Benjamin Huntsman is revered in Sheffield. Not because he scored the winning goal that saw Wednesday go on to win their inaugural top flight title in 1903, nor because he was the first to organise proper black outs from the bombing raids of the Luftwaffe in the second world war nor that he went over the top at the Somme in 1916 where we lost nearly 60,000 men on the first day, the largest number ever for a single day, by the British military. The name Huntsman is not revered for these things but he likely could have been had he been around. Huntsman is revered for inventing the 'Crucible Steel Process' in 1742 following years of experimentation from his Handsworth, south Sheffield Foundry.
He was the first person to cast steel ingots. Until the mid-18th century, the quality of steel produced was unreliable. Steel was made by heating iron bars, covered with charcoal, for up to a week. The end product was called "blister steel". Blister steel was then turned into "shear steel" by wrapping blister steel bars into a bundle and re-reheating them before forging the bundle. The heat and action of the forge hammer welded the bundles together to the required size. Although this steel was used to make razors, files, knives and swords, the process was extremely laborious and no more than 200 tons a year were produced in Sheffield in this way. Benjamin Huntsman's invention of the crucible steel process changed all of that. He was the first person to cast steel bars, producing tougher, high-quality steel in larger quantities (from less than 200 tons of steel a year to more than 20,000 tons, or 40% of total European steel production, a century later). The demand for Huntsman's steel increased rapidly and, in 1770, he moved his factory to a new site in Attercliffe in the Don Valley. This area later became the main location for the huge special-steel making industry of Sheffield.
The sagacity of Huntsman caused him to be looked upon as the 'wise man' of the neighbourhood. He even practised surgery as an empiric, and was regarded as a clever oculist, but he always gave medical aid free of charge.
The wealth created in Sheffield and by steel was a joint effort however; Huntsman was pivotal in that he enabled the mass production of cutlery for the first time and Britain soon dominated world production.
A year after Huntsman's invention came another Sheffield cutler, Thomas Boulsover (1705-1788), who devised a means of fusing a thin layer of silver to copper to produce silver plate the famous 'Sheffield Plate' that looked like silver but was far cheaper, and was to take silver-plated cutlery into the dining rooms of almost every middle class family in the land. Boulsover noticed that silver and copper had fused together very strongly after heating. Experiments showed that the two metals behaved as one when he tried to reshape them, even though he could clearly see two different layers. Boulsover carried out further experiments in which he put a thin sheet of silver on a thick ingot of copper and heated the two together to fuse them. When the composite block was hammered or rolled to make it thinner, the two metals were reduced in thickness at similar rates. Using this method, Boulsover was able to make sheets of metal which had a thin layer of silver on the top surface and a thick layer of copper underneath. This silver plate was, of course, cheaper than silver and was very popular for items such as candlesticks and teapots.
In 1856 another cutler named Henry Bessemer introduced a new method of producing steel, using a special furnace called a convertor. This came after years of experimentation. The Bessemer process was able to produce much larger quantities of refined steel than the crucible process. It was worked by blowing air into the bottom of the furnace so that it bubbled through the molten iron. This burned carbon from the iron producing a great deal of heat as it refined the metal.
The 150th anniversary of this invention is being celebrated. One of Bessemer's converters can still be seen at Kelham Island Museum. Well worth a visit I can tell you.
And we must most definitely mention Chemist Harry Brearley. In 1907 Brearley returned to Sheffield from abroad to take charge of the Brown-Firth Research Laboratory. Five years later he was investigating the corrosion of rifle barrels. As a result of his investigations, he developed a chrome alloy steel which was much more rust resistant than the steel which had been used until then. This is now known as Stainless Steel. Brearley's chrome steel formed the basis for the wide range of stainless and special steels which are now used so widely. And his successor Dr. Hatfield further developed this process with what today is known as 18/8 steel. Or, if one is spending a little more, 18/10 which denotes the amount of chromium to nickel.
John Brown who had taken out the first licence to produce what was to become known as Bessemer Steel created the 'The Bessemer boom' and made Sheffield the kings of world steel. Its products were sent all over the world. In 1871, two firms, Browns & Cammells, exported to America three times as much railway track as was produced by the entire American domestic industry. By 1880, production of Bessemer steel was over a million tons out of a total production of about 1.3M tons. Quite remarkable. Sheffield was probably second to nobody as the driver of industrialization of Britain, its empire and the world at large. We all of us owe an enormous debt to the steel city of Sheffield. But no ground will be given, no quarter ceded, and no effort relinquished in the pursuit of a victory today between two undisputed kings of industrialization.
And as Confucius once said; "It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop".
Or as Sir Winston Churchill said; "Success is not final, failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts"
City will have more days like Leeds Utd before this season is out and one never knows the mindset after yet another laborious international break, we will soon find out.
Hillsborough is always a very nice away day. Hope you all enjoy the journey and help bring back the points.
Agreed; sincerely hope LJ learns from his fathers mistakes of 10 years ago and makes much better quality signings that will give us the extra 3 or 4% that could make all the difference. Of course managers always come out and say January signings are notoriously difficult and usually overpriced. Buyer beware no doubt. I have now... I think that has to be the miss of the season so far. So bad in fact that my immediate reaction was that he is linked to a Singapore Syndicate.
