The creation of stainless steel following a series of scientific progress, beginning in 1798, where Louis Vauquelin first displayed chromium to the French Academy.
In the first 1800s, Robert Mallet, James Stoddart, and Michael Faraday marked oxidizing agents’ resistance by chromium-iron alloys (“chromium steels”). Robert Bunsen found out chromium’s resistance to keen acids.
The iron-chromium alloys’ corrosion resistance may have been primarily admitted by Pierre Berthier in 1821, who noted the iron-chromium opposition over onslaught by some acids and suggested their cutlery use.
In the 1840s, both Krupp and Sheffield steelmakers built chromium steel, applying it in the 1850s for cannons.
In 1861, Robert Forester Mushet extracted a chromium steel’s patent.
These events resulted in the first creation of chromium-embodying steel by J. Baur of Brooklyn’s Chrome Steel Works to build bridges.
A U.S. product’s Patent was granted in 1869. This was tracked with recognition of the chromium alloys’ corrosion resistance by Englishmen John Clark and John T. Woods, who observed chromium ranges from 5–30%, with added medium carbon tungsten. They followed up the commercial worth of the innovation via a British “Weather-Resistant Alloys” patent.
In the late 1890s, German chemist “Hans Goldschmidt” improved an aluminothermic (thermite) method for manufacturing carbon-free chromium.
Between 1904 and 1911, many researchers, including Leon Guillet of France, developed alloys that would be examined for stainless steel today.
Friedrich Krupp Germaniawerft, in 1908, produced the 366-ton sailing yacht Germania presenting a chrome-nickel steel structure in Germany.
Philip Monnartz, in 1911, described the relationship between corrosion resistance and chromium content.
On 17 October 1912, Eduard Maurer and Krupp engineers Benno Strauss certified austenitic stainless steel as Nirosta.
The same developments in the United States were taking place. Frederick Becket and Christian Dantsizen were mechanizing ferritic stainless steel. Elwood Haynes, in 1912, asked for a US patent on “a martensitic stainless steel alloy,” which was not awarded until 1919.
While asking for a corrosion-resistant alloy for weapon muzzles in 1912, Harry Brearley of the Brown-Firth research laboratory in Sheffield, England, subsequently industrialized and discovered a martensitic stainless steel alloy.
Two years, the discovery was announced in a newspaper article in January 1915 in The New York Times.
The metal was later sold under the “Staybrite” brand in England, by Firth Vickers and was used for the new entry sunshade in 1929 for the Savoy Hotel in London.
During 1915, Brearley requested a US patent only to discover that Haynes had already registered one. Haynes and Brearley combined their funding and created the American Stainless Steel Corporation, with Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
At first, stainless steel was marketed in the US under various brand names like “Nirosta steel” and “Allegheny metal.” Even inside the metallurgy field, the name stayed unsettled; one trade journal called it “unstainable steel” in 1921. Before the Great Depression, in 1929, over 25,000 tons of stainless steel were produced and marketed in the US annually.
Significant technological progressions in the 1950s and 1960s permitted the production of vast tonnages at a low-priced cost:
- AOD procedure(argon oxygen decarburization), for the removal of sulfur and carbon
- Ongoing casting and hot strip rolling
- The Z-Mill, or Sendzimir cold rolling mill
