The Hatfield Memorial Lectures

244 Pages·2005·25.811 MB·English

by  P.R. Beeley (Eds.)

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The Hatfield Memorial
Lectures
Volume III
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Dr William Herbert Hatfield FRS, 1882–1943.
Courtesy of Sheffield Industrial Museums Trust
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The Hatfield Memorial
Lectures
Volume III
Edited and Foreword by
Peter Beeley
Woodhead Publishing and Maney Publishing
on behalf of
The Institute of Materials, Minerals & Mining
CRC Press
Boca Raton Boston New York Washington, DC
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Woodhead Publishing Limited and Maney Publishing Limited on behalf of
The Institute of Materials, Minerals & Mining
Published by Woodhead Publishing Limited, Abington Hall, Abington, Cambridge CB1 6AH,
England
www.woodheadpublishing.com
Published in North America by CRC Press LLC, 6000 Broken Sound Parkway, NW,
Suite 300, Boca Raton, FL 33487, USA
First published 2005, Woodhead Publishing Limited
 IoM Communications Ltd, 2005
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Woodhead Publishing ISBN-13: 978-1-84569-101-1 (book)
Woodhead Publishing ISBN-10: 1-84569-101-6 (book)
Woodhead Publishing ISBN-13: 978-1-84569-114-1 (e-book)
Woodhead Publishing ISBN-10: 1-84569-114-8 (eook)
CRC Press ISBN-10: 0-8493-9242-X
CRC Press order number: WP9242
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Foreword
This third volume of Hatfield Memorial Lectures comprises two groups. In the first of
these the central theme is process metallurgy, the lectures encompassing technical aspects
of plant design and operation, including associated research and development. Lectures in
the second group address the organization of the iron and steel industry, including its
general structure and economic circumstances. Although there is occasional overlap,
these two broad themes complement the three contained in the two earlier volumes, to
cover five fields as contemplated at the outset: Volume I is devoted to Properties and
Behaviour of Materials and to Applications, and Volume II to the single theme of
Metallography and the Structure of Iron and Steel.
A similar system to that used in the earlier volumes has been adopted in the present
case: the lectures are arranged in date sequence within each group, providing pictures of
the respective subject areas over the whole period since the outset in 1946, when the first
lecture was delivered by Dr Hatfield’s contemporary Dr George B. Waterhouse. This
dealt with Hatfield’s own work and formed the introduction to the first volume, which
also contained biographical notes on Hatfield himself; further aspects of his life and
character were portrayed in Professor A. G. Quarrell’s personal recollections, which
provided the introduction to Volume II.
William Herbert Hatfield had been born in 1883 and had died in 1943. The Memorial
Lecture series had been instituted by the University of Sheffield in 1944 as a joint project
with the Royal Society and the Iron and Steel Institute. The fiftieth lecture, the most
recent and last to be included in the present series of volumes, was delivered by Professor
C. M. Sellars of the same University in December 2002.
The annual Hatfield Lecture continues to draw large audiences from far afield and
reflects the ongoing interest in the major metallurgical advances of our time. Many of the
chosen topics have significance over the wider field of materials and across diverse
branches of engineering. It is hoped that supplementary volumes will add to the record of
these occasions at suitable intervals in future years, and will be arranged on a similar
thematic basis.
Peter Beeley
P. R. Beeley DMet is a Life Fellow and former Senior Lecturer in metallurgy in the University of Leeds
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A shot at leisure.A picture of W. H.Hatfield from the Firth Brown Photographic Collection.Courtesy of Sheffield
Industrial Museums Trust (copyright)
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Printed Sