Cast steel razor - what is it?

[kayvee]

Shopping on eBay, I’ve come across various razors that have “cast steel” written on the tang. What is it? How are these blades different than those which don’t have “cast steel” on the tang?

Is this just marketing? I had thought that most all razor blanks had to be cast before tempering and grinding. (I’m not a metallurgist - excuse my naive understanding)

 

[ChriWilson]

Shopping on eBay, I’ve come across various razors that have “cast steel” written on the tang. What is it? How are these blades different than those which don’t have “cast steel” on the tang?

Is this just marketing? I had thought that most all razor blanks had to be cast before tempering and grinding. (I’m not a metallurgist - excuse my naive understanding)

Cast vs Forged

​

"Cast steel is made by pouring molten steel into a mould, where it cools and solidifies. This process is relatively cheap and quick, but the resulting steel is not as strong or durable as forged steel. Forged steel is made by heating a piece of steel until it is red-hot and then hammering it into shape"​

 

[kayvee]

Is one better than the other? Does cast steel hone faster? While forged steel hold edge longer?

 

[Mr Bedlington]

English Clockmaker, Benjamin Huntsman searching for higher quality steel for making clock springs, discovered that blister steel could be completely melted at very high temperatures (we now know about 1500c) in clay crucibles and further refined by the edition of a special flux ( e.g sand, glass ashes) that removed the remaining fine particles of slag that the cementation process could not remove. This was called Crucible or Cast Steel.
By carefully controlling the process it was discovered that this could have just the right amount of carbon for making razors, but it could only be made by hand in very small quantities and was thus very expensive. Early high-quality razors were often stamped "Cast Steel" to show they were the best money can buy. PS Old English Cast Steel razors are top quality and made from only the best steel.

 

[CpnStumpy]

Cast steel is a quality steel for razors from early in the straight razor era. Warranted was another word used to mean the same. I have a warranted stamped razor from France late 1700s.

By 1740, Benjamin Huntsman was making straight razors complete with decorated handles and hollow-ground blades made from cast steel, using a process he invented. Huntsman's process was adopted by the French sometime later, albeit reluctantly at first due to nationalist considerations. In England, razor manufacturers were even more reluctant than the French to adopt Huntsman's steel-making process and only did so after they saw its success in France.

Source from Wikipedia on Straight Razors.

To give a sense of timeline.

 

[Gamma]

Cast Steel is equivalent to Acier Fondu - as noted, an early crucible steel type that surpassed the blister steel known previously.

I have not found that blades stamped Cast/Acier are always 'top quality', etc. At the time they were the best, yes, technically at least.

But shortly after, not so much. The earliest 'Cast Steel' blades are usually a bit too soft for me. Some better than others, Greaves Cast Steel is usually better than many others by a long shot. Greaves blades made later on were even better.
I own a Huntsman blade actually, it shaves but the steel is a bit too soft to keep me happy.

Obviously, crucible steel exists today, and it's top quality stuff, but it's a different thing entirely.

By the 1850s steel had improved upon tremendously.

 

[ChriWilson]

This thread provides so much context towards my Thiers Issard and Sheffield blades…

 

[Mr Bedlington]

I have Old Sheffield blades with cast steel, my Clark & Hall takes and holds an amazingly smooth edge, and has no problem taking a 20K edge, it will out-shave many modern razors and is equal to anything I own.

 

[kayvee]

This thread provides so much context towards my Thiers Issard and Sheffield blades…

Could you explain please? Are all Sheffield blades made of cast steel?

 

[rbscebu]

@kayvee, when Sheffield was a major steel producer, all steel was cast into ingots. That is just how steel was made. These ingots were then reheated and formed into various steel products like plates and sections. Some of this formed steel was again reheated, this time back into a liquid, and recast into the form of a straight razor blade.

Other blades were made by forging the blade shape from preformed sections/plates. Even the cast steel blades would have had some forging done to them to get to the final shape before grinding.

The main thing with blade steel is its alloy composition and the way it is heat treated. Reheating the steel to a liquid before casting the blade, allowed the manufacturer to adjust the alloying element(s) concentration, if required, before final casting into a rough blade shape.

So, as you may now realise, the term "cast steel" for a blade may not mean a better blade steel, although it does allow the blade manufacturer to change the steel's alloying elements to what he may prefer. The term is more a marketing ploy.

 

[Mr Bedlington]

Definitely not a marketing ploy.

