The technology gap. Liquid steel and Saint Martin

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

I'll start my story from afar. I came across a picture on which lies a Siemens cable-laying machine "Faraday".

"Faraday" (CS Faraday) is a Siemens pothers vessel, built in 1874 by C. Mitchell & Company Ltd. at the shipyards in Newcastle. Named after Michael Faraday.

Faraday has laid 50,000 nautical miles of cable in 50 years of operation as a cable layer. The ship was sold for scrap in 1924, but the 1-inch sides made it difficult for the demolition workers, so Faraday became a coal hull named Analcoal in Algeria and owned by the Anglo-Algerian Coal Company. In 1931, the hull was transferred to Gibraltar. In 1941, the ship became a Naval Storage Ship in Sierra Leone. In 1950, the Faraday returned to England, where she was dismantled at the South Wales shipyard."

Wonderful and surprising destiny for one of the first huge-size solid-metal propeller-driven ships. Length - 111 meters, displacement 4197. Commensurate, for example, with the cruiser "Aurora". a little less.

Of course, this picture reminded me of the fate of another famous cable-laying operator. Even larger in size. "Great_Eastern", made even earlier.

As it turned out, a lot of huge iron ships appeared at this time! But what is interesting is that these are not ships, these are civilian ships!

This is a huge iron ship - an ore carrier!

And here is a ship, a battleship of the same time.

In the middle of the 19th century, not only huge iron ships appear. The famous Brunnel builds the most complex bridge entirely from rolled steel. This bridge still stands and is being used! King Albert Bridge.

This is a photo, as it were, of the construction of a bridge, I practically did not find other photos, but many questions arise on this one.

The most important manifestation of high metallurgical technologies is railway transport, and in the photographs of the middle of the 19th century, we see a developed system of railways, steam locomotives and classic wheelsets near carriages.

Steel and rolled metal everywhere!

But with the weapon came some kind of misfortune - bronze or cast iron guns, smooth-bore rifles, basically, with a capsule fuse, almost flint.

Here is a cannon aboard the giant steel ship "Leviathan", or rather a ship that is not well suited for cannons!

For me, this is not an understandable paradox, because all innovations, especially in metallurgy, have always been implemented in weapons. What we see now, and at the beginning of the 20th century - cannons made of steel, huge dreadnoughts, armored trains and rifles, and so on.

I decided to delve into the history of metallurgy in the late 18th century - early 19th century.

As it turned out, Russia was the leader in the world metallurgy!

For example, the history of the Verkhneisetsky metallurgical plant -

I will cite one unexpected piece from the article …

“At the beginning of the 19th century, a new product - sheet roofing iron - brought world fame to the plant. It was bought by England, France, America and their colonies. At least 300 thousand poods of products were exported to America annually. The roofs of the London Parliament were covered with Visa iron. In the commercial world, the Upper Isetsk iron was known as "Yakovlevskoe", was branded "A. Ya. Siberia" with the image of a sable and was highly valued for its excellent qualities: it was smooth, glossy, did not require painting, "for a hundred years it stood on the roof.”After the fire of 1812 in Moscow, it was placed on all the roofs of the affected city.”

Who did not understand - this is steel sheet products and if you believe what was written of very high quality - stainless steel and did not require painting.

In the article, I came across a curious place that in 1918 all the old equipment was taken out, by whom and where it is not clear. But this is a different song …

That is, the rental was and the equipment was and was rented at the beginning of the 19th century. I recently wrote about rental in ancient Roman buildings - the Pantheon's T-beams.

But according to the official history, everything is not so !!

I was hooked by one little article about the history of the rolling mill …

… "With the development of railway transport, the need for rolled products has increased significantly. The first rails were cast iron, but at the beginning of the 19th century in England they switched to the production of iron rails. In 1828, the first rolling mill for rolling puddling iron rails appeared. and from 1825 they began to roll rails from Bessemer steeland. Rails were the main product of the rolling mill. In addition to rails, it was necessary to produce various parts for steam locomotives, armor was also required for the development of the fleet, in which wooden ships were replaced by metal armored ones."

