Steel history

Everything done in a shop has a history: someone, somewhere, had a problem and solved it. In this topic we tell those stories with sources — patents, archives, museums — and without making anything up: how alloy steel was discovered, how electric welding was born, how steel structures began to be erected industrially, how industry learned to capture dust, how steel became cheap and where the shop’s gases come from. When sources disagree, we say so. And every story ends in the same place: in what is still left of it in what we build today.