Razor Steel
I have often wondered how the steel for our antique razors was made, and perhaps
why some old razors appear to have an individual or special ‘feeling’ about them.
Does the answer lie in their method of manufacture and the effort that went into
making their steel?
What I have discovered is that the manufacture of steel in 1800 was a complicated
and very imprecise process - a Black Art in which secret knowledge and recipes
were passed from master to apprentice over many generations. These highly skilled
iron masters did not have the benefit of our science or technology. They worked
entirely by feel, intuition and experience, and their recipes might have been “a bucket
and a bit of this plus a handful of that, heated until it looks and smells right”, but
these were clever men and their steel was turned into perhaps some of the finest
razors ever made. It is thought-provoking that our very old razors still hold the long-
lost secrets of these masters.
To keep this account as concise as possible, I will focus on the steel produced in
England specifically for razors before 1860 and used by Sheffield and London’s ‘little
mesters’ - before the era of huge cutlery works. After this period, rapid advances in
the science of metallurgy allowed the composition of steel to be better understood
and steel to be manufactured consistently to ever more specific recipes tailored to its
end-use, and in ever-increasing quantities and quality for the industrialised world, but
the principles mentioned here remained the same.
So, what is steel? It is primarily an alloy of iron and carbon, but with additional
minerals that can improve or degrade the performance of the final product. These
minerals are either present in the naturally occurring iron or nowadays can be added
during manufacture. The early iron masters were unaware of these minerals, and so
relied on the properties of the iron that they could obtain. Steel production has been
traced back 2000 years in China and India, but their methods were very basic and
they could only make it in very variable quality and in small batches at a time.
The fundamental problem of making steel for razors is to carefully control its
carbon content. Too much carbon and the metal is hard but brittle, too little carbon
and the metal is too soft to take an edge. With modern analysis, we now know that a
carbon content ranging from approximately 0.8 to 2% by weight gives the perfect
properties required to make razors. But of course, the early iron masters could only
produce this quality steel from years of experience of which methods and recipes
worked and which didn’t.
Iron is the most abundant metal on earth. It exists in various forms naturally
throughout the world and is called iron ore (an oxide of iron–like rust, and is
sometimes called ironstone or iron sand).
The wide variety of iron ore
Iron ore also contains a cocktail of other minerals which are difficult to remove and
yet affect the properties of the finished steel, importantly this cocktail of minerals in
the ore varies throughout the world. British iron ore contains sulphur and
phosphorus, both of which reduce the performance of the finished steel whereas
Swedish iron ore does not contain these minerals but contains beneficial minerals
such as Vanadium and Manganese (more later).
Smelting is the process by which metallic iron is extracted from iron ore. When iron
ore and carbon (in the form of charcoal) are heated together in a fire, a honeycomb-like, spongy, red hot mass of relatively pure iron is formed, intermixed with unwanted
bits of the charcoal and other materials (generally known as slag). We now know
that carbon releases oxygen from iron oxide to produce iron and carbon
dioxide. The separation of slag from the iron is aided by the addition of flux, that is,
crushed seashells or limestone. The formation of this bloom of metal was as far as
the primitive iron smith got: he would remove this spongy mass from the fire whilst it
was still red hot and hammer it to drive out the cinders and slag (seen as sparks)
and to compact the spongy metallic particles into a solid mass.
A bloom of primitive wrought iron
This bloom of metal was called wrought iron (“wrought” means “worked,” that is,
hammered) and it generally comprised 0.02 to 0.08 percent of carbon, just enough to
make the metal both tough and able to be beaten or forged into shape, but not able
to form or hold a decent cutting edge. The big problem with this method was that
only very small batches of metal could be made (perhaps for one sword), and the
the world was becoming hungry for iron to make cannon, swords, armour, nails, tools
etc.
At some time during the Middle Ages, it was discovered that at very high
temperatures (we now know at about 1200 C) iron ore begins to produce molten
metallic iron. We also now know that at these temperatures the iron absorbs large
quantities of carbon from the charcoal. The result is called cast iron and it contains
from 3 to 4.5 percent carbon by weight. This high proportion of carbon makes the
metal hard but brittle; it is liable to crack or shatter under a heavy blow, and therefore
it cannot be forged. By the 16th century, European ironmakers had developed the
blast furnace to be able to achieve these high furnace temperatures and therefore
were able to produce cast iron in large quantities.
The furnace was loaded with alternating layers of charcoal, flux, and iron ore and the
combustion of the charcoal was intensified by a blast of air pumped through the
mixture. This could be a continuous process as more ingredients were added at the
top as the iron ore and charcoal were converted into iron and tapped from the base.
Early ironworkers used water wheels to power the bellows to pump air through the
blast furnace; after 1777, James Watt’s new steam engine was increasingly used for
these purposes. Molten cast iron would run directly from the base of the blast
furnace into a sand trough which fed a number of smaller lateral troughs; this
configuration resembled a sow suckling a litter of piglets, and cast iron produced in
this way came to be called pig iron. Pig iron could be cast directly into moulds at
the blast furnace base or re-melted elsewhere to make cast iron stoves, pots, pans,
firebacks, cannon, cannonballs etc (“to cast” means to pour into a mould, hence the
name “cast iron”). Casting is also called founding and is done in a foundry.
Pig iron ingots
So, we now had two forms of the metal – brittle cast iron with too much carbon
and soft wrought iron with not enough carbon for razors, we needed something in the
middle. And we also needed it in increasing quantities as the population in Britain
was growing rapidly (1760 – 6 million, 1850 – 21 million)!
But, only cast iron could be made in large quantities and so a second refining
process was developed to remove the carbon and convert cast iron into the more
useful wrought iron. This involved heating cast iron bars to red/white heat in a
charcoal furnace and then hammering them to remove impurities and oxidise excess
carbon. This was done in a finery forge and became known as the Walloon
method from the (Belgian) people that developed it (this was used well into the 19th
century). But this process could still only produce relatively small batches of wrought
iron until1784 when a puddling furnace was developed by the Englishman Henry
Cort.
The puddling furnace kept the molten metal separate from the charcoal and required
stirring the molten cast iron through an aperture by a highly skilled craftsman called a
puddler; this exposed the metal evenly to the heat and combustion gases in the
furnace so that the carbon could be oxidized out. A similar process was also
developed called the Lancashire Hearth process. During these processes, as the
carbon content decreases, the melting point of the iron rises, causing semi-solid bits
of iron to form in the liquid mass. The worker would gather these into a single mass,
remove it and then work it under a forge hammer to remove the remaining impurities
and so produce wrought iron. We could now produce wrought iron on an industrial
scale.
So, by the late 18th century, blast furnaces were used to produce large quantities of
cast iron from iron ore and charcoal (or latterly coke) and then coal-fired puddling
furnaces were used to convert it into the more useful wrought iron. But we still didn’t
have steel with the optimum carbon content for razors! We needed to add carbon to
the wrought iron before we had razor steel.
This was carried out by the cementation process. Bars of wrought iron would be
packed with a carefully controlled quantity of powdered charcoal, layer upon layer, in
tightly sealed stone boxes and heated to red heat. After cooking for several days,
the wrought iron bars would have absorbed the carbon in the charcoal; to distribute
the carbon more evenly, the metal would be broken up, re-bundled with charcoal
powder, and reheated. The resulting blister steel would then be heated again and
brought under a forge hammer to give it a more consistent composition.
The remains of a Sheffield steel cementation furnace built in 1848
The characteristic blisters on an ingot of - blister steel
But blister steel did not make ideal razors. By chance, in the 1740s, the English
clockmaker Benjamin Huntsman, searching for higher-quality steel for making
clock springs discovered that blister steel could be completely melted at very high
temperatures (we now know about 1500 C) in clay crucibles and further refined by
the addition of a special flux (e.g. sand, glass, ashes) that removed the remaining
fine particles of slag that the cementation process could not remove. This was called
crucible or cast steel; by carefully controlling the process it could have just the right
amount of carbon for making razors, but it could only be made in very small
quantities and was thus very expensive. Early, high-quality razors were often
stamped “cast steel” to show that they were the best that money could buy.
A very old boy
Abbeydale (part of Sheffield) crucible furnaces were built in about 1830
Clay crucibles waiting outside the furnace
Casting a crucible full of molten crucible steel
I haven’t yet mentioned the variability of iron ore. Iron ore exists in great quantities
throughout the world, but it was found that the British ore did not make good razors
(we now know that it had too much sulphur which makes the blade prone to
chipping). By a lengthy process of trial and error, it was found by the 16th century that
iron from Sweden was the best for refining into steel that would take a durable edge.
We now know that it contained no ‘bad’ minerals and many ‘good’ minerals such as
manganese which aids the final hardening process of the razor’s edge. Therefore,
Sweden became a major supplier of cast iron to England. In fact, in the 18th century,
almost half of the Swedish output of wrought iron came across the North Sea to
England (average about 20,000 tons per year). We also imported a similar quantity
of wrought iron from Russia, but this was of only of similar quality to British iron and
was useless for making good razors.
For hundreds of years, the Swedish iron industry was tightly controlled by the Crown -
iron foundry and quality had to be proven before each ingot could be stamped with
the details and exported. And there were various qualities of Swedish iron too –
there were hundreds of mines, but the very best iron came from the Dannemora
mine and shipped via the nearby port of Öregrund (it was often referred to in
England as oregrounds iron).
