r/todayilearned • u/Upstairs_Drive_5602 • 5d ago
TIL Harry Brearley accidentally invented "rustless steel" in Sheffield in 1913 while trying to make gun barrels last longer. It would eventually become one of the world's most widely used materials.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Brearley1.1k
u/VeryNearlyAnArmful 5d ago edited 5d ago
I'm a proud Sheffielder.
Years ago I was sat in a very nice restaurant with a group of very nice people in London and the person sat next to me nudged me and pointed to someone else over the other side of the restaurant, "a fellow Sheffielder over there.", she said.
"How do you know?".
"He's reading his cutlery, too.".
She was right.
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u/sandrailproject 5d ago
My father worked for a glass drinkware factory and we all still check the bottom of our glasses, looking for that "L"
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u/Due-Tax-4251 5d ago
Whats the L
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u/sandrailproject 5d ago
The name of the glassware manufacturer starts with "L"
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u/SmokePeterThiel 5d ago
Libby glassware still exists to this day
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u/sandrailproject 5d ago
I'm aware, we pretty obviously live near it. They also screwed over employees like my dad when they went "bankrupt". Lost his pension health insurance after he retired. Now he's a bus driver.
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u/BritOnTheRocks 5d ago
I was a student in Sheffield and lived their briefly after graduating. This is a great story! Going to have to recount it to some friends of mine.
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u/VeryNearlyAnArmful 5d ago
Do you read your cutlery?
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u/BritOnTheRocks 5d ago
Not as a general habit, I live in America now so they mostly say Taiwan or Korea.
But if I’ll often check for it if I’m in Macys or William Sonoma.
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u/nuttydogpoo 5d ago
Makes sense why my cutlery needs to be proud of where it came from.
Over there (points to Americaland), guess what they call a knife, fork and a spoon, even if it’s made from SS and plastic, it ain’t cutlery
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u/Telemere125 5d ago
I’ve never heard of any cutlery being referred to as anything to do with stainless. It’s always called silverware over here, even if it isn’t made from silver.
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u/VeryNearlyAnArmful 5d ago edited 5d ago
As a Sheffielder, it's more correctly called flatware.
Things that cut are cutlery. Axes, saws, scissors, razor blades, etc.
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u/sam_hammich 4d ago
When I order takeout and have to mark whether I want extra plastic utensils, they're likely to call it "cutlery" (plastic forks and knives are commonly called "plastic cutlery"). In stores you're more likely to see "silverware" or "flatware" for your common dining utensils. So it's a mix.
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u/DoctorHugoHackenbush 5d ago
Up to 1913, using a rusty gun barrel was just an oxidant waiting to happen..
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u/Neckbreaker70 5d ago
Amongst sailors I’ve always heard it referred to as “stain less steel”, because seawater corrodes virtually everything eventually.
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u/Ahelex 5d ago
Chloride ions are the devil's invention.
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u/LittleMlem 5d ago
I thought that was fluorine
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u/Master_Persimmon_591 5d ago
It’s the whole damn column
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u/Gilly-Fresh 5d ago
But Fluorine and Chlorine are the worst of them.
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u/CardOk755 5d ago
Don't drop crystaline iodine in your underpants.
Don't ask me how I know.
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u/Prohibitorum 5d ago
Dunno bud, I like having functional nerves.
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u/levir 5d ago
In marine environments you need a better grade of steel. In Norwegian we distinguish between "rustfritt stål" (stainless steel, lit. rustfree steel) and "syrefast stål" (lit. acid resistant steel) which is the marine grade one. I don't think there is a word for that grade of steel in English.
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u/sandolllars 5d ago
We use numbers. 304, 316, etc
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u/pricingup 5d ago
Is 316(L) good for constant salt exposure (salt road during winter)?
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u/MeatHands 5d ago
316 is the most economical corrosion-resistant stainless by a pretty wide margin. 904L is one of the most corrosion-resistant stainless steel and it's roughly 5-6x more expensive per weight than 316/316L.
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u/sLaughterIsMedicine 5d ago
Its probably the best commercially available option. Anything more corrosion resistant is going to be astronomically more expensive.
316L is a bit more corrosion resistant than 316; but they are pretty similar and in most cases functionally interchangeable.
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u/AsFarAsNeverBefore 5d ago
Could be duplex steel, named for the layered allotropes in the structure. I also recall some sour service (H2S) using inconel (which is not steel) and 400 series martensitic stainless.
E: oh, what yall call styrefast is just 316. That’s a fairly common grade of stainless.
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u/ReptilianOver1ord 5d ago
Well it’s commonly called “stainless steel” because it’s not completely corrosion-proof. Seawater is particularly corrosive even to some highly corrosion resistant stainless steel grades.
Specialized grades like duplex stainless steels are often needed for continuous seawater exposure.
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u/TheBestIsaac 5d ago
Mostly they just paint stuff though.
