The creation of stainless steel | Hacker News Reader

The creation of stainless steel

nautil.us

120 pointsdnetesn71 comments

"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.

Now THAT is how you incentivize workers to innovate.

This is an incentive used in Lean manufacturing. If you save the company some money, they pay it instead to you as a bonus for a while. I have heard of 6 months in full and then 6 months at 50% so it is not such a shock the lose.

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!

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.

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.

While I sympathise strongly with you on moral grounds, you might want to investigate your state or other jurisdiction's work-for-hire or equivalent statutes or case law.

An employer often can, if not legally claim fruits of your labour and/or thought, be a major (and expensive) pain in the ass to your asserting ownership of them.

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).

I've only ever heard it said that way. Used in Lancashire and Cumbria too.

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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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 [2] http://www.bssa.org.uk/about_stainless_steel.php?id=31 [3] http://www.stainlesssteelcentenary.info/stainlesshistory

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

> 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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Not for me. Iceweasel using NoScript and uBlock Origin. Text renders perfectly...

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.

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...

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

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

same! read it as in Music

LOL - likewise... I was expecting long hair and thrashing guitars... ;)

Yeah :( I was gunning for Dio.

Hoooly diiiiveeerr! \m/

I was expecting it to be a member of Judas Priest. But then again, Tipton and Downing are more than one person... hmm.

I think of 'modern' metal as extreme metal. I wonder who would qualify, then...Lemmy? Quorthon? Tom Warrior?

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

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!"

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.

Video explaining this for those who wonder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APTjx79WgcE

Nautil.us better do a follow up to this article. The Father of (Heavy) Metal.

Friedrich Stromeyer? ;-)

Lots of heavy metals to choose from, though.

Oh. They really should have appended "... (not Tony Iommi)" in the title.

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

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

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

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.

He was, but Dio without Iommi was better than Iommi without Dio. Both together were best, of course.

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.

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.

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

I know, but sometimes conversations with smart people lead to interesting places -- just doesn't seem like a bad thing. We're often reminded that the comments can be flagged or downvoted if they seem inappropriate. Why not trust the HN community to self-regulate something like this...?

Because as you saw here, everyone just went with the heavy metal comments. It's self-perpetuating because they see other comments like that and it validates that they are appropriate. Ideally there could have been one comment thread on that which people upvoted or added to, but there were multiple comments. I don't necessarily disagree with you, off-topic comments can be very fruitful at times, and the mods here often move off-topic comments to their own parent comment chain. At the end of the day though, we're here to discuss the actual content, no matter how much easier it is to criticize the title than to read the long article. (The system also has its own flaws: newer users don't have enough karma to downvote and they outnumber the more experienced portion of the community that could self-police)

Oh. I thought it was about music and ignored the article.

With the new title I immediately opened it. So thanks!

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

http://www.blabbermouth.net/news/sheffield-heavy-metal-metal...

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

Speaking solely from too much experience on HN: they're a problem when:

1. They consume a disproportionate amount of the thread. Even collapsible comments don't totally fix this problem, because relevant subthreads sometimes sneak their way into sprawling digressions.

2. They become hostile. In fact, the real issue here is subtle: digressions and the original topic compete for attention, and whichever subthread is more hostile will tend to win.

It's not a problem that "needs to be corrected"; there have been some fantastic digressions on HN threads over the years! But it's helpful for thread participants to acknowledge that they're tacking the thread away from the article, and important that digressions not become contentious.

Unpredictable tangents are often fine, but predictable ones make discussion boring.

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.

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)

> 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.

$70/6 issues is not a lot of money to pay for a good quality magazine, IMO.

I can get a whole book for $12, perhaps two on offer. The price/hour doesn't quite compute. New Scientist is £44/12 issues in the UK making it objectively about twice the value for comparison.

That's a very strange measure of value for something you've admitted you want. I get it and sympathise if you can't afford it, but just arbitrarily calculating price per hour is very strange to me.

With somewhat limited time and equivalent items to pick from to fill that time, what's wrong with discriminating on price efficiency?

But the thing is they are never equivalent.