The English trade in oregrounds iron was controlled from the 1730s to the 1850s by
a cartel of merchants, of whom the wealthiest and longest enduring members were
the Sykes family of Hull. Other participants were residents in (or controlling imports
through) London and Bristol. These merchants controlled the prices and advanced
money to Swedish exporting houses, which in turn advanced it to the ironmasters,
thus buying up the entire output from the best forges for several years in advance -
and preventing other countries from acquiring large quantities of this precious metal
(for armaments).
Dannemora mine, Sweden
So, in early 19th century England, razor-quality steel had a long journey: in Sweden,
iron ore was first mined and then smelted in blast furnaces to produce cast iron
which was then refined into wrought iron by the Walloon process (later by puddling
or the Lancashire Hearth methods). It was then imported into Britain (Hull being the
incoming port for Sheffield as it provided river/canal access to Rotherham and then
by road to Sheffield – later, it was possible to barge iron directly from Hull to
Sheffield). The wrought iron was then refined in cementation furnaces to produce
blister steel which could be used to make razors or was further refined in a crucible
furnace to produce the finest quality crucible steel for the very best razors.
We should remember that all of these processes were carried out without the
benefits of science and technology. Temperatures were judged by eye and even ear;
the correct quantities of carbon and fluxes to add were known from experience
handed down through generations of iron masters and adjusted by the ‘feel’ of each
individual batch. The masters guarded their knowledge, and each master’s steel
would have been slightly different from another’s because his fluxes were known
only to him and his methods were kept secret. Yes, there was national and
international industrial espionage even in those times! Even an individual iron
master’s steel would vary slightly from batch to batch.
Our little mester, therefore, had a variety of iron masters to buy his steel from. Each
razor smith would have had his own trusted source because he knew how to work it
and the results that it would give. The very best crucible steel was very expensive
because it had been through many stages of refining - but it could produce
superlative razors. Cheaper razors used cheaper, less refined blister steel coming
from lower-grade iron ores. Razor apprentices would learn all of this from their
masters, who had learnt it from their masters, who….. As you can see, this was a
very complex and highly skilled process that evolved over hundreds of years and
came to a peak in the early 1800s.
So, our very old razor is the end product of this long and complex international chain
of events involving many highly skilled men who worked with their hands and their
brains and had mastered their specialist arts over many years. Is this what makes
each razor special and different – possibly?
Endnote
The mass production of cheap steel only became possible in the latter part of the
19th century after the introduction of the Bessemer process (which quickly converted
large quantities of cast iron directly to steel with a pre-determined carbon content).
This was named after its inventor, the British metallurgist Sir Henry Bessemer (1813-
1898). By the latter half of the 19th century, Britain was producing half of the world’s
iron. This spelt the demise of the little mesters and the old London cutlery
businesses and opened the way for ever larger mass production cutlery ‘works’ in
Sheffield such as Rogers or Worstenholm. They had direct access to the local coal
fields and steel works and could produce consistently good razors in large enough
quantities to export all over the world, making their owners extremely wealthy in the
process.
THE SWEDISH IRON AND STEEL INDUSTRY
The Period of Osmund
It was merchants from Lübeck who, in the Middle Ages, began to interest the kings
of Sweden in the export of iron on a large scale. It was also at that time that German
mine owners and merchants acquired the rights to run their own operations in
Sweden's mining areas and trading communities.
Mining and foreign trade thereby paved the way for the integration of Sweden into
the mainstream of European civilisation. The consequence was a new economic
structure and the emergence of a broader society in the formerly agrarian Sweden.
The Swedish iron exports during the Middle Ages comprised so-called osmunds - a
standardised format of high-grade forged iron with a weight of just 3 hectograms.
The osmund was an accepted object of barter both in Sweden and abroad and was
also used as a form of payment with its value being determined by the Crown.
In the 14th century, about half of Sweden's iron production was exported, mainly to
Lübeck and Danzig. The entire annual production at this time has been estimated at
2,000 tonnes, less than a third of the production from the German forges.
Since the cogs (trading vessels) from Lübeck were not able to enter Lake Mälar,
Stockholm was established as a transhipment centre, customs station and port of
shipment for iron and copper exports from Närke, Västmanland and Dalarna.
In the 1420's the Scandinavian king, Erik of Pommern, granted preference to
Swedish seamen and merchants over their counterparts from Germany and barred
Öresund to the cogs from Lübeck. This was devastating for Swedish iron exports
and led to peasant miners from Dalarna and Västmanland - together with merchants
in Stockholm, all under the leadership of the peasant miner Engelbrekt - breaking out
of the union with Denmark and Norway.
Lübeck, which helped Gustav Vasa gain power - this in exchange for the sole rights
to trade in Sweden - saw itself defeated by the united forces of the Swedish and
Danish kings. The trading monopolies enjoyed by other Hanse cities would also later
be abolished following the expansion of Dutch and English shipping in the North Sea
and the Baltic.
The price of Swedish osmund iron started to decline around the mid-14th century
and continued to fall during the 15th century. The reasons were to be found on both
the producers' and consumers' sides. In Europe, the more blast furnace technology
was used the more iron production increased, thereby putting pressure on Swedish
products. Even though the price fell, Swedish exports of osmund iron to Danzig
increased during the 16th century. Here, Swedish iron was used as a basis for the
manufacture of a more workable forging iron, which was turned into long bars -
known at the time as bar iron - by water-powered iron hammers. This was then sold
on under the designation, 'bar iron from Danzig', mainly to Holland and England.
Bar iron takes over
During the 16th century, the kings of Sweden realised that Sweden, too, had to
modernise its iron production and start producing bar iron. In order to handle the
difficult technical changeover, the involvement of expertise and finance from foreign
countries was required.
The decisive modernisation of the Swedish iron industry in fact took place at the
beginning of the 17th century. Then Spain recognised Holland's dependence in
1609, the Dutch started to plan for their future defence partly by importing iron
cannons from Sweden. A large number of forgers who had emigrated to Holland
from Spanish-controlled Wallonia were now recruited to work in Sweden at the Royal
Ironworks and armouries, were modernised by engineers such as Willem de Besche and
financed by businessmen such as Louis De Geer.
The doctrine that dominated trade policy in Sweden in the 17th century was
mercantilism which stated that a country's economy should be strengthened through
high protective tariffs. In addition, exports should be favoured and imports restrained
in order to establish a trade surplus. The fact that in international trade finished
products commanded a better price than raw materials led to a prohibition,
introduced in 1604, on exports from Sweden of osmund iron. In the future, only
Sweden's processed bar iron could be exported.
In the 1640s, Sweden's exports of bar iron amounted to around 11,000 tonnes a
year. Fifty years later, the average was about 27,000 tonnes a year and in the 1740's
an average of 40,000 tonnes a year was achieved.
The large increase depended almost wholly on the emergence of new markets, firstly
in Holland and then in England. Nevertheless, most of the armaments produced
remained in Sweden and the production of nails, plates, tools and utensils was mainly
for the home market.
During the 18th century, Sweden's iron production virtually doubled due to the
increased demand for bar iron from abroad, particularly England, which had a large
need for high-quality, so-called Oregrund iron, as an input for its steel industry. Bar
iron gradually came to comprise no less than three-quarters of the total Swedish
exports, creating for the Crown much-needed revenues in the form of taxes and
export duties.
In England, the charcoal forests had been stripped to such an extent that the country
had become strongly dependent on iron imports from Sweden. England's imports in
the 1730s totalled about 25,000 tonnes of which Sweden's contribution was nearly
20,000 tonnes. from Russia came about 5,000 tonnes but Russian iron, some twenty
years later, would rise to 15,000 tonnes which would then equal Sweden's share.
At the end of the 18th century technology in England had been developed enabling
the use of fossil coal in metallurgical processes.
In addition, it was increased competition from Russian bar iron that caused the crisis
for Sweden's iron industry which in turn was a crucial factor in the establishment of
Jernkontoret in 1747. The increasing utilisation of coal and coke would subsequently
lead to a radical change in the competitive status of Swedish iron and during the
19th-century Europe's iron production gradually switched to countries with ample
resources of fossil coal.
Forging regulations
The strong growth of bar iron exports aroused concern that the competition of
the bar mills for charcoal and pig iron would lead to increased production costs. It
was for this reason that a limitation on forge production was introduced whereby it
would also be possible to influence the prices on the international markets. The
owners of the bar mills were successful in implementing a forging regulation in the
Riksdag of 1746-47 which effectively obstructed an increase in bar iron exports over
the long term. It was not until the 1830s that the regulation was wholly abolished.
However, a significant upturn in the value of the composition of exports took place
during the latter part of the 18th century. Exports of iron, which had undergone
further processing following forging under the heavy bar iron hammers, increased
sharply. With the help of the lighter and faster iron hammers, it was possible to
produce thinner bars, or strips, which were then bound together and exported in
bundles. Forged plate and steel were also exported to a greater extent than before.
Sweden's bar iron exports during the 18th century - as previously mentioned - were
very much focused on the British market. This was complemented by a stable and
significant export to the Baltic Sea countries and, in the latter part of the century, by
increased exports to France, Portugal and the Mediterranean lands. At the same
time, the former large-scale sales to Holland diminished. Trade policy considerations
were to be of major importance for Sweden's foreign policy during the coming
revolutionary and Napoleonic periods.
The Napoleonic wars ushered in a serious crisis for the Swedish iron industry. The
