That's a quote that surely appeals to many here.
Leading to stainless steel, a first step was the discovery of the method to produce aluminum cheaply, by electrolysis. With cheap aluminum available, a method for producing chromium was discovered, by reducing chromium compounds with metallic aluminum.
With metallic chromium easily available, after a century from its discovery, during which making metallic chromium had been impossible in great quantities, it has become possible to investigate the properties of the chromium alloys with the other available metals.
Soon, it has been discovered that chromium can produce interesting alloys with cobalt ("stellite") and with nickel, and that these alloys are the first metals that can rival the platinum-group metals in chemical resistance.
It has been suggested that these chromium alloys could be used for stainless cutlery, but the high prices of cobalt and nickel have prevented the use of such alloys, except for special applications where the cost was unimportant.
More than a decade later, the next logical step has been the discovery that the expensive cobalt and nickel can be substituted with cheap iron, without diminishing much the chemical resistance of the alloys.
It should also be noted that while Brearley has invented the ferritic stainless steel, which has only small amounts of any other elements besides iron and chromium, almost simultaneously a different kind of stainless steel has been invented in Germany, austenitic stainless steel, which also has significant amounts of nickel, besides iron and chromium, with enough nickel to change the crystal structure of the steel.
Austenitic stainless steels have various advantages, especially that they are much more suitable to cheap processing by plastic deformation, so nowadays they are much more widely used than the kind of stainless steel invented by Brearley.
Are you sure about that? Chromium is produced (as ferrochrome, a FeCr alloy) by carbothermic reduction of chromite. This is done in an arc furnace, so electrical energy is needed, but no aluminum. Pure chromium (without the iron) is not needed for production of stainless steel.
Brearley steel debuted in 1915. The question is not how it is produced in 2025 but how it was produced in 1915.
Wikipedia partly agrees with GP:
“Also in the late 1890s, German chemist Hans Goldschmidt developed an aluminothermic (thermite) process for producing carbon-free chromium.[29] Between 1904 and 1911, several researchers, particularly Leon Guillet of France, prepared alloys that would later be considered stainless steel.[29][30]”
Though it points out a host of household names that knew of iron chrome alloys, including Faraday and Bunsen. Chrome steel existed for 75 years before Brearley came along but seems to have been used for things like canons, which are a lot more dear than cutlery. I wonder how they got their chrome 50 years before Goldschmidt.
The only kind of stainless steel that could have had any chances of being made with such a ferrochrome would have been a martensitic stainless steel for knife blades.
In any case that kind of ferrochrome was not suitable for researching the properties of chromium alloys. The acceptable compositions for alloys like stellite or various kinds of stainless steels have all been discovered, after many experiments, only by using relatively pure aluminothermic chromium, which was a strictly necessary ingredient for enabling chromium alloy research.
Only after the required composition of a kind of stainless steel was understood and only if it was determined that such a composition can be reached by mixing ferrochrome with iron, the manufacturing process was adjusted for using cheaper ferrochrome instead of pure chromium.
Today there exists low-carbon ferrochrome, which is suitable for making most kinds of stainless steels, but even now the low-carbon ferrochrome is much more expensive than the high-carbon ferrochrome from which only martensitic stainless steel can be made.
Ferrochrome is used to make Chrome steel and later stainless steel, but Chrome steel is significantly older.
Their possible uses were very limited in comparison with the ductile stainless steels discovered in the 20th century.
Also the chemical resistance of the first chrome steels was modest, because it was not known which is the minimum content of chromium for avoiding rusting and also their composition was not well controlled.
Nickel and cobalt don't seem prohibitively expensive for cutlery, around $15,000 [0] per ton and $33,000 [1] per ton respectively. By comparison, chromium is around $10,000 and iron is essentially free.
Even if the optimal ratio is 100% cobalt, that might add $1.50 to the price of a dinner fork or $50 to a cutlery set that will last a lifetime.
Walmart might not stock it, but that seems completely within the range of what you could charge for a premium product, if the nickel-cobalt-chromium alloys really do make for superior cutlery. Maybe it's less suitable for other reasons than cost.
Low-carbon ferrochrome, which is suitable for any stainless steel, is around $1500 per ton.
High-carbon ferrochrome, which is suitable for martensitic stainless steel, which is used for knife blades and for some tools, is less than $1000 per ton.
This is why stainless steel is much cheaper than any alternatives, e.g. much cheaper even than pure copper.
The inventor of stellite, Haynes, thought that stellite will become popular for cutlery.
It is likely that this would have happened, if the much cheaper stainless steel had not been invented soon.
The window of opportunity for using stellite in such applications has closed after a decade since its invention, by the appearance of stainless steel, relegating stellite and its derivatives to applications with requirements so high that they could not be satisfied by stainless steel, e.g. special tools and surgical implants (CoCrMo alloys, which are variants of the alloy originally named stellite, have been used for decades in making surgical implants, before the discovery that titanium is even better for this purpose).
It's interesting that most times I have heard these stories growing up the "discovery" aspect was always emphasized - some retelling even framed them as "accidents". Forgetting the parts where the person in question had dedicated a lifetime of study in pursuit of the finding.
Eg. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03054...
What happened is that they have found a place with chromite and they have believed that they have found magnetite, because both are heavy blackish stones. Most likely the chromite was actually mixed with true magnetite, which is always much more abundant (chromite is a mixed iron-chromium oxide, while magnetite, which has an identical crystal structure, is a mixed Fe(II)/Fe(III) oxide).
Then they have used the magnetite mixed with chromite exactly like they knew to use magnetite, for making steel.
