Stainless Steel: The Sheffield Connection
Sheffield, a city in the North Yorkshire district of the UK, is famous for many things, from being the location of the world's oldest football ground to being the birthplace of actor Sean Bean, animator Nick Park and frontman Jarvis Cocker from the britpop band Pulp. The city's most well-known association, however, is with steel, particularly stainless steel. To find out why, we need to go back over 200 years...
In 1794, a French chemist called Louis Vauquelin became the first person to isolate the element chromium, a discovery which he shared with the French Academy in 1798. Though he couldn't have known it at the time, chromium would go on to become a critical element in the production of stainless steel. It is chromium that, by forming a layer of chromium oxide on the surface of stainless steel, imbues this ubiquitous material with its famed resistance to corrosion.
In the early part of the 19th century, Michael Faraday, James Stoddart and Robert Mallet worked with a team of scientists examining chromium/iron alloys, discovering that they were particularly resistant to oxidisation. A short time later, Robert Bunsen (the father of the Bunsen burner), found that chromium was also strongly resistant to acid attack. Pierre Berthier, a French geologist and mining engineer, prophetically noted that these new alloys would be an excellent material from which to produce items of cutlery.
The first patent for what would today be considered stainless steel was filed for in 1872 by entrepreneurs Woods and Clark; their weather- and acid-resistant alloy contained as much as 35% chromium along with 2% tungsten. Three years later, a French man named Brustlein realised that creating stainless steel successfully would require a low carbon content at a maximum of 0.15%.
It took another 20 years until Hans Goldschmidt developed a way to produce chromium free of carbon, known as the 'aluminothermic reduction process'. This was the real starting point for stainless steel. Leon Guillet built on this work, creating alloys of chromium and iron that would go on to become todays 400 and 300 series of stainless steel.
Harry Brearley, a Sheffield native working in the city's Brown-Firth Research Laboratory, was tasked in 1912 with finding a way to prolong the useful service life of gun barrels, which had a tendency to erode quickly. Just one year later, he created a steel alloy containing 0.24% carbon and 12.8% chromium, which was arguably the first ever true stainless steel.
Recognising the vast potential for the new material, especially for cutlery, Brearley went on to develop a hardening process for knives, naming his new invention 'rustless steel'; a friend of his suggested that 'stainless steel' would be a better name and this was the one that stuck. Sheffield was already a world hub of steel production and its reputation was cemented as it began producing vast amounts of the new stainless steel.
As technology has evolved, stainless steel is today offered in a multitude of grades and types, which are used for a correspondingly vast number of applications. BS Stainless has grown to become a leading supplier and processor of a comprehensive collection of stainless steel products, which you can find out more about on our website or by getting in touch with our expert technical team.