The Cementation of Iron and Steel (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from The Cementation of Iron and Steel

The cementation of iron or steel is perhaps, of all metallurgical processes that which to-day is still applied industrially with the greatest empiricism and it may be asserted that what the English so effectively denote by the expression "rule of thumb" is the only rule followed in the greater part of cementation establishments.

Now, while this might have been justified, a few years back, by the lack of precise scientific data on the process of the carburization of iron or steel, this is no longer so, since numerous investigations which have been carried out have furnished abundantly the information necessary to carry out any cementation under the simplest and most easily controlled conditions, with less expensive materials, and in such a way as to obtain, certainly and logically, exactly predetermined results. It would therefore be desirable, since it is now possible and even easy, that cementation establishments should begin to use only cements whose composition and manner of acting are known exactly, and that the persons who direct them should realize that it is very easy to prepare for themselves cements which are much more simple, efficacious and certain and, above all, by far much less expensive than those which they now buy at very high prices without knowing even approximately what is concealed under the mysterious names which dealers in cement powders usually give to their humble products.

I believe that such an evolution can and must soon come to pass as, for example, that which has almost completely stopped the very lucrative trade in those mysterious powders which, thrown in small quantities into the molten steel, before casting, were supposed to relieve the steel founder of all his ills.

It has seemed to me that, to facilitate such an evolution (at least in small part) I could usefully contribute a resume of the results to which the scientific investigations carried out on the p…