |
12260 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1987 |
4,468 Words |
| Author
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William T. Hogan, S.J.
William T. Hogan, S.J., is professor of economics and director
of the Industrial Economics Research Institute of Fordham
University. He is the author of numerous books and articles
on steel-industry economics, including the landmark, five-
volume work Economic History of the Iron and Steel Industry in
the United States (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1971)
and Steel in the United States: Restructuring to Compete
(Lexington Books, 1984). |
Seven generations after Adam, we are told in Genesis 9:22, Tubal-cain was a forger of steel. In prehistoric times, iron replaced brass as the world's foremost working metal and somewhat before 1000 B.C. was smelted for use by industry throughout western Asia and Egypt. This marked the beginning of the "Iron Age," described in mythology, according to Webster's dictionary, as "the last and worst age of the world, characterized by wickedness, selfishness, and degeneracy." Steel, to be sure, has never cured the world's evils, but with the dawning of the "Steel Age" early in the twentieth century, the lot of humankind was set on a course of truly dramatic improvement.
Today steel is vital in producing food, weaving clothes, providing shelter, printing books, and moving ourselves and everything we need across the countryside and around the world. As our most basic and useful metal, it has given us better control over time and space, drudgery, and hunger, and has uplifted the lives of many. It is at once widely available, durable, versatile, and inexpensive and has come to be regarded as matter-of-factly as sugar, grain, or other commodities. Far from having a counterpart in nature, however, steel must be manufactured by a long series of complex processes, each of which supports the other and requires a massive capital investment (see sidebox). The term 'steel' encompasses thousands of individual products of many different shapes, chemical compositions, and quality for a seemingly endless variety of applications.
Both iron and steel, contain 90 percent or more of elemental iron. The metal designated iron, however, contains approximately 4.5 percent carbon. The production of steel consists of removing most of the carbon so that the final product contains between 0.005 and 1.0 percent carbon, thereby yielding superior strength and hardness. The amount of carbon is crucial to the properties of steel: too much carbon and steel is brittle; too little and the metal becomes soft. The use of steel also determines carbon content. Sheet steel for auto bodies must contain 0.04 to 0.06 percent carbon, while structural steel may contain 0.2 to 0.6 percent.
Steel can be further improved in hardness and corrosion resistance by adding special elements to the molten metal to create alloys (see box). Once solidified, other properties are added by hot and cold working and heat treating, and the steel is transformed into a variety of useful shapes, including sheets, strips, plates, bars, beams, rods, rails, pipe, and wire.
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