A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, June 1954, II: Just You Wait

 

Surely I'm not the only person who hears "[Henry] Wiggin Works" and thinks of My Fair Lady, the 1964 film adaptation of the 1956 Broadway musical based on the 1913 George Bernard Shaw play. I don't even watch musicals, but that particular song, like the dreadful menace of Cobalt-60 Doomsday bombs, from another movie I've never seen, is, well, I guess that's why it's called popular culture. 

You know what's not popular culture? The Wiggin Works, and, for that matter, Nimonic, and Nineteenth Century businessman and Liberal Unionist Henry Wiggin, and finally, the actual operator of the works, Mond Nickel, which probably merged with Inco at some more recent  point. The trademarks for "Nimonic" and other nickel alloys like Brightray, and Inconel, are now held by Special Metals Corporation, and various grades of Nimonic continue to be used in aircraft engines among other specialty applications. I see no evidence that it is used in nuclear reactor fuel slugs these days, although Cobalt-60 continues to be produced in trace quantities by the nuclear transmutation of Fe-58 in steel components into Cobalt-59 and hence Cobalt-60. (I did not know that!)  There's a Wiki page on the cobalt bomb, but it doesn't really get into the isotope as a signifier of universal nuclear destruction, upon which subject I am sure I have seen websites if not scholarly articles over the years. 

Not that any of this really matters. I want to talk about the British steel industry today. It just happens that special alloy steels are an important part of that story. 

After difficult years in the Thirties, the postwar era through the 1960s was a golden age for European steel. It is frequently noted in morbid stories about the decline of the British iron and steel industry that production peaked at 28.3 million tons in 1669, at which time Britain was the fifth largest  producer in the world. Speaking to the Royal Institution on 26 May 1954, and reported in The Engineer on 11 June 1954 (197: 856--7) as T. P. Colclough, "Development in the Iron and Steel Industry in Great Britain," Colclough, who had a somewhat intangible career as corporate director, "technical advisor" to iron and steel companies, the Iron and Steel Federation, and the Ministry of Supply, and popular lecturer on metallurgical subjects, gives us a summary of recent developments.

Colclough points out that there have been "no vital new principle for the making of iron or steel" discovered in the previous twenty-five years,and that research has instead focussed on improvements in the efficiencies and scales of production. In 1929 there were 400 blast furnaces in the UK, of which 200, presumably the larger ones, had an average capacity of 400 tons a week, or in total, 80,000 tons/week, whereas "[t]oday, eight operating furnaces have a capacity of over 50,000t/week, and when four other furnaces . . . come into operation [production will reach] 83,000t/week." In steel, open hearth production per furnace has more than doubled from 15,000 to 39,000t, while total electric furnace production has risen from 100,000 to 1 million tons. (That is a very confusing series of data, Tom!) The target for production in 1957 is 15 million tons of pig iron and 20.5 million tons of steel.

Colclough chooses 1929 as a reference point because he wants to discuss 1920--29, "one of the most difficult periods in the history of the industry," when war-built plant, unsuited to peacetime operations, combined with obsolescent plant not scrapped in a timely way during the conflict, burdened the industry with excess capacity. The estimated capacity in 1920 was 12 million tons and average production only 7.36 million, and in spite of this some 26% of steel used in the country was imported. Something had to be done, and was. The years 1930--39 were "a period of experiment and tentative progress"

It's not a blog post. It's a playlist! "My wife took down and died/Upon the cabin floor . . ."

but "[d]evelopment during the war years 1939--44 showed quite a different pattern. . ." by which, to be fair, Colclough intends a reference to 1914--18, BUT! It is fairly easy to look at the Thirties and agree on what should be done to put the industry back on its feet, but as for actually doing it? The Second War saw a decrease in British steel production rather than an increase, "but there was a marked change in the pattern of the quality of steel made," by which Colclough means electrical and alloy steels, the former rising from 230,000t in 1937--9 to a peak of 750,000t in 1943, while alloy steels hit a peak figure of 1.6 million tons. I reading this I am struck by an unmentioned anecdote, probably unknown to the author, shared by Dr. Bailey in his discussion of his namesake modular bridge set, of how it was crucial that the foundries that cast the pieces achieved a new standard of sizing control so that the holes would line up. I'm even more struck by Colclough's plaintive "This work placed Britain in a pre-eminent position in the manufacture of the highest qualities of steel, and it is to be hoped that the full story will be placed on record by the competent authorities." Because, no, Dr. Colclough, it will not. You're getting Paul Kennedy and Correlli Barnett instead. 

Of course, it didn't hurt that planners were in charge, he goes on to say, and the need for "co-operation . . .discussion, and coordination" were demonstrated. The upshot, besides nationalisation, was the Five-Year Plan of 1946, to increase steel production over the prewar total by 3 million tons to 15 million by the installation of 5 million tons of new capacity and by the rationalisation and consolidation of manufacture. The 15 million ton target was met by 1949, but the rapidly growing economy showed it to be inadequate; a new target of 18 million tons, to be be met by the mid-Fifties, was established, with the author looking forward to 20.8 million tons by 1957, the primary obstacle being coal production, leading to some thumbsucking speculation about how the coal-gas industry might take the hit, and even absorb it if large gas grids  made that industry more efficient --and we know where that went. (For those who don't natural gas from the offshore fields began landing in Britain 1967.) As it turns out, by the end of the decade steel was in abundance and all of that "cooperation, coordination, and discussion" fell away. 

Can't imagine how that happened.