The steel happened to be better than what they had made before, and they were happy that they had found a source of particularly good magnetite for making steel.
After gathering experience, they have probably adjusted their techniques for smelting and forging to work better with steel made with the natural magnetite-chromite mixture, but that is all the extent of their knowledge.
Because the ancient smiths did not know how to do chemical analyses, they had no idea why using similarly looking minerals mined from different places results in metals with different properties. In the ancient world it was well known that certain steels or bronzes made in certain places are much better than the steels or bronzes made in other places, so the price of steel or bronze varied a lot based on its provenience. These quality differences were frequently caused by impurities in the source minerals used for metal production, whose presence was unknown for the ancients, but they were aware of the qualities of the metals produced there.
No knowledge whatsoever about the existence of chromium has existed anywhere, before the creation of the modern chemistry, based on the concept of chemical element, slightly before the French Revolution, towards the end of the 18th century, which triggered an intense search for the discovery of new chemical elements.
>Crucially, analyses using Scanning Electron Microscopy enabled them to identify remains of the ore mineral chromite [rusakhtaj], which was described in Biruni’s manuscript as an essential additive to the process.
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2020/sep/chromium-steel-was-first...
This still doesn't say they knew about chromium ofc just that it was not just magnetite. Ofc one has to read farsi to make sure rusakhtaj wasn't a common alias for magnetite. Who knows, rudimentary awareness of the concept of "alloy" might have existed there..
I have read many ancient texts about metallurgy and the like, where they were using a bewildering amount of various names to designate the various kinds of ores and of produced metals.
Despite that, they did not think that there was any essential difference between the many kinds of magnetite or of chalkopyrite and so on. They were habituated with the fact that the natural minerals extracted from different places have never exactly the same properties. Now we know that this is caused by slightly different chemical compositions, but they just knew that some are better for a certain purpose, while others are worse, without knowing why this is so.
Because this is how all the minerals they knew had always behaved, it was not considered a surprising fact. It was just accepted that you have to know the exact origin of a mineral, to assess its value and its suitability for a desired purpose.
So I doubt that they had considered chromite as a stone distinct from magnetite, like they considered e.g. magnetite distinct from pyrite, where the appearance of the stones is easily distinguishable.
Even if they had thought that chromite is not a better kind of magnetite, but something really different, they still would have not imagined that chromite contains another metal that becomes alloyed with iron, like they knew to alloy tin with copper or the like. They would have thought that adding chromite stones to the minerals for iron extraction improves the resulting steel for some unknown reason.
> “Time was,” he lamented later, “when a man made steel, decided what it was good for and told the customer how to make the best of it. Then, with time’s quickening step, he just made the steel; he engaged another man, who knew nothing about steelmaking, to analyse it, and say what it was good for. Then he engaged a second man, who knew all about hardening and tempering steel; then a third man who could neither make steel, nor analyse it, nor harden and temper it—but this last tested it, put his OK mark on it and passed it into service.”
In a way it warms my heart that obfuscation in such a manner, perhaps even enshittification, is not a new experience for those watching a trade modernise. Several things come to mind: npm and python library dependency hell and LLM as a catalyst of skill atrophy in experts simultaneously with the enablement of a whole new middle layer of proprietors.
Also the article led me to think more about the idea of simultaneous invention - I used to believe it to be redundant and wasted work. But this still can lead to different outcomes even with identical formulations or methods. Getting an invention into use in the world is perhaps as great a feat as the invention itself. I now believe any worthwhile invention deserves more than one champion.
In today's hyperconnected world it is easy to discover that someone else has beaten you to the full flourishing of idea into invention, but I find that doing the novel work oneself with one's own mind and hands still provides the unique learning opportunity which can allow one to invent yet again, albeit now with a widened skill and knowledge horizon.
Volunteer oil well firefighters from a host of first world and some developing countries showed up and started trying to work together.
The intense heat makes for slow going, and can melt not just people but also equipment. It turned out every country had solved a different part of the problem. The Russians used thermal mass - they attached the hose to the barrel of a tank and let the armor soak up heat for a while. Someone else had better heat shielding. The Americans (?) had perfected detonation to extinguish rather than ignite a fire. And someone had better protective gear.
All of these techniques could be combined. Heat shielding on a tank means the machines you can get the equipment closer to the fire for longer, and the suits and explosives put the fire out faster so the capping crew can get in there.
In the end they were doing several wells per day and multiple sites per week, instead of a few wells per week. Parallel invention doesn’t always end up at the exact same outcome.
I think a great illustration of this today are SLaM methods that almost always seem to combine a low-drift high-noise technique with one that is high-drift and low-noise.
I expect that was a lot of the speed up. You can’t do eight wells a week if every well exhausts your team. Better working conditions mean faster cycling. Hell I bet whoever brought the best “Gatorade”, masseuse, and entertainment deserves more credit than they ever got.
This is rather silly, since steel today is far superior to the steel of his day. The complexity he bemoans is part of that process of improvement.
I am talking about enshittification of digital applications and services compared to the earlier years of the information age.
Fun fact, a common older winding alloy for acoustic guitars was called 80/20 Bronze despite actually being copper/zinc alloy and therefore Brass!
If anyone was hooked by this tangent, this was[0] "Todhunter’s[1] Algebra" [2] (1858? 1870? 1871? 1889?) you can peruse for free at [2].
[0] https://www.readingsheffield.co.uk/harry-brearleys-reading-j...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rex_Stout
The Timothy Hutton shows available on YouTube are a good introduction if you can get over the poor transcription to youtube.