
The creation of stainless steel - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/36/aging/the-father-of-modern-metal
======
kevhito
"Lab protocol stipulated that anyone who figured out how to save time could
enjoy his savings as he wanted. Brearley got his day’s work done in a couple
of hours, and spent the rest of the day reading and experimenting."

This seems relevant to our increasingly automated/automatable jobs.

~~~
fallingfrog
Funny how many of the big innovators, especially of that era had some kind of
similar situation. They were all either independently wealthy landed gentry,
or were basically stealing time from their employers. Einstein used to do
something similar - he got all his patent office work done in the first couple
hours and spent the rest of his time working on his pet project, relativity. I
can only hope that someday I find myself in a situation where I can do
something like that!

~~~
naveen99
That's not stealing time from the employer. You have been brain washed into
slave mentality. No one owns your time other than yourself. Employer pays for
your help to do a task.

There are lots of jobs with lots of down time.

~~~
fallingfrog
Well, I'm not a slave - I am not owned, but only rented. Every person is born
not owning the place where they live, or the air they breathe - you have to
pay rent on that stuff, and so you have to sell pieces of your life (the
majority of your waking hours, in fact) to pay that rent. I'm glad I'm not a
slave- the difference is that I can switch to another employer. I can't escape
the system as a whole though, although I am trying. The favorite job I think
I've ever had was working stacking lumber, because it didn't really require my
attention, which meant that I could let my brain spin, I would write computer
programs for typing up later, I would try to come up with music, and so forth.
Does anyone else feel this way, or is it just me? If I express these thoughts
people tend to tell me I'm whiny and entitled. I don't want for anything
materially. I'm well fed. But I really feel deep down that I'm not free and I
hate it and it just kills me every day.

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Lio
Just an aside for anyone interested in language but the phrase listed as
“where there’s muck there’s money” should probably be more colloquially
written as “where there’s muck there’s brass”.

(At least in my experience I've only ever heard Yorkshiremen say it that way).

~~~
thaumasiotes
Living in the US, I've never heard the phrase at all as far as I can remember,
but have been exposed to it in writing in the form you mention. "Where there's
muck there's money" is probably an attempt at letting people who don't know
the phrase understand what it means.

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Animats
Requires cookies to read.

Also, it's disputed whether Brearly invented stainless steel. At least four
others did it earlier.[1][2] Brearly came out with stainless steel cutlery,
but the alloy was not suitable for a knife, leading to the comment "the knife
that would not cut". It was Elwood Haynes, in 1919, who finally came up with a
martensitic stainless steel alloy, the very hard form used for cutting tools.

[1]
[http://www.estainlesssteel.com/historyofstainlesssteel.shtml](http://www.estainlesssteel.com/historyofstainlesssteel.shtml)
[2]
[http://www.bssa.org.uk/about_stainless_steel.php?id=31](http://www.bssa.org.uk/about_stainless_steel.php?id=31)
[3]
[http://www.stainlesssteelcentenary.info/stainlesshistory](http://www.stainlesssteelcentenary.info/stainlesshistory)

~~~
kedean
They cover that pretty well in the article, closer to the end.

~~~
olejorgenb
> What’s more, Harry Brearley didn’t know it then, but the stuff he cast from
> the electric furnace at Firth’s on Aug. 20, 1913, was nothing new. At least
> 10 others had created it, or something like it, before; at least half a
> dozen had described it; and one guy even explained it, and explained it
> well. Others had patented it, and commercialized it. Before Brearley got
> around to it, at least two dozen scientists in England, France, Germany,
> Poland, Sweden, and the United States were studying alloys of steel by
> varying the amounts of chromium, nickel, and carbon in it. Faraday had tried
> as much nearly a century earlier. It’s not like Brearley was exploring
> unknown territory. That he is credited with discovering stainless steel is
> due mostly to luck; that he is credited with fathering it is due mostly to
> his resolve.

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jpt4
Left school at 11; personally apprenticed to a metallurgical chemist; a
voracious autodidact; quantitative in a qualitative field, who kept one foot
in the trenches, eschewing the managerial mindset - all told, a veritable
steampunk hardware hacker.

