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The editor almost performed the impossible in NL 89 by compressing several shelves of books on iron and steel into a few hundred words, and although he included some of the names of steel that sounded good but meant nothing, there are others which crop up frequently enough to justify an attempt at explanation. The subject of steel and its manufacture is so confusing, that I hope yet another article brings more light then darkness. German SteelThese words were applied to second quality saws from the late 18th to well past middle of the 19th centuries. They were not just a marketing devices, but, apart from being some cheaper process, it is not altogether clear how the steel of these saws was made. There were other words which had been used earlier for the same product, namely Styrian (Styria in southern Austria), or Cullen (Cologne) steel. It was made by melting cast iron (4% carbon) and burning out enough of the carbon to bring it down to the desirable amount for a good steel, that is about 1-1.5%, using more or less a modification of the finery process [NL89, p22]. This steel was a high quality product, and was imported into England from enterports like Amsterdam and Hamburg until it begun to be made here. The method remained virtually the only one used on the continent, and certainly in Germany itself, until after Bessemer and the other developments of the second half of the 19th century. In 1693 a steelmaker named William Bertram from Remscheid (the counterpart of Sheffield in the Ruhr) was shipwrecked on the north Durham coast. A few years later his name crops up as the man in charge of furnace turning out blister* steel near Newcastle upon Tyne, and at another one nearby in 1720. He produced five grades of "German Steel" of varying hardness, but all made from blister steel, not by method he would presumably have learned at home. As Brian Read pointed out, the carbon content of blister steel bars varies when they come out of the cementation furnace, and a skilled man could predict the variations, bundle together the bars of similar quality, forge-weld them and sell them in the five grades. As Barraclough i (my source for this account) says "since he [Bertram] was a German, it seems to have been accepted that he had produced the true German steel". What he had produced, however, was not German "German Steel" but a material that behaved in much the same way. It seems to have been his blister for Sheffield's production of it, the art of making of it having arrived in 1767 when Thomas Boulsover, silver plate and saw maker, hired a workman from Blackhall Mill near Newcastle; blister steel making was of course well known in Sheffield by then. In the 1850's the Swedish Government relaxed its ban on the export of cast iron (up to then iron had been sent out in wrought iron bar form only), thus making it possible to produce steel far more cheaply, by direct puddling from this highest quality material. Until that date Sheffield probably made all its German steel from lengthy and expensive process of cementation from the wrought bars. For one reason or another "German Steel" ceased to be a quality mark probably sometime after the 1860s. Thus in figure 1, the mark on a saw made between 1787 and 1816 (Barber and Genn's dates in the trade directories), indicates a saw of lesser quality, and price, then the one in figure 2. In appearance these saws cannot be otherwise distinguished.
In the following decade Beardshaw were selling saws for the following prices:
These prices were wholesale, usually with 50% discount or more, but there are no records to suggest what retailers would charge at that time. Cast Steel and its variationsFigure 2 implies - and the buyer no doubt hoped he was getting a truthfully labeled product - a high quality steel. Figure 3 goes a little farther. Staniforth (his first name is not known) occupied the premises in Hollis Croft which Jonathan Beardshaw took over in 1823, so that the word London does not mean the place of manufacture but was an addition that suggested extra quality.
"London", the largest city in England and much the larges and most sophisticated market, was the maker's attempt to catch a purchaser's eye.
The word survives in figure 4, a saw made probably 100 years later. This one is indeed the most expensive, i.e. top quality, saw that Spear and Jackson made at that time.
Figure 5 is on a brass-backed saw of the early 1820's, but
Ibbotsons and Roebuck have chosen to call their steel "Refined".
With all due respect (or, as one of my teachers used to say,
with no respect whatever), the term has little meaning except to
say that the steel had been melted, i.e. was crucible cast
steel.
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