IT'S JUST A LOVE WHAT THAT IS !!! Bessemer was only 12 years old in 1825 !!! Twelve!!!

I understand that the boy could be smart … but not that much! Henry Bessemer (English Henry Bessemer; January 19, 1813, Charlton, Hertfordshire - March 15, 1898, London) - English engineer-inventor, known for his inventions and revolutionary improvements in the field of metallurgy [3]; member of the Royal Society of London since 1879._Henry

I will remind the readers of what the Bessemer process is.

Liquid iron is poured into the Bessemer convector and air is blown through it. Oxygen in the air interacts with the carbon of cast iron, CO2 is formed and energy is released, which sharply increases the temperature of the melt, a sheaf of flame and sparks bursts out of the convector's throat, and the steel is ready!

Further, the steel is poured into molds and immediately, until it has cooled down and is plastic, is fed to the rolling mill.

ATTENTION!!! THE MOST IMPORTANT FEATURE !!! If the steel cools down, it does not roll, it is already very dense !!! The rolling mill takes steel from the spill directly. It is the rolling of hot steel that makes it both hard and resilient, since the rolled steel arranges the crystal lattice and creates fibers that are laid along the rolled steel. But as soon as they began to cool down - this is a completely different matter! Steel must be heated again so that it becomes available for both forging and rolling. This is exactly what they do - during rolling, the steel is repeatedly heated as it is rolled in a special furnace.

The device for rolling steel is called blooming and slabbing!

The first rolling mill in Russia started working according to the official history at the Sormovsky plant in 1871

The first blooming mills appeared in the 70s of the 19th century - For the first time, trio-mills were used to compress Bessemer ingots in the USA by A. Holley (1871). In subsequent years, John and George Fritz and A. Holley built mechanized trio blooming mills there for rolling light ingots. In England, Ramsbotom designed (1880) a duo-reversing mill with a variable direction of rotation of the rolls for rolling ingots up to 5 tons and more. The duo-reversing mill became widespread thanks to the electric reversing drive proposed by K. Ilchner (1902). Blooming mills have been produced in the USSR since 1931; the first blooming made in the USSR (according to German drawings) was put into operation at the Makeevka Metallurgical Plant (1933). In the late 1940s. Soviet scientists and engineers (A. I. Tselikov, A. V. Istomin, and others) developed the first proper Soviet blooming design (the work was awarded the Stalin Prize of the 2nd degree in 1951).

Of course steel can be forged, with hammers and sledgehammers you can forge a sword, an ax, a knife, but not a rail !!! And not roofing iron and not an inch sheet of ship hull.

Well, well, one reader advised me that before that there were large hammers from a water drive or a steam engine, and you can forge anything with them! For example, such a hammer and forging …

This type of mechanical hammer has one significant drawback, it is clearly visible in the photo - the hammer falls on the anvil at an angle and because of this its capabilities are severely limited!

Yes, this is how the tower was forged on the first battleships and monitors during the American Civil War!

Here is one of the "inventors" like Brunel - all at once, the father of all steam locomotives and so on … James Nasmyth (English James Nasmyth; August 19, 1808, Edinburgh - May 7, 1890, London) - Scottish astronomer and engineer, son of the Scottish artist Alexander Nasmyth (eng.), inventor of the steam hammer and hydraulic press._James

Tokmo is not very clear what he forged there … if Bessemer had not yet invented his own method of producing steel in marketable volumes!

Here are the steam hammers

French king hammer.

But all the same, the rail cannot be hammered with a hammer, and the curved ship mast. That's why hydraulic presses were invented. But again, at best, this is the second half of the 19th century!

Now I propose to see how the ore was mined according to the official history in the 19th century in the era of photography. After all, ore must not only be dug up, it must also be delivered to the furnace.

Yes, with such prey, it’s okay if you can do iron to every peasant with a knife and an ax! England or France in the photographs does not differ in anything special exactly the same miners with a lantern on their head and a horse and a cart, no more than 500 kg. Do not forget that the quarry is in the ground and the horse carries the loaded cart up! That is, before the advent of excavators and heavy vehicles, or at least before the railway to the mine, there is no question of large volumes of ore mining. Iron must be very, very expensive! But we see just a disregard for the iron scrap - the ships are lying on the shore and no one is taking them apart. Why? Could you do it, but didn't make it out?