reasons were - inter alia - that the custom tariffs on Swedish bar iron to Great Britain
were raised sharply. From just over 52,000 tonnes of bar iron per year during the
1790's, the total Swedish export fell to less than 30,000 tonnes for the lowest year,
1808. The losses in the British market could, however, largely be compensated by
the newly emerging US market. Thus, in the early 19th century; the USA became an
important market and was, right up to the First World War, the largest importer of
Swedish bar iron.
Industrialism
At this time many people in the Swedish iron industry realised that the solution to the
crisis lay in improving the quality of Swedish charcoal forging. The Walloon Forge
retained its position on the market in Sheffield. Others recommended going over to
the use of coal-fired puddling furnaces - invented in England - for the production of
forgeable iron and complementing this with rolling mills. This was to be
delayed, however, until 1845 when the mill owner, Gustaf Ekman, solved the
problems of adapting a Lancashire forge to Swedish conditions using charcoal
instead of coal as an energy source. In the Ekman furnace, the frayed surfaces on
the puddle bars could be effectively welded together. Ekman's furnace thereby
became the mainspring in the development of the rolling mill of that period. An added
advantage was that fuel consumption was sharply reduced.
The improved quality now made it possible to recover a large part of the lost market
in Sheffield. When furnaces adapted to Swedish conditions had been developed and
rolling mills set up, iron of high quality could be produced in large quantities. Also,
with rolling mills the expensive hammer working in the forge could be replaced. The
expansion of the Lancashire forge resulted in a sharp increase in the demand for pig
iron and overall production increased to about 180,000 tonnes per year by the start
of the 1860s.
The technical advances resulted in more concentrated operations and smaller mills
were now being closed down to the advantage of larger and more dynamic units.
This process, known as 'the great mill shutdown', meant that the number of smelting
furnaces in Sweden declined from 220 in 1840 to less than 160 by 1880 (despite the
the fact that many new furnaces were opened during this period).
The Bessemer process
The need for steel increased strongly in the mid-1800s. For industries and means of
transport steel of high quality was required in large quantities. Both in Europe and
USA assiduous efforts were made to replace the old craft methods of steel
production with processes that better responded to the growing demand. One such
was the Bessemer method, introduced by Henry Bessemer in 1855, a system
whereby air blown into smelted pig iron made it possible to produce steel directly in
the furnace.
The desired carbon content was obtained by breaking off the process at appropriate
intervals. At the time it was an epochal discovery before, in the refining processes
the product became a softer, carbon-lacking iron which had to be carburised through
special processes and at a high cost in order to become hard carbon steel. Using the
Bessemer process this was now no longer necessary. Bessemer himself did not
succeed in producing any ingots of satisfactory quality.
When, in 1858 at Edsken, the Swede, Göran Fredrik Göransson became the first
person in the world to successfully apply the Bessemer process on a practical scale
and produce ingot steel of good quality, this was an industrial exploit of historic
importance with international ramifications. It marked the start of the modern steel
age by enabling the economic production of high-quality steel products such as rails,
railway wheels, ship plates and so on. Now, for example, the great railway
construction in Europe and the USA could begin.
The successful introduction of the Bessemer method in Sweden led to its
implementation in many Swedish steelworks at the start of the 1880s. It would be
some time, however, before the production levels exceeded 50,000 tonnes and not
until 1895 that production of 100,000 tonnes would be exceeded for the first time.
However, in Sweden, the Bessemer process never became the major production
method for ordinary steel as it did in other countries. This was mainly because of the
expensive charcoal pig iron required to charge the Bessemer converter.
Instead, it was the other great ingot steel method, the Siemens-Martin method, which
was to lead the Swedish steel industry into its great era of expansion. A
characteristic of the method was that the steel smelting took place in a furnace
designed by the Siemens brothers in 1861. Pierre Martin was the first person to
successfully produce ingot steel in a furnace of this type.
It would take some time - not until the latter part of the 1880s - before the open-
hearth production of steel in Sweden would become widely established but by 1895
it had already exceeded that of Bessemer steel. Not until then did the volume of
ingot steel production exceeds that of wrought iron production, meaning that the
The Lancashire method maintained its position as the most important for the production of
iron and steel during most of the 19th century.
The introduction of ingot steel processes represented a major upturn in the Swedish
steel industry. Both production and exports were doubled during the period from the
1870s up to the First World War. At the same time, the export of Lancashire iron
increased at the same rate as ingot steel, at least until the turn of the century.
Particularly in the most important export markets Great Britain and the USA - the
Lancashire bar iron continued to predominate. After 1900, however, ingot steel took
an increasingly larger share of the market whilst the so-called wrought iron methods,
based on the Lancashire and particularly the Walloon forge, declined in importance.
A precondition for the geographical concentration of the iron and steel industry at the
end of the 19th century was the development of communications - particularly the
railways. Steelworks demanded a cheap supply of materials - coal, ore, etc. - as well
as good transportation facilities to the export harbours for the finished steel.
The start of the 20th century saw a breakthrough for electric steel- a process which,
as a consequence of advantageous electricity prices, was to enjoy a rapid expansion
in Sweden. Together with the acid open-hearth process, the electric-steel process
was to have great significance for the development of Sweden's quality steel.
The advance of free trade
The breakthrough to a more liberal trade policy did not take place until J.A.
Gripenstedt a supporter of free trade - became the Minister of Finance in the mid-
19th century. As late as 1850 there was a ban on exports and imports of pig iron, an
export ban on iron ore and an import ban on bar iron. In 1865, however, thanks to
Gripenstedt's authority Sweden became a member of the international free trade
system which emerged along the lines of the so-called Cobden Treaty between
France and Great Britain.
Gripenstedt was also behind the national railway policy, the reforms in the banking
sector and the introduction of freedom of trade in 1864. He has come to personify
the deregulation and liberalisation which took place in Sweden in the mid-19th
century.
There was certainly no question of introducing complete freedom of trade without
protective tariffs. A number of important products enjoyed complete tariff exemption
whereas others were subject to relatively modest duties. Iron and steel were on the
exemption list up until 1888 when tariffs were re-introduced. For its time, the
Swedish customs tariff was fairly sensitive to free trade.
In 1934, a change in American trade policy took place. The Americans realised that
to increase their exports they must also be prepared to increase imports. It was this
perception that lay behind a liberalising tariff agreement America completed with a
number of countries including Sweden. From the 1930s to the period just after
the Second World War, security policy considerations came to play an increasingly
important role in shaping trade policy. It was essential for individual countries to
make themselves self-supporting with regard to the most important commodities.
‘A steel for every purpose’
During the 1930's the steel industry made rapid strides. The rationalisation and
modernisation which had taken place during the 1920s led to an increase in steel
production by about 60 per cent. This increase was almost wholly due to ingot steel.
Pig iron production grew during the same period by about 30 per cent but did not
attain the peak figures recorded during the First World War. During the 1920s
production of wrought iron had declined to insignificant quantities. Important
progress in the production of speciality steels was also achieved, a large part of
which was exported. At the same time, the production of ordinary steel had also
considerably increased.
During the Depression years of the 1930s, the Swedish steel mills managed to
recover a significant share of their home market from foreign steel producers.
Sweden's steel industry also developed over this period, greatly diversifying its
product range. Fagersta Bruk's advertising slogan - 'A Steel for Every Purpose' - is
well-known. This led to increased competition between the individual companies but
paid off during the blockade of Sweden during the Second World War and greatly
facilitated Swedish rearmament.
After the Second World War
During the immediate post-war years, a large number of regulations remained in
force - not least in the area of foreign trade. Here there was a jungle of bilateral
trading agreements, mostly with different counties, and the price situation with both
imports and exports varied sharply. Payment difficulties were a regular
occurrence. Gradually, however, these regulations were abolished. Through the
Bretton Woods system, a stable currency order was created meaning that world trade
could start to expand again. A strong contributory factor was the more or less
contemporary agreement reached between the world's leading industrial nations on
customs tariffs and trade: The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).
After the Second World War, several organs were created in Western Europe
for economic and political co-operation the main purpose of which was to reduce
the future risk of war. The most important of these was the European Coal and
Steel Community (1951) - the embryo of the European Union. This first
step, which was primarily intended to strengthen co-operation between France and
West Germany; there subsequently grew the EEC (1957) which came to embrace
other industries, including agriculture.
Central to this co-operation was the establishment of a customs union entailing
common external custom tariff for all member states. The co-operation was
developed gradually towards the creation of a single internal market embracing
fifteen countries which we now know as the EU. Sweden's entry as a full member on
1st January 1995 enabled the Swedish industry to participate fully in the EU's integration
work.
For Sweden's steel industry, membership in itself has not brought major changes.
The industry has long been closely tied to the Coal and Steel Community with
Swedish steel companies apply the price and market regulations which relate to
steel trading in the union. However, an important advantage of membership is
participation in the decision-making institutions and the removal of costly frontier
controls on trade.

