For over 2,000 years, steel has been known and used by humans. It slowly became more important to humanity over time and eventually became the central material of modern society. It built railroads, bridges, battleships, cars, and countless everyday tools. Yet, steel wasn't discovered all at once. It was refined over centuries through trial and error and scientific breakthroughs. Learn more about steel and how it changed the world on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. This episode is sponsored by Quince. Steve Jobs is famous for having multiple versions of the same outfit that he wore every day. I'm not saying I'm Steve Jobs, but I do have a rather simple wardrobe, a habit I developed through years on the road living out of a bag. My Quince cashmere sweater is something I've mentioned before and I've come to wear it almost every single day. Not only does it look good, but it's incredibly durable. And the best part is that Quince's prices are 50-60% lower than those of similar brands. Quince works directly with ethical factories and cuts out the middleman so you're paying for quality, not brand markup. Everything is designed to last and make getting dressed easy. Two things that I really care about. The fresher wardrobe with Quince. Go to quince.com slash daily for free shipping and 365 day returns, now available in Canada too. Go to qince.com slash daily for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com slash daily. This episode is sponsored by True Work. Working outside in the springtime means you're dealing with chilly mornings, hot afternoons, and everything in between. Not to mention the mud, rain, whatever else the weather decides to throw at you. You need workwear that can keep up with the challenging conditions and True Work has you covered. Most workwear is made from cotton blends which restrict your movement and get soaked after just a few raindrops. True Work uses advanced performance fabrics to build products designed specifically for work on the job site. They've been tested and validated for over 10 years by Real Trade Pros working in real job site conditions with over 15,000 5-star reviews. And I have a pair and I wish I had them years ago when I was traveling because they would have made the perfect travel pants. The work doesn't stop just because the weather changes. Upgrade to the T2 work pant and stay comfortable no matter what the day brings. Get 15% off your first order at truework.com with code everything. That's T-R-U-E-W-E-R-K.com code everything. True Work. Don't like it matters because it does. Unlike other discoveries and inventions, Steel has no particular person, place, or time that we can point to for its origin. The only thing that we can be sure of is that its discovery was ancient and almost certainly accidental. True Iron Smelting, achieved by heating iron ore in a charcoal fire hot enough to reduce it to a spongy metallic mass called a bloom, emerged around 1200 BC in Anatolia and the Eastern Mediterranean. The bloomery process produced wrought iron, which is nearly pure iron and thus rather soft. It would also occasionally contain accidental amounts of a harder, higher carbon material whenever conditions were just right. That higher quality material was steel. Many metal workers learned that they could significantly harden iron through a process now known as carburization. This involved a repetitive cycle of heating the metal over charcoal fires and hammering it, gradually infusing carbon into the metal surface. This breakthrough represented the first intentional method of producing steel. As early as 300 BC, metallurgists in the Indian subcontinent pioneered the creation of crucible steel, also known as woots. This sophisticated process involved sealing iron, charcoal and organic materials within clay crucibles. When heated, the iron absorbed a precise concentration of carbon, resulting in high carbon steel renowned for its exceptional hardness and the unique banded look that it takes on when polished. Exported across the Persian, Arabian and Roman world, woots became the raw material for blades, later known in the West as Damascus Steel. It was famous for its flowing water pattern surface and its ability to hold a razor edge, which confounded European metallurgists for centuries. Damascus steel swords became the subject of legends and were said to be sharper, stronger and able to cut lesser blades in two. In reality, its reputation likely came from the high quality crucible steel used, combined with expert Middle Eastern forging techniques, which produced blades that were genuinely excellent, although not supernatural. In East Asia, Chinese smiths were producing cast iron by the year 500 BC, centuries before Europe, owing to the higher furnace temperatures that they were able to achieve. They also pioneered the process called de-carborization, the deliberate removal of carbon from cast iron by prolonged heating and air, which produced a form of steel that the Chinese called 100 refined iron. Representatives and later Japanese smiths developed techniques for folding and welding steels of different carbon levels, creating complex composite blades. Representing perhaps the peak of pre-industrial metallurgy, Japanese Tamahagani steel was produced by smelting iron sand in charcoal-fired furnaces. This refined process involved folding the steel and applying a strategic clay coating for differential hardening prior to quenching. But the medieval period, European steel production was an art rather than a science. The cementation process, widely practiced in the 16th and 17th centuries, involved packing bars of wrought iron into stone chests with charcoal powder and then heating them for days at a time. Carbon slowly diffused into the iron from the surface inward, producing what was called blister steel, identifiable by the blister surface that formed as carbon bubbles were released. Blister steel was hard but uneven, with a carbon-rich shell and a much softer iron core. And this was basically the state of steel entering the 18th century. It had been known for almost 2,000 years, but production was highly inconsistent, it was difficult to work with, and so it was reserved for very special items such as swords. The great leap forward in steel production came in the 1740s when a clockmaker from Sheffield, a man who was a man of the name Benjamin Huntsman, frustrated with inconsistent spring steel available for his clock mechanisms, began experimenting in secret with a new approach. He melted blister steel in sealed clay crucibles heated to temperatures far higher than any English furnace had previously reached. He discovered that the molten metal on cooling formed an entirely homogeneous ingot of uniform composition. It was harder, tougher, and more consistent than any steel previously made. Sheffield became the steel capital of the world for over a century on the strength of the single innovation. Huntsman's process spread slowly, partially because he tried to keep it a secret, but it eventually transformed cutlery, tools, and spring manufacturing throughout industrial Europe. The 18th century's other great contribution to steel was more indirect. It transformed the fuel that drove the furnaces. Before Abraham Darby's experimentations at Colbrookdale in 1709, iron smelting depended entirely on charcoal, which required enormous quantities of wood. Darby