One of the first questions immediately arises - how to cut steel?

Gas welding and cutting of metals appeared again at the end of the 19th century and again in France -

But excuse me, but how did they cut the rails, what did they cut off the edges, what did they cut the metal with until the end of the 19th century. Did they make ships in the middle of the 19th century ??? Did you cut an inch sheet with a chisel? Yes, there are hydraulic shears, but this is again the end of the 19th century! Tool steel saws are at the end of the 19th century …. with tungsten carbide they are generally in the 20th century.

But this is not the most important thing.

This is what you think, what did you do with the scrap metal, well, the steam boiler broke down or the part for the ship was done wrong or the rails were rolled, what they did with all these pieces of iron, the iron costs money! The natural answer is melting down! Even from the history of the Second World War, everyone remembers how wrecked tanks and other unnecessary broken weapons were sent for reloading … it's iron!

So it turns out, before the great invention of Martin Pierre Emile - a regenerative combustion furnace, they could not melt scrap metal !!! Again - COULD NOT MELT WITH METAL SCRAP !!!

It is possible to heat and forge a rail into a saber or a shovel, but for example, they could not make a new rail thicker, or they could not assemble the old rails and make a ship out of them. This is what the official history of metallurgy says!

In Germany and other England, this method is called Semens - Open-hearth. Here is Martin …

But Wilhelm Siemens, this is one of the brothers of the great family.

Some articles even confuse them.

The fact is that Siemens supposedly came up with the theory, and Martin made the first oven. Martin's fate is strange, he was recognized only at the end of the 19th century and was even awarded before his death. His photographs are few.

The most amazing thing is that the furnace and the smelting method are not complicated - a mixture of cast iron ore and scrap metal is heated by the combustion of regenerative gas, which they knew how to get almost from the end of the 18th century! But it is even stranger that glass melting takes place in exactly the same furnaces according to the same principles!

But glass has been known since ancient times !!!

The Siemens story is interesting in that a ship made of iron laid thousands of kilometers of cable, which was covered with rolled steel - a braid, the cable through which, as it turned out, it was impossible to transmit signals since it was damped … and all this was before the invention of the present method of producing steel in industrial volumes, good quality steel.

The fact is that, as it turned out, the Bessemerovsky or Tomasovsky method of blowing cast iron with air did not give good quality steel. The Bessemer method "found its new incarnation" when, in the 20th century, they learned to get oxygen and began to blow through the cast iron with pure oxygen !!!

Judging by the fact that the heritage of their ancestors could be fully mastered only by the beginning of the 20th century and immediately rushed to make weapons. Technologically, I estimate the beginning of the 19th century as the end of the 19th … minimum! So why did Napoleon transport his armies on carts or on the railway, this is still a question! And then we argue that he could not drag the millionth army through the Belarusian swamps with guns! Fuck knows what was there in this early 19th century. Well, 50 years before the first photos, you can adjust that oh oh oh! I remember how in 90, in one winter, summer cottages were deprived of all wires, aluminum pans and other meta color. But what can I say then - the hatches from the roads were dragged into scrap metal, since there is no hatch, one hole in the road! so that Siemens laid the cable in 1856 on "Leviathan" and "Faraday" or pulled it out, it’s even my grandmother said for two.

PS: Oh yeah … why did I call Martin a saint? There is such a saint in the Catholic Church - Louis Martin (fr. Louis Joseph Aloys Stanislaus Martin; August 22, 1823, Bordeaux, France - April 29, 1894, Arnier-sur-Eaton, France) - a saint of the Roman Catholic Church, father of St. Teresa of Lisieux, husband of Saint Marie-Zeli Martin. Actually, he didn't seem to be glorified by anything else except as a holy man and a holy father. Why's that? However, he is very much like Martin the metallurgist whose fate was very cheated, he died in severe poverty without protecting his patents, all Siemens cleaned up. But this is so … for intrigue, should there be intrigue in my LJ?:::-)))