 

[kayvee]

Wow! Is this from your book? Thank you!

 

[Eastcoast30]

Definitely not a marketing ploy.

Razor Steel
I have often wondered how the steel for our antique razors was made, and perhaps
why some old razors appear to have an individual or special ‘feeling’ about them.
Does the answer lie in their method of manufacture and the effort that went into
making their steel?
What I have discovered is that the manufacture of steel in 1800 was a complicated
and very imprecise process - a Black Art in which secret knowledge and recipes
were passed from master to apprentice over many generations. These highly skilled
iron masters did not have the benefit of our science or technology. They worked
entirely by feel, intuition and experience, and their recipes might have been “a bucket
and a bit of this plus a handful of that, heated until it looks and smells right”, but
these were clever men and their steel was turned into perhaps some of the finest
razors ever made. It is thought-provoking that our very old razors still hold the long-
lost secrets of these masters.
To keep this account as concise as possible, I will focus on the steel produced in
England specifically for razors before 1860 and used by Sheffield and London’s ‘little
mesters’ - before the era of huge cutlery works. After this period, rapid advances in
the science of metallurgy allowed the composition of steel to be better understood
and steel to be manufactured consistently to ever more specific recipes tailored to its
end-use, and in ever-increasing quantities and quality for the industrialised world, but
the principles mentioned here remained the same.
So, what is steel? It is primarily an alloy of iron and carbon, but with additional
minerals that can improve or degrade the performance of the final product. These
minerals are either present in the naturally occurring iron or nowadays can be added
during manufacture. The early iron masters were unaware of these minerals, and so
relied on the properties of the iron that they could obtain. Steel production has been
traced back 2000 years in China and India, but their methods were very basic and
they could only make it in very variable quality and in small batches at a time.
The fundamental problem of making steel for razors is to carefully control its
carbon content. Too much carbon and the metal is hard but brittle, too little carbon
and the metal is too soft to take an edge. With modern analysis, we now know that a
carbon content ranging from approximately 0.8 to 2% by weight gives the perfect
properties required to make razors. But of course, the early iron masters could only
produce this quality steel from years of experience of which methods and recipes
worked and which didn’t.
Iron is the most abundant metal on earth. It exists in various forms naturally
throughout the world and is called iron ore (an oxide of iron–like rust, and is
sometimes called ironstone or iron sand).
The wide variety of iron ore
Iron ore also contains a cocktail of other minerals which are difficult to remove and
yet affect the properties of the finished steel, importantly this cocktail of minerals in
the ore varies throughout the world. British iron ore contains sulphur and
phosphorus, both of which reduce the performance of the finished steel whereas
Swedish iron ore does not contain these minerals but contains beneficial minerals
such as Vanadium and Manganese (more later).
Smelting is the process by which metallic iron is extracted from iron ore. When iron
ore and carbon (in the form of charcoal) are heated together in a fire, a honeycomb-like, spongy, red hot mass of relatively pure iron is formed, intermixed with unwanted
bits of the charcoal and other materials (generally known as slag). We now know
that carbon releases oxygen from iron oxide to produce iron and carbon
dioxide. The separation of slag from the iron is aided by the addition of flux, that is,
crushed seashells or limestone. The formation of this bloom of metal was as far as
the primitive iron smith got: he would remove this spongy mass from the fire whilst it
was still red hot and hammer it to drive out the cinders and slag (seen as sparks)
and to compact the spongy metallic particles into a solid mass.
A bloom of primitive wrought iron
This bloom of metal was called wrought iron (“wrought” means “worked,” that is,
hammered) and it generally comprised 0.02 to 0.08 percent of carbon, just enough to
make the metal both tough and able to be beaten or forged into shape, but not able
to form or hold a decent cutting edge. The big problem with this method was that
only very small batches of metal could be made (perhaps for one sword), and the
the world was becoming hungry for iron to make cannon, swords, armour, nails, tools
etc.
At some time during the Middle Ages, it was discovered that at very high
temperatures (we now know at about 1200 C) iron ore begins to produce molten
metallic iron. We also now know that at these temperatures the iron absorbs large
quantities of carbon from the charcoal. The result is called cast iron and it contains
from 3 to 4.5 percent carbon by weight. This high proportion of carbon makes the
metal hard but brittle; it is liable to crack or shatter under a heavy blow, and therefore
it cannot be forged. By the 16th century, European ironmakers had developed the
blast furnace to be able to achieve these high furnace temperatures and therefore
were able to produce cast iron in large quantities.
The furnace was loaded with alternating layers of charcoal, flux, and iron ore and the
combustion of the charcoal was intensified by a blast of air pumped through the
mixture. This could be a continuous process as more ingredients were added at the
top as the iron ore and charcoal were converted into iron and tapped from the base.
Early ironworkers used water wheels to power the bellows to pump air through the
blast furnace; after 1777, James Watt’s new steam engine was increasingly used for
these purposes. Molten cast iron would run directly from the base of the blast
furnace into a sand trough which fed a number of smaller lateral troughs; this
configuration resembled a sow suckling a litter of piglets, and cast iron produced in
this way came to be called pig iron. Pig iron could be cast directly into moulds at
the blast furnace base or re-melted elsewhere to make cast iron stoves, pots, pans,
firebacks, cannon, cannonballs etc (“to cast” means to pour into a mould, hence the
name “cast iron”). Casting is also called founding and is done in a foundry.
Pig iron ingots
So, we now had two forms of the metal – brittle cast iron with too much carbon
and soft wrought iron with not enough carbon for razors, we needed something in the
middle. And we also needed it in increasing quantities as the population in Britain
was growing rapidly (1760 – 6 million, 1850 – 21 million)!
But, only cast iron could be made in large quantities and so a second refining
process was developed to remove the carbon and convert cast iron into the more
useful wrought iron. This involved heating cast iron bars to red/white heat in a
charcoal furnace and then hammering them to remove impurities and oxidise excess
carbon. This was done in a finery forge and became known as the Walloon
method from the (Belgian) people that developed it (this was used well into the 19th
century). But this process could still only produce relatively small batches of wrought
iron until1784 when a puddling furnace was developed by the Englishman Henry
Cort.
The puddling furnace kept the molten metal separate from the charcoal and required
stirring the molten cast iron through an aperture by a highly skilled craftsman called a
puddler; this exposed the metal evenly to the heat and combustion gases in the
furnace so that the carbon could be oxidized out. A similar process was also
developed called the Lancashire Hearth process. During these processes, as the
carbon content decreases, the melting point of the iron rises, causing semi-solid bits
of iron to form in the liquid mass. The worker would gather these into a single mass,
remove it and then work it under a forge hammer to remove the remaining impurities
and so produce wrought iron. We could now produce wrought iron on an industrial
scale.
So, by the late 18th century, blast furnaces were used to produce large quantities of
cast iron from iron ore and charcoal (or latterly coke) and then coal-fired puddling
furnaces were used to convert it into the more useful wrought iron. But we still didn’t
have steel with the optimum carbon content for razors! We needed to add carbon to
the wrought iron before we had razor steel.
This was carried out by the cementation process. Bars of wrought iron would be
packed with a carefully controlled quantity of powdered charcoal, layer upon layer, in
tightly sealed stone boxes and heated to red heat. After cooking for several days,
the wrought iron bars would have absorbed the carbon in the charcoal; to distribute
the carbon more evenly, the metal would be broken up, re-bundled with charcoal
powder, and reheated. The resulting blister steel would then be heated again and
brought under a forge hammer to give it a more consistent composition.
The remains of a Sheffield steel cementation furnace built in 1848
The characteristic blisters on an ingot of - blister steel
But blister steel did not make ideal razors. By chance, in the 1740s, the English
clockmaker Benjamin Huntsman, searching for higher-quality steel for making
clock springs discovered that blister steel could be completely melted at very high
temperatures (we now know about 1500 C) in clay crucibles and further refined by
the addition of a special flux (e.g. sand, glass, ashes) that removed the remaining
fine particles of slag that the cementation process could not remove. This was called
crucible or cast steel; by carefully controlling the process it could have just the right
amount of carbon for making razors, but it could only be made in very small
quantities and was thus very expensive. Early, high-quality razors were often
stamped “cast steel” to show that they were the best that money could buy.
A very old boy
Abbeydale (part of Sheffield) crucible furnaces were built in about 1830
Clay crucibles waiting outside the furnace
Casting a crucible full of molten crucible steel
I haven’t yet mentioned the variability of iron ore. Iron ore exists in great quantities
throughout the world, but it was found that the British ore did not make good razors
(we now know that it had too much sulphur which makes the blade prone to
chipping). By a lengthy process of trial and error, it was found by the 16th century that
iron from Sweden was the best for refining into steel that would take a durable edge.
We now know that it contained no ‘bad’ minerals and many ‘good’ minerals such as
manganese which aids the final hardening process of the razor’s edge. Therefore,
Sweden became a major supplier of cast iron to England. In fact, in the 18th century,
almost half of the Swedish output of wrought iron came across the North Sea to
England (average about 20,000 tons per year). We also imported a similar quantity
of wrought iron from Russia, but this was of only of similar quality to British iron and
was useless for making good razors.
For hundreds of years, the Swedish iron industry was tightly controlled by the Crown -
iron foundry and quality had to be proven before each ingot could be stamped with
the details and exported. And there were various qualities of Swedish iron too –
there were hundreds of mines, but the very best iron came from the Dannemora
mine and shipped via the nearby port of Öregrund (it was often referred to in