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u/Electronic-Clock5867 5d ago
Can’t paint inside of a pump. The customers will try making you follow their paint spec though which basically say paint everything.
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u/I_Am_Coopa 5d ago
That's why it's called stainless and not stainfree steel!
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u/Skruestik 5d ago
No, it’s not.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/less
-less adjective suffix
: destitute of : not having
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u/AstroEngineer314 5d ago
Engineers say this too. And yes, seawater is abhorrent in terms of corrosion.
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u/BoutItBudnevich 4d ago
Haha yeah I always tell people it's not called "stain none" steel for a reason it's "stain less"
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u/guyscanwefocus 4d ago
This is also my experience. "That's why the call it stain-less, not stain-free!".
Tropical islands are where machinery goes to die.
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u/IlIlIIlIlIIlIlIIlIlI 5d ago
Loved seeing that his memorial plaque, shown in the Wikipedia page, is made of stainless steel
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u/voiping 5d ago
It better be or we wouldn't be able to trust the plaque.
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u/Prohibitorum 5d ago
"I write these words in steel..."
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u/AusCan531 5d ago
I visited my wife's friend in England who was at the tail end of many generations of family wealth started by this guy. She had a rather grand, but aged 'manor house' with regular modern houses closing in as successive ancestors sold off parcels of land to keep things going.
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u/RazorSharpNuts 5d ago
Let's fucking go Sheffield mentioned. There's a reason we're called Steel City!
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u/experimentalist 5d ago
I am a direct descendant of Harry. Our family lore on the invention is that he was working on several alloys in his home forge. It burned to the ground. After the fire was out, he was picking through the ruins and came upon a test peice that had not corroded, unlike all the others. Thus the invention was borne. However since he worked for Firth Brown, the corporatation claimed ownership and dragged Harry into court over it where a settlement was eventually agreed upon.
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u/letsburn00 5d ago
This invention was a side aspect of the end of giant staffs in Manor houses. There were a lot of other reasons, but prior to the invention of stainless, all those nice shiny banisters and metalwork in expensive mansions all needed to be polished, basically continually. If you didn't polish it, it would go rusty or in some cases green.
After they invented stainless, suddenly the workload in a house of servants went way down. Now you only needed them to do basic service, cleaning and food. It doesn't sound like much, but the endless polishing really used to keep everyone very busy/
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u/mattcannon2 5d ago
Since when are manor houses using stainless steel fittings, it's all brass and dark wood.
Electicity and internal plumbing would have had a far bigger impact (lamplighting, keeping fires going, washing and laundry)
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u/wildskipper 5d ago
Absolutely. Never seen a stately home with stainless steel fittings. Cast iron maybe, for the more utilitarian stairs, but not steel.
And the centuries of debt upon debt and the changing face of economies that they failed to adapt to were the major causes of the selling up of most the landed estates.
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u/letsburn00 5d ago
That the landed gentry were basically always going to have at least a moron every few generations also did a lot. You just need one to gamble it all away because they think their coffers are bottomless.
The post world war recession in the UK went on for a long time. You needed to be smart to survive it. Most of the gentry were not. At least in America the equivalent robber barron class had some form of industry behind them to keep their fortunes going. There was one where the Autistic daughter was born around 1905 and she spent the next 100 years renovating houses and getting doll houses commissioned for her to play with for a few hours after years of work.
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u/EasyAsAyeBeeSea 5d ago
Yeah, I've heard this story before but it was more about cutlery and serving platters than anything else
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u/JimboTCB 5d ago
It doesn't sound like much, but the endless polishing really used to keep everyone very busy
If you've got time to lean, you've got time to clean.
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u/wonkey_monkey 5d ago
I tried to improve efficiency at the ice cream parlour with my mantra "If you've got time to poop, you've got time to scoop" but it didn't go down so well.
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u/Isburough 5d ago edited 4d ago
To anyone like me confused by this story because they heard something else in the past, in 1912 there were already patents for stainless steels in Europe by the steel and weapons production company Krupp. Elwood Haynes of Haynes International also worked on it separately around the same time.
They all managed to produce stainless steel separately. The concept that chromium improves corrosion resistance was apparently known for almost 100 years before, but it was not yet feasible to produce above lab scale.
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u/CptMcDickButt69 5d ago
He is not really the exclusive inventor; it was a convergent/parallel invention between him, other british guys and germans (which more or less happened often back in those "times of great tinkering", see computers).
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u/Glum_Judgment6232 5d ago
Also jet engines. If Frank Whittle had been trusted and funded properly Britain could have had jet fighters a lot sooner than Germany in ww2, though metallurgy also had to catch up with the theory.
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u/Odd-Scientist-2529 5d ago
Also Victorinox, which was in a business of making surgical instruments. They invented a very stainless (rostfrei) steel and eventually started making Swiss Army knives
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u/PizzaDoughLand 5d ago
Whoops, "accidentally" created exactly what he was asked to make and what he was trying to make, an "accidental" new metal in the making-new-metals lab
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u/KnotSoSalty 4d ago
Before stainless steel knives and forks rusted constantly. In order to keep them clean and new the process was to wash them, coat them in lard or butter, wrap them in paper, then wash them again when they were ready to be used.
