The Treatment of Steel (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from The Treatment of Steel

"Steel," as Arnold well expresses it, "is a marvelously complex material, containing always more or less of the following elements in addition to iron: carbon, silicon, manganese, sulphur and phosphorus. Besides these constituents, there may be present by design or accident the following: - tungsten, chromium, aluminium, nickel, copper, arsenic,"... and, we may add, molybdenum.

"In addition to these elements, steel contains the gaseous bodies, hydrogen and nitrogen, and sometimes oxygen."

Altogether, as Dr. Dudley points out, there are "fifteen or twenty elements occurring in and affecting the quality of iron and steel," while Carnot and Goutal call attention to the fact that through purely chemical methods four conditions of carbon have been detected: - "graphite or free crystallized carbon; graphitic carbon or temper carbon; the carbon of the carbide of iron (cement carbon) and hardening carbon."

The microscope reveals four constituents in carbon steel: - "ferrite or nearly pure malleable iron; sorbite or iron slightly carburetted; pearlite, composed of alternate plates of ferrite or sorbite and of the carbide Fe.C., and cementite or the carbide Fe.C.," while, forming the bulk of hardened steel, "are three other constituents, martensite, troostite and austensite."

"Of all the elements connected with steel," Arnold says. "carbon is by far the most important: as the blood is the life, so is the carbon the steel" - truly a wondrous metal, steel.

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com