England as oregrounds iron).
The English trade in oregrounds iron was controlled from the 1730s to the 1850s by
a cartel of merchants, of whom the wealthiest and longest enduring members were
the Sykes family of Hull. Other participants were residents in (or controlling imports
through) London and Bristol. These merchants controlled the prices and advanced
money to Swedish exporting houses, which in turn advanced it to the ironmasters,
thus buying up the entire output from the best forges for several years in advance -
and preventing other countries from acquiring large quantities of this precious metal
(for armaments).
Dannemora mine, Sweden
So, in early 19th century England, razor-quality steel had a long journey: in Sweden,
iron ore was first mined and then smelted in blast furnaces to produce cast iron
which was then refined into wrought iron by the Walloon process (later by puddling
or the Lancashire Hearth methods). It was then imported into Britain (Hull being the
incoming port for Sheffield as it provided river/canal access to Rotherham and then
by road to Sheffield – later, it was possible to barge iron directly from Hull to
Sheffield). The wrought iron was then refined in cementation furnaces to produce
blister steel which could be used to make razors or was further refined in a crucible
furnace to produce the finest quality crucible steel for the very best razors.
We should remember that all of these processes were carried out without the
benefits of science and technology. Temperatures were judged by eye and even ear;
the correct quantities of carbon and fluxes to add were known from experience
handed down through generations of iron masters and adjusted by the ‘feel’ of each
individual batch. The masters guarded their knowledge, and each master’s steel
would have been slightly different from another’s because his fluxes were known
only to him and his methods were kept secret. Yes, there was national and
international industrial espionage even in those times! Even an individual iron
master’s steel would vary slightly from batch to batch.
Our little mester, therefore, had a variety of iron masters to buy his steel from. Each
razor smith would have had his own trusted source because he knew how to work it
and the results that it would give. The very best crucible steel was very expensive
because it had been through many stages of refining - but it could produce
superlative razors. Cheaper razors used cheaper, less refined blister steel coming
from lower-grade iron ores. Razor apprentices would learn all of this from their
masters, who had learnt it from their masters, who….. As you can see, this was a
very complex and highly skilled process that evolved over hundreds of years and
came to a peak in the early 1800s.
So, our very old razor is the end product of this long and complex international chain
of events involving many highly skilled men who worked with their hands and their
brains and had mastered their specialist arts over many years. Is this what makes
each razor special and different – possibly?
Endnote
The mass production of cheap steel only became possible in the latter part of the
19th century after the introduction of the Bessemer process (which quickly converted
large quantities of cast iron directly to steel with a pre-determined carbon content).
This was named after its inventor, the British metallurgist Sir Henry Bessemer (1813-
1898). By the latter half of the 19th century, Britain was producing half of the world’s
iron. This spelt the demise of the little mesters and the old London cutlery
businesses and opened the way for ever larger mass production cutlery ‘works’ in
Sheffield such as Rogers or Worstenholm. They had direct access to the local coal
fields and steel works and could produce consistently good razors in large enough
quantities to export all over the world, making their owners extremely wealthy in the
process.
THE SWEDISH IRON AND STEEL INDUSTRY
The Period of Osmund
It was merchants from Lübeck who, in the Middle Ages, began to interest the kings
of Sweden in the export of iron on a large scale. It was also at that time that German
mine owners and merchants acquired the rights to run their own operations in
Sweden's mining areas and trading communities.
Mining and foreign trade thereby paved the way for the integration of Sweden into
the mainstream of European civilisation. The consequence was a new economic
structure and the emergence of a broader society in the formerly agrarian Sweden.
The Swedish iron exports during the Middle Ages comprised so-called osmunds - a
standardised format of high-grade forged iron with a weight of just 3 hectograms.
The osmund was an accepted object of barter both in Sweden and abroad and was
also used as a form of payment with its value being determined by the Crown.
In the 14th century, about half of Sweden's iron production was exported, mainly to
Lübeck and Danzig. The entire annual production at this time has been estimated at
2,000 tonnes, less than a third of the production from the German forges.
Since the cogs (trading vessels) from Lübeck were not able to enter Lake Mälar,
Stockholm was established as a transhipment centre, customs station and port of
shipment for iron and copper exports from Närke, Västmanland and Dalarna.
In the 1420's the Scandinavian king, Erik of Pommern, granted preference to
Swedish seamen and merchants over their counterparts from Germany and barred
Öresund to the cogs from Lübeck. This was devastating for Swedish iron exports
and led to peasant miners from Dalarna and Västmanland - together with merchants
in Stockholm, all under the leadership of the peasant miner Engelbrekt - breaking out
of the union with Denmark and Norway.
Lübeck, which helped Gustav Vasa gain power - this in exchange for the sole rights
to trade in Sweden - saw itself defeated by the united forces of the Swedish and
Danish kings. The trading monopolies enjoyed by other Hanse cities would also later
be abolished following the expansion of Dutch and English shipping in the North Sea
and the Baltic.
The price of Swedish osmund iron started to decline around the mid-14th century
and continued to fall during the 15th century. The reasons were to be found on both
the producers' and consumers' sides. In Europe, the more blast furnace technology
was used the more iron production increased, thereby putting pressure on Swedish
products. Even though the price fell, Swedish exports of osmund iron to Danzig
increased during the 16th century. Here, Swedish iron was used as a basis for the
manufacture of a more workable forging iron, which was turned into long bars -
known at the time as bar iron - by water-powered iron hammers. This was then sold
on under the designation, 'bar iron from Danzig', mainly to Holland and England.
Bar iron takes over
During the 16th century, the kings of Sweden realised that Sweden, too, had to
modernise its iron production and start producing bar iron. In order to handle the
difficult technical changeover, the involvement of expertise and finance from foreign
countries was required.
The decisive modernisation of the Swedish iron industry in fact took place at the
beginning of the 17th century. Then Spain recognised Holland's dependence in
1609, the Dutch started to plan for their future defence partly by importing iron
cannons from Sweden. A large number of forgers who had emigrated to Holland
from Spanish-controlled Wallonia were now recruited to work in Sweden at the Royal
Ironworks and armouries, were modernised by engineers such as Willem de Besche and
financed by businessmen such as Louis De Geer.
The doctrine that dominated trade policy in Sweden in the 17th century was
mercantilism which stated that a country's economy should be strengthened through
high protective tariffs. In addition, exports should be favoured and imports restrained
in order to establish a trade surplus. The fact that in international trade finished
products commanded a better price than raw materials led to a prohibition,
introduced in 1604, on exports from Sweden of osmund iron. In the future, only
Sweden's processed bar iron could be exported.
In the 1640s, Sweden's exports of bar iron amounted to around 11,000 tonnes a
year. Fifty years later, the average was about 27,000 tonnes a year and in the 1740's
an average of 40,000 tonnes a year was achieved.
The large increase depended almost wholly on the emergence of new markets, firstly
in Holland and then in England. Nevertheless, most of the armaments produced
remained in Sweden and the production of nails, plates, tools and utensils was mainly
for the home market.
During the 18th century, Sweden's iron production virtually doubled due to the
increased demand for bar iron from abroad, particularly England, which had a large
need for high-quality, so-called Oregrund iron, as an input for its steel industry. Bar
iron gradually came to comprise no less than three-quarters of the total Swedish
exports, creating for the Crown much-needed revenues in the form of taxes and
export duties.
In England, the charcoal forests had been stripped to such an extent that the country
had become strongly dependent on iron imports from Sweden. England's imports in
the 1730s totalled about 25,000 tonnes of which Sweden's contribution was nearly
20,000 tonnes. from Russia came about 5,000 tonnes but Russian iron, some twenty
years later, would rise to 15,000 tonnes which would then equal Sweden's share.
At the end of the 18th century technology in England had been developed enabling
the use of fossil coal in metallurgical processes.
In addition, it was increased competition from Russian bar iron that caused the crisis
for Sweden's iron industry which in turn was a crucial factor in the establishment of
Jernkontoret in 1747. The increasing utilisation of coal and coke would subsequently
lead to a radical change in the competitive status of Swedish iron and during the
19th-century Europe's iron production gradually switched to countries with ample
resources of fossil coal.
Forging regulations
The strong growth of bar iron exports aroused concern that the competition of
the bar mills for charcoal and pig iron would lead to increased production costs. It
was for this reason that a limitation on forge production was introduced whereby it
would also be possible to influence the prices on the international markets. The
owners of the bar mills were successful in implementing a forging regulation in the
Riksdag of 1746-47 which effectively obstructed an increase in bar iron exports over
the long term. It was not until the 1830s that the regulation was wholly abolished.
However, a significant upturn in the value of the composition of exports took place
during the latter part of the 18th century. Exports of iron, which had undergone
further processing following forging under the heavy bar iron hammers, increased
sharply. With the help of the lighter and faster iron hammers, it was possible to
produce thinner bars, or strips, which were then bound together and exported in
bundles. Forged plate and steel were also exported to a greater extent than before.
Sweden's bar iron exports during the 18th century - as previously mentioned - were
very much focused on the British market. This was complemented by a stable and
significant export to the Baltic Sea countries and, in the latter part of the century, by
increased exports to France, Portugal and the Mediterranean lands. At the same
time, the former large-scale sales to Holland diminished. Trade policy considerations
were to be of major importance for Sweden's foreign policy during the coming
revolutionary and Napoleonic periods.