succeeded in smelting iron commercially with coke, unlocking a fuel supply that was effectively unlimited compared with charcoal. Coke is just coal that is partially burned to drive off sulfur and other impurities. Coke-fueled blast furnaces could be built far larger and run hotter, producing cast iron in quantities previously unimaginable. New processes of puddling and rolling iron made wrought iron cheap enough to build bridges, and the early 19th century saw iron used for host of structural purposes. Steel itself, however, still remained expensive, limited to cutting tools, springs, and specialty services. Throughout the 18th and first half of the 19th centuries, the industrial world was desperate for something that was better than wrought iron. The problem was that steel was still too costly to produce in volume. The solution to this problem came in the 1850s. Henry Bessemer, an English inventor with no formal metallurgical training, discovered in 1856 that blowing cold air through a bath of molten pig iron caused spectacular combustion. The excess carbon, silicon, and manganese in the iron burned away in a shower of sparks, converting the pig iron into steel in under 20 minutes without any extra fuel at all. The latent heat of the molten pig iron was sufficient to do the job. The impact of the Bessemer process on steel production is difficult to overstate. Steel that had previously taken days to produce in small batches could now be produced by the ton in a matter of minutes. Just to give you an example, the price of steel rails in Britain fell by roughly 90% between 1870 and 1900. Railroads expanded exponentially across North America and Europe because of cheaper steel. Natural steel also made the skyscraper possible. The first true steel-framed building, the Home Insurance Building in Chicago, was constructed in 1885. The Brooklyn Bridge completed in 1883 used steel wire for its cables, a choice that made Bessemer-era steel engineering internationally famous. The Bessemer process had some limitations, however. It could not handle iron ore that was high in phosphorus, which was common across much of continental Europe. The Gilchrist-Thomas process, which was patented in 1878, solved this by lining the Bessemer converter with dolomite, which is similar to limestone. It absorbed the phosphorus that was in the slag. This made vast European iron ore reserves now available for steelmaking. Meanwhile, the Siemens-Martin Open-Hearth furnace, developed throughout the 1860s, offered an alternative. It was a slower process that could use scrap iron as well as pig iron and allowed more control over composition, making it better suited to the production of consistent steel. By the year 1900, Open-Hearth furnaces were producing more steel than Bessemer convergers. The first half of the 20th century saw steel become the defining material of industrial civilization. It was central to two world wars, the construction of modern cities, and the rise of mass market manufacturing. Metalurgists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries discovered that adding small quantities of other elements, including chromium, nickel, manganese, vanadium, and tungsten, transformed steel's properties in highly specific ways. In 1913, Harry Burley made an accidental breakthrough in Sheffield, England while researching erosion resistant steel for gun barrels. He observed that alloys with high chromium content were resistant to rust, a discovery that established the entire new category of stainless steel. Additionally, industrial manufacturing was transformed by the advent of tungsten carbide steels. This innovation enabled the machining of other metallic materials at velocities that were once considered impossible. Both world wars drove enormous expansion in steel capacity around the world and accelerated the development of specialty grades of steel, including armor plate steel, high temperature steels for turbine blades, spring steels for artillery, and bearing steels for machinery. The United States became the world's dominant steel producer, and Pittsburgh, with its proximity to coal and the Great Lakes iron ore, became the symbolic center of industrial steelmaking. By 1945, the United States was producing roughly half of the world's steel. The post-war period brought the most significant process innovation since the Bessemer process. The basic oxygen steelmaking process, or BOS, was developed in Austria at the Linn's Donna Witt Steelworks in the early 1950s. It blew pure oxygen into the molten pig iron from above rather than simple air. As pure oxygen reacts far more vigorously than air, a BOS converter could produce 300 tons of steel in under an hour, with better temperature control and less nitrogen pickup than Bessemer converters had allowed. BOS furnaces spread globally throughout the 1960s and 70s and remain the dominant method of steelmaking today. Simultaneously, the electric arc furnace, which melts steel scrap using enormous graphite electrodes, matured from a specialty tool for alloy steels into a mainstream production method. The electric arc furnace required neither a blast furnace nor a coke plant. It needed only scrap and electricity. This allowed a new type of producer, the mini mill, to enter the market with far lower capital requirements than in integrated steelworks. During the 1970s, the Newcore Corporation championed the mini mill in the United States. By initially utilizing scrap to produce low-grade reinforcing steel bar, the company eventually transitioned to higher-valued offerings. The evolution was supported by the advancement of continuous casting, a process that boosted industry-wide consistency and productivity by pouring steel into a moving strand rather than separate ingots. The period from the 1980s through the 2000s was characterized by the globalization of the steel industry and the proliferation of specialty grades engineered for specific applications. However, the most significant shift during this period was geographic rather than technical. Following massive investments in production capacity starting in 1990, China overtook the United States as the leading global steel producer in 1996 and passed Japan in 2000. By 2020, Japan's output accounted for over half of the world's total steel production, manufacturing roughly 1 billion metric tons of the 1.9 billion tons produced globally. This transformation reshaped global trade, drove down prices, forced the mass closure of traditional steelworks in both Europe and North America, and shifted the industry's center of gravity. What makes the history of steel remarkable is that it's not the story of one invention. It's a chain of thousands of improvements stretching from ancient accidental steel production to modern AI-controlled steel mills. Every age believes that it's mastered steel only for the next age to discover a better method of steelmaking. Steel helped build the modern world and despite competition from aluminum, composites, and ceramics, it remains one of the most adaptable and indispensable materials humanity has ever created. The executive producer of everything everywhere daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Austin Otkin and Cameron Kiefer. My big thanks to everyone who supports the show of Ron Patreon. Your support helps make this podcast possible. 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