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Dowwie
Bad title, yet an interesting story. This article is an excerpt from the book,
"Rust -- the longest war"

[http://www.amazon.com/Rust-Longest-War-Jonathan-
Waldman/dp/1...](http://www.amazon.com/Rust-Longest-War-Jonathan-
Waldman/dp/1451691602/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1463664365&sr=8-1&keywords=rust)

~~~
dajohnson89
Great title! That's how you get clicks :-)

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tmikaeld
Not the metal i expected \m/ (>.<) \m/

~~~
autoreleasepool
Everything changed when Tony Iommi cut the tips of his fingers in a factory
accident and had tune his guitar lower resulting in the signature Black
Sabbath sound

~~~
6stringmerc
Paraphrased from an interview I read in a guitar magazine years ago with Tommy
Iommi:

"It was the strangest thing, I would lower the tuning and get a deeper sound,
and then Ozzy would sing higher than he did before!"

~~~
malkia
I didn't know that. Went this year to see Ozzy + Black Sabbath in Los Angeles,
then Iron Maiden later, but the biggest event I was was David Gilmore (from
Pink Floyd) - the sound (at the Hollywood Bowl) was so amazing, that when I
recorded it, and sent it to my father, he couldn't believe it was live. And my
father, since he bought me Heaven & Hell when I was teenager, and had lots of
time listening to Wish you were here, Welcome to the machine and many other
crazy songs in the car.

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StevePerkins
Oh. They really should have appended "... ( _not_ Tony Iommi)" in the title.

~~~
StavrosK
Iommi?! I mean, Iommi was good, but Dio is where it's at. The Ozzy stuff
wasn't as good, in my opinion.

~~~
cholantesh
Iommi was present in both those lineups. He's the only constant member of
Black Sabbath.

~~~
vibrato
uh, Geezer Butler? come on! Bill Ward was there for nearly everything as well.

~~~
cholantesh
Butler left the band thrice. Ward hasn't been in the band since Born Again
dropped. That doesn't satisfy any definition of 'constant'. And 9/19 is not
nearly everything.

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dang
OK, we changed the title from "The Father of Modern Metal", which threw the
thread out of whack. (It's amazing how sensitive these things are.) Let's
discuss the article now.

~~~
bostonpete
Are comments which diverge from the linked article somehow discouraged? I've
surprised that this was treated as a problem that had to be corrected.

~~~
cooper12
Well if you look at the actual comments they're completely off-topic and
talking about heavy metal music, nothing to do with steel.

~~~
twic
Although funnily enough, Sheffield has also been something of a crucible for
musical heavy metal:

[http://www.blabbermouth.net/news/sheffield-heavy-metal-
metal...](http://www.blabbermouth.net/news/sheffield-heavy-metal-metal-scene-
profiled-in-new-book/)

~~~
dang
Now this is the sort of whimsical tangent that makes a thread interesting
again.

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Olap84
It's a shame they want $30 for shipping to Europe, I've seen a few articles
from these guys and would pay for a physical copy, but not $70/6 issues.

~~~
RBerenguel
I got the online subscription a year ago, and even though I forget to download
the issues from time to time, I love it. Great writing, interesting topics,
great design. I'd love to have the print editions at a decent price, too,
though. But digital is good enough (and is stupidly cheap I think, for the
quality)

~~~
KhalilK
> I forget to download the issues from time to time

Same here, so I wrote a Python script (Selenium) that downloads the new issue
and emails it to me. The quality to price ratio is amazing, I love Nautilus.

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bitwize
I thought it was going to be about Jimi Hendrix.

~~~
gnaritas
Why? Hendrix wasn't metal; he's more the father of modern electric guitar
playing.

~~~
ChemicalWarfare
I wouldn't go that far even. Sure, influential player but there are many more
who are at least at the same level influence-wise or higher.

~~~
gnaritas
Who? Everyone after Hendrix was heavily influenced by his electric guitar
playing, before Hendrix, Cream was what electric guitar rock style sounded
like. Hendrix was more than just influential, he changed how the instrument
was played.

Go listen to "Machine Gun" and then find anything in all of rock music before
Hendrix that sounds remotely like anything more than an amplified acoustic
with maybe a little distortion in comparison.

~~~
soundwave106
Jimi Hendrix had a _lot_ of influences and that's part of why he sounds so
unique, and ended up being so influential.

However, he wasn't formed out of a vacuum. :) If I had to pick "most
influential style", I'd pick the blues, not rock. In particular, to my ears,
there's a lot of Muddy Waters and especially Buddy Guy in Jimi's style.

~~~
gnaritas
Of course, but those things are only a part of Hendrix's style. No one is
formed in a vacuum.

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swatthatfly
The title is misleading. This is an article about steel, not heavy metal as
most people here expect. The subtitle is more informative: "The creation of
stainless steel took equal parts metallurgy and perseverance". The father of
modern metal is Iommi U+1F918