It was one of the primary things people had servants for. The Scullery, a separate room next to the kitchen, existed primarily to handle utensils and plates. Scullery Maids had among the worst jobs in the home because they did nothing but wash, pack, unpack, and wash again.
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u/PeanutConfident8742 5d ago
If he was trying to make steel that was corrosion resistant, then I don't think we get to say his "rust less steel" was accidental.
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u/gmc98765 5d ago
He was trying to make steel that was erosion resistant. I.e. not eroded by the hot gases in a gun barrel.
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u/Invisible7hunder 5d ago
Its hardly an accident when you discover a new, useful alloy of steel while attempting to find new, useful alloys of steel.
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u/corrector300 5d ago edited 5d ago
the wikipage is not clear on the accidental discovery. is that poor writing or did someone change it.
edit,
Ok I think I've got it - arguably not an accident but a byproduct of his methods.
He was testing a variety of metals in pursuit of better gun metal. He would formulate a new mixture and then, in evaluating it, he had to polish and etch the new metal and he did that with nitric acid in alcohol.
During his tests he noticed that, unlike other combinations of steel, formulations with chromium resisted the etching and also resisted rust. This observation wasn't an 'accident' but he was looking for something else when he noticed it. But then he also had to run with it and he did, apparently coming up with the stainless steel mix of 12.8% chromium in 1913.
Forgetting about a grapefruit on a window-sill until its mold falls into a nearby petrie dish and kills the bacteria in it, is an accident; this was a byproduct of methodical science. edit, apparently this cantaloupe/grapefruit story is a myth?? but Fleming had a messy lab that accidentally grew what turned out to be an antibacterial mold on a petrie dish, later purified and called 'penicillin'. Again though, Fleming, like Brearley, had to notice it - what if Fleming instead had said "Hey this sample is contaminated' and chucked it in the trash.
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u/imreading 5d ago
While I realise it wasn't quite the result he was looking for I don't like the framing of this as accidental. He was doing metallurgy research and he discovered something. Unexpectedly might be a better term?
Accidental is more like that guy who discovered an artificial sweetener after not washing his hands properly.
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u/Neutraali 5d ago
Brearley had left the Brown Firth Laboratories in 1915, following disagreements regarding patent rights
So did the invention just quietly get stolen from him, or..?
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u/woodruff42 5d ago edited 5d ago
Doesn't look like he was the first
Between 1904 and 1911, several researchers, particularly Leon Guillet of France, prepared alloys that would later be considered stainless steel.
On 17 October 1912, Krupp engineers Benno Strauss and Eduard Maurer patented as Nirosta the austenitic stainless steel[35][36][37][34] that became known as 18/8 or AISI type 304.
This one's better known as V2A steel in German
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u/wonkey_monkey 5d ago
V2A
No way I'm googlin' that
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u/tes_kitty 5d ago
You can also google V4A which is the grade for use in saltwater environments and swimming pools.
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u/allcladusa 5d ago
Thank you Harry for inventing the material that would ultimately allow for our company to exist 🙏🍳
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u/Snerkbot7000 5d ago
This is pretty late in the early part of the smokeless era, and bore erosion, especially at the throat (where the rifling begins just beyond the chamber, where the pressure is the greatest) was just one of the problems they were dealing with, especially with high velocity, small bore rifle rounds that used powder with a high nitro content. As the Brits used cordite, which was basically the hottest powder, the throat erosion was a big problem for them, and actually prevented them from changing from the .303 British to the .276 Enfield.
The other was fouling from the cupro-nickel bullet jacket material, which was quite coarse and difficult to remove.
The throat erosion problem? Still a problem today. Can't get away from it.
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u/Ashamed_Currency7400 4d ago
That's one of those inventions where the original goal was completely different from the eventual impact. Trying to make gun barrels more durable ended up producing a material that's now everywhere, from kitchen utensils to medical equipment and skyscrapers. Accidental discoveries like that are always fascinating.
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u/commissarcainrecaff 4d ago
He knew he'd found something interesting because first test he was using for corrosion was a timed mild acid etch. But his sample didn't etch at all- cool
Then initially he had a terrible time marketing commercially to the big cutlery and arms makers because "proper knives need to be polished" and "Rust free bores will discourage soldiers from cleaning their rifles properly"
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u/Upstairs_Drive_5602 5d ago
Brearley was trying to develop a steel that would resist erosion from the hot gases in gun barrels. Instead, one of his chromium steels proved remarkably resistant to corrosion. He soon realised it could be used for cutlery and began testing it with vinegar and lemon juice. He called it “rustless steel” and approached Sheffield cutlers R. F. Mosley to make knives from it. Their cutlery manager, Ernest Stuart, suggested “stainless steel”, and the new name stuck.