And really at this price people spend more time thinking about how much to spend than they are making per hour in wages.

> But the thing is they are never equivalent.

You can say: it's too much hassle to refute the null hypothesis.

(Ie they are equivalent enough.)

You judge reading sources by price/hour?

I'm a slow reader, so this method would mean just about everything has massive value

Hell, you can get whole books for $0.01 on Amazon.

Books are a different equation, a different tier if you will. With a newspaper, a large part of what you are paying for is currency. Books can be timeless. Magazines are somewhere in between, immediacy of info is deprioritized somewhat in exchange for increased depth, but not as much as books... Old magazines lose relevancy, just not as quickly as newspaper.

Dollars per time spent reading is a poor metric, IMO.

The most interesting thing in old magazines and newspapers are the ads.

I thought it was going to be about Jimi Hendrix.

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

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.

Re: Electric guitar. It pretty much all starts with Les Paul.

Not only an absolute genius on the guitar, tasteful and accomplished beyond what most will ever achieve, he also had a knack for electronics. That's putting it mildly. Numerous innovations and systems he created for looping, recording, editing, and manipulating sound laid the foundation for what modern music is today. Jimi was just about to start working in his personal studio and may have been able to continue to build sonic experiments with some of the emerging tech; sad that it didn't turn out like that, but it's life.

Just figured I'd drop his name in this consideration, he certainly deserves the recognition in my opinion.

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.

Distortion-wise Hendrix was reasonably up there for the time although I wouldn't be making blanket statements like 'Everyone after Hendrix was heavily influenced by his electric guitar playing' based on that fact.

He wasn't the 'distortion pioneer' either (Jeff Beck was sorta the one who popularized it although he didn't 'invent' it per se).

As far as other no-less-influential guitarists from that era there was the aforementioned Beck, Jimmy Page, David Gilmour (speaking of distortion - check out The Nile Song off of 'More' which came out in '68), Clapton (although I'm not a fan personally), Fripp (again see '21st Century Schizoid Man' for distortion and overall truly pioneering complexity), McLaughlin, Blackmore etc.

'Being influential' is of course subjective and hard to quantify but to call any one player from that (incomplete) list 'a father of modern guitar playing' would be taking that subjectivity to a whole another level :)

I think you misread me, never said he pioneered distortion, I'm saying distortion is about what guitar playing was before him. I'm sure you can find interviews with every one of his contemporaries and they'll all say he changed the game and they were all blown away by him. Clapton was considered king of guitar at that time and even he admits he couldn't believe how he played and it destroyed his confidence for a while. You really can't listen to rock music today and not hear Hendrix influence virtually everywhere.

‘The first shockwave was Jimi Hendrix… He came along and reset all of the rules in one evening,’ – Jeff Beck

‘In rock guitar, there are but two eras — before Hendrix and after Hendrix’, – Andy Aledort, musicologist

‘He did a few of his tricks, like playing with his teeth and behind his back, but it wasn’t in an upstaging sense at all, and that was it…. He walked off, and my life was never the same again,’ – Eric Clapton

>>You really can't listen to rock music today and not hear Hendrix influence virtually everywhere.

That's where I would actually disagree the most. The Beck-Clapton-Hendrix-Page styles were basically the pinnacle of bluesy 'hard' music. It did have it's influence obviously (if I had to pick one I'd go with Page) and is still represented in 'rock music' although some of the players there are old enough to go straight to Chuck Berry for their influences :)

There were notable other players (like Fripp and Gilmour for example) at that same time kind of laying the foundation for the departure from the pentatonic based riffing and soloing which to me is a staple of what I would call a 'modern rock music' (which is also too wide of a blanket to make a concrete argument I suppose).

All good points, but I think overly focusing on things that weren't really unique to Hendrix; pentatonic based riffing and soloing is certainly a staple of rock, but it was Hendrix who popularized things like the wah and octavia pedals, heavy feedback being used as part of the overall atmosphere, theatrical stage presence, and his raw forever improvising-every recording you can find is unique-that sets him apart from the rest. And like I said, pick any of those guys you name and they'll all say the same thing about him.

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.

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

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

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