The Napoleonic wars ushered in a serious crisis for the Swedish iron industry. The
reasons were - inter alia - that the custom tariffs on Swedish bar iron to Great Britain
were raised sharply. From just over 52,000 tonnes of bar iron per year during the
1790's, the total Swedish export fell to less than 30,000 tonnes for the lowest year,
1808. The losses in the British market could, however, largely be compensated by
the newly emerging US market. Thus, in the early 19th century; the USA became an
important market and was, right up to the First World War, the largest importer of
Swedish bar iron.
Industrialism
At this time many people in the Swedish iron industry realised that the solution to the
crisis lay in improving the quality of Swedish charcoal forging. The Walloon Forge
retained its position on the market in Sheffield. Others recommended going over to
the use of coal-fired puddling furnaces - invented in England - for the production of
forgeable iron and complementing this with rolling mills. This was to be
delayed, however, until 1845 when the mill owner, Gustaf Ekman, solved the
problems of adapting a Lancashire forge to Swedish conditions using charcoal
instead of coal as an energy source. In the Ekman furnace, the frayed surfaces on
the puddle bars could be effectively welded together. Ekman's furnace thereby
became the mainspring in the development of the rolling mill of that period. An added
advantage was that fuel consumption was sharply reduced.
The improved quality now made it possible to recover a large part of the lost market
in Sheffield. When furnaces adapted to Swedish conditions had been developed and
rolling mills set up, iron of high quality could be produced in large quantities. Also,
with rolling mills the expensive hammer working in the forge could be replaced. The
expansion of the Lancashire forge resulted in a sharp increase in the demand for pig
iron and overall production increased to about 180,000 tonnes per year by the start
of the 1860s.
The technical advances resulted in more concentrated operations and smaller mills
were now being closed down to the advantage of larger and more dynamic units.
This process, known as 'the great mill shutdown', meant that the number of smelting
furnaces in Sweden declined from 220 in 1840 to less than 160 by 1880 (despite the
the fact that many new furnaces were opened during this period).
The Bessemer process
The need for steel increased strongly in the mid-1800s. For industries and means of
transport steel of high quality was required in large quantities. Both in Europe and
USA assiduous efforts were made to replace the old craft methods of steel
production with processes that better responded to the growing demand. One such
was the Bessemer method, introduced by Henry Bessemer in 1855, a system
whereby air blown into smelted pig iron made it possible to produce steel directly in
the furnace.
The desired carbon content was obtained by breaking off the process at appropriate
intervals. At the time it was an epochal discovery before, in the refining processes
the product became a softer, carbon-lacking iron which had to be carburised through
special processes and at a high cost in order to become hard carbon steel. Using the
Bessemer process this was now no longer necessary. Bessemer himself did not
succeed in producing any ingots of satisfactory quality.
When, in 1858 at Edsken, the Swede, Göran Fredrik Göransson became the first
person in the world to successfully apply the Bessemer process on a practical scale
and produce ingot steel of good quality, this was an industrial exploit of historic
importance with international ramifications. It marked the start of the modern steel
age by enabling the economic production of high-quality steel products such as rails,
railway wheels, ship plates and so on. Now, for example, the great railway
construction in Europe and the USA could begin.
The successful introduction of the Bessemer method in Sweden led to its
implementation in many Swedish steelworks at the start of the 1880s. It would be
some time, however, before the production levels exceeded 50,000 tonnes and not
until 1895 that production of 100,000 tonnes would be exceeded for the first time.
However, in Sweden, the Bessemer process never became the major production
method for ordinary steel as it did in other countries. This was mainly because of the
expensive charcoal pig iron required to charge the Bessemer converter.
Instead, it was the other great ingot steel method, the Siemens-Martin method, which
was to lead the Swedish steel industry into its great era of expansion. A
characteristic of the method was that the steel smelting took place in a furnace
designed by the Siemens brothers in 1861. Pierre Martin was the first person to
successfully produce ingot steel in a furnace of this type.
It would take some time - not until the latter part of the 1880s - before the open-
hearth production of steel in Sweden would become widely established but by 1895
it had already exceeded that of Bessemer steel. Not until then did the volume of
ingot steel production exceeds that of wrought iron production, meaning that the
The Lancashire method maintained its position as the most important for the production of
iron and steel during most of the 19th century.
The introduction of ingot steel processes represented a major upturn in the Swedish
steel industry. Both production and exports were doubled during the period from the
1870s up to the First World War. At the same time, the export of Lancashire iron
increased at the same rate as ingot steel, at least until the turn of the century.
Particularly in the most important export markets Great Britain and the USA - the
Lancashire bar iron continued to predominate. After 1900, however, ingot steel took
an increasingly larger share of the market whilst the so-called wrought iron methods,
based on the Lancashire and particularly the Walloon forge, declined in importance.
A precondition for the geographical concentration of the iron and steel industry at the
end of the 19th century was the development of communications - particularly the
railways. Steelworks demanded a cheap supply of materials - coal, ore, etc. - as well
as good transportation facilities to the export harbours for the finished steel.
The start of the 20th century saw a breakthrough for electric steel- a process which,
as a consequence of advantageous electricity prices, was to enjoy a rapid expansion
in Sweden. Together with the acid open-hearth process, the electric-steel process
was to have great significance for the development of Sweden's quality steel.
The advance of free trade
The breakthrough to a more liberal trade policy did not take place until J.A.
Gripenstedt a supporter of free trade - became the Minister of Finance in the mid-
19th century. As late as 1850 there was a ban on exports and imports of pig iron, an
export ban on iron ore and an import ban on bar iron. In 1865, however, thanks to
Gripenstedt's authority Sweden became a member of the international free trade
system which emerged along the lines of the so-called Cobden Treaty between
France and Great Britain.
Gripenstedt was also behind the national railway policy, the reforms in the banking
sector and the introduction of freedom of trade in 1864. He has come to personify
the deregulation and liberalisation which took place in Sweden in the mid-19th
century.
There was certainly no question of introducing complete freedom of trade without
protective tariffs. A number of important products enjoyed complete tariff exemption
whereas others were subject to relatively modest duties. Iron and steel were on the
exemption list up until 1888 when tariffs were re-introduced. For its time, the
Swedish customs tariff was fairly sensitive to free trade.
In 1934, a change in American trade policy took place. The Americans realised that
to increase their exports they must also be prepared to increase imports. It was this
perception that lay behind a liberalising tariff agreement America completed with a
number of countries including Sweden. From the 1930s to the period just after
the Second World War, security policy considerations came to play an increasingly
important role in shaping trade policy. It was essential for individual countries to
make themselves self-supporting with regard to the most important commodities.
‘A steel for every purpose’
During the 1930's the steel industry made rapid strides. The rationalisation and
modernisation which had taken place during the 1920s led to an increase in steel
production by about 60 per cent. This increase was almost wholly due to ingot steel.
Pig iron production grew during the same period by about 30 per cent but did not
attain the peak figures recorded during the First World War. During the 1920s
production of wrought iron had declined to insignificant quantities. Important
progress in the production of speciality steels was also achieved, a large part of
which was exported. At the same time, the production of ordinary steel had also
considerably increased.
During the Depression years of the 1930s, the Swedish steel mills managed to
recover a significant share of their home market from foreign steel producers.
Sweden's steel industry also developed over this period, greatly diversifying its
product range. Fagersta Bruk's advertising slogan - 'A Steel for Every Purpose' - is
well-known. This led to increased competition between the individual companies but
paid off during the blockade of Sweden during the Second World War and greatly
facilitated Swedish rearmament.
After the Second World War
During the immediate post-war years, a large number of regulations remained in
force - not least in the area of foreign trade. Here there was a jungle of bilateral
trading agreements, mostly with different counties, and the price situation with both
imports and exports varied sharply. Payment difficulties were a regular
occurrence. Gradually, however, these regulations were abolished. Through the
Bretton Woods system, a stable currency order was created meaning that world trade
could start to expand again. A strong contributory factor was the more or less
contemporary agreement reached between the world's leading industrial nations on
customs tariffs and trade: The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).
After the Second World War, several organs were created in Western Europe
for economic and political co-operation the main purpose of which was to reduce
the future risk of war. The most important of these was the European Coal and
Steel Community (1951) - the embryo of the European Union. This first
step, which was primarily intended to strengthen co-operation between France and
West Germany; there subsequently grew the EEC (1957) which came to embrace
other industries, including agriculture.
Central to this co-operation was the establishment of a customs union entailing
common external custom tariff for all member states. The co-operation was
developed gradually towards the creation of a single internal market embracing
fifteen countries which we now know as the EU. Sweden's entry as a full member on
1st January 1995 enabled the Swedish industry to participate fully in the EU's integration
work.
For Sweden's steel industry, membership in itself has not brought major changes.
The industry has long been closely tied to the Coal and Steel Community with
Swedish steel companies apply the price and market regulations which relate to
steel trading in the union. However, an important advantage of membership is
participation in the decision-making institutions and the removal of costly frontier
controls on trade.

That's quite a history!

 

[Gamma]

When razor manufacturers first stamped their blades with 'Cast Steel' - is was actually marketing, but not in a deceptive or misleading way. It was not marketing like those "As Seen on TV" labels.
Claiming 'its just marketing' is actually misleading and deceptive.

A blade marked 'Cast Steel' let you know the quality of the steel used to make the razor was superior to what was used previously. It was not an incremental improvement, this was significant in all regards.

Huntsman's steel (Cast/Acier) was a much improved material compared to its predecessor.
And any smith using it would naturally advertise the use of it.

Those makers putting Cast or Acier on their tangs were letting customers know that they were using the best steel available - at that time.
Huntsman's steel was not readily accepted by English makers, French smiths were the early adopters. There is an interesting story there, but it belongs in another thread.

But the phrase "At That Time" does not mean "For All Time".

Like all technologies, with time, everything improved. The quality of steel improved. Sourcing ore changed and the materials were higher purity. Methods of removing remaining impurities improved. forging, HT&T and grinding improved. Geometry improved.
Steel quality from the early 1800s/late 1700s was surpassed in all regards by the mid 1800s.

I've owned, literally, many dozens of 'cast steel' razors from the pre-1820 era. That early steel just does not match what Sheffield was capable of producing in the mis 1800s and later. Not every post 1850 Sheffield blade was 'spot-on' and some early Cast Steel blades were better than others. As always, a good smith will get the most out of his steel and some smiths were better than others it seems. So maybe a great smith with a lesser ingot can make a better razor than a poor smith with a better ingot. That's not the point though. The quality of the ingot is the subject of concern and better steel is better steel. Was there a razor along that way stamped Cast Steel that was equal to or better than one that wasn't? Probably, maybe, can't recall. That's not the point though. What was referred to as 'Cast Steel" in 1810 was improved upon tremendously by 1850. Common use of the Acier and Cast tang stamps goes away early on, maybe 1830s. My Huntsman razor is stamped with his name and presumably mid 1700s, it's soft. It shaves well but it's soft.

I have honed too many Cast Steel Greaves razors to count, they all shaved and they all took good edges. I've had them on every stone I've owned including 20k and 30k synthetics and higher grit compounds even. They were some of my favorite razors back then. But the later blades from Greaves took better edges. The older blades were a little softer or had less wear resistance or both. It's the nature of the beast. Same holds true for other makers as well. If someone can't realize the quality differences between ancient and more modern steel, that doesn't mean those differences are not there. They are there. Improvements were made to the steel processing operations for good reasons.

Thinking that steel from the late 1700s is the equal of steel from the later 1800s is obviously a flawed concept. It's like that fantasy where Wootz steel from the the the 1st millennium BC is thought to be equal to or better than S30V. Everyone is entitled to like, think, and have any opinion they want though. Factually, steel was improved over time; but maybe someone can't tell the difference or doesn't care or just prefers a lower grade steel in a razor. Preferences are what they are.

Logic, reason and the laws of physics apply to everyone all the time. The quality of steel, and steel products, improved tremendously in all regards as time progressed; grain structure, hardness levels, resistance to wear machanisms, etc - it all got better as time moved along because people kept experimenting and making improvements. Reading about Faraday's work with alloys can shed a lot of light on the subject.

Note - cast steel razors were forged, 'Cast Steel' referred to the process of making the ingot, not the making of the blade.
It's not like today where you can buy a Pittsburgh hardware-store axe and the head might actually be cast and not forged, while a Hultafors axe will be forged and possibly from steel that could, technically, be called cast steel.

 

[TSENG]

This is the 2023 Cast Steel Race.
The test can be compared with the function of ordinary carbon steel.

 

[Wid]

I need a audio book of that long post

 

[rbscebu]

@Mr Bedlington, you are educating me all the time. For decades I and most others have been told that aluminium (Al) was the most abundant metal (ppm) on earth at about 8.2%. Now we learn that iron (Fe) is the more abundant metal at about 5.6%. Amazing facts.

By mass, steel production in the world is about twice that of aluminium. By volume, aluminium production is about 50% more than that of steel.

 

[TSENG]

BENGALL cast steel razor 6/8" Around 1880 , the shaving feeling is as comfortable as the later BENGALL carbon steel razor. There are many types of steel, and the focus is on the difference in the heat treatment and grinding process of the razor. Different brands of razors, the same Steel will vary.

 

[TSENG]

Crucible steel
original Wikiwand - Degelstål - https://www.wikiwand.com/sv/Degelst%C3%A5l?fbclid=IwAR2l00tQZ404Ojpe7YIHmx3cTOaLV9nOGywdiTVjEJdlLds1awwX-wrUMDc#CRU-st%C3%A5l

The following computer translation.

The crucible steel method The crucible steel method was, before the introduction of cast steel processes in the second half of the 19th century, a common way of producing steel. The manufacture of steel by melting carbon steel in crucibles was invented in Sheffield, England in 1740. The method, which was both expensive and laborious, produced, with the right raw materials, a steel of the highest quality suitable for edge tools and springs. In order to produce a hard steel, the carbon content of the soft bar iron had to be increased. Coal and bar iron were therefore heated together in a furnace. The iron obtained there was then forged into fuel steel. The quality of the steel was then further raised in the crucible steel furnace. The fuel steel was then melted down in crucibles, and in this way the carbon content became absolutely even.

The crucible steel method in Sweden During the 19th century, Sweden imported crucible steel from England, even though the raw material itself, bar iron, was produced in the Swedish Walloon mills. Namely, it was considered that only Swedish Walloon iron could measure up as a raw material for steel production. In 1870, however, the Dannemora cast steel company was formed at Österbybruk in an attempt to replace English imports with domestic production. Crucible steel was difficult to manufacture, and it took some time before production began in earnest.

CRU steel From 1859, Vikmanshyttan's mill introduced an improved variant of the crucible steel method, which came to be known as CRU steel after the then mill manager Carl Reinhold Ulff. The carbon content of the finished steel could be controlled by changing the amount of iron, ore and coal that was added to the crucible. The oxygen in the iron ore (iron ore mainly consists of various forms of iron oxide) reacted with the carbon. A prerequisite for a good end result was that you had access to an ore that had a very low content of unwanted elements. In the Vikmanshyttan, iron ore from the Bispberg mine was used, which delivered ore with a rare high content of iron. During the end of the 19th century, they began to manufacture alloy steel, i.e. steel that was alloyed with metals other than iron. The production of crucible steel decreased later in the 20th century, and has now ceased.

 

[sexy beast]

I have been collecting some of these late 1700 early 1800 stub-tail razors lately. The razor image below is my Crook straight razor. I was pretty amazed comfort edge feel, blade keenness, and shaving smoothness of these blades. They take an edge and ease of sharpening that I would say would rival my Japanese Iwasaki Tamahagane razors. I know this quite a claim but it's true from my experience. This took me by surprised and was totally unexpected. The only issue with these cast or crucible steel razors is they are highly reactive metal that needs a rust inhibitor like museum wax or something like it and keep dry after use. If you have hard water, these razors will develop water spots quickly. These razors are amazing and very unique shavers to what is being made today. By my own research and reading some of the posts of the other members on this forum confirms, some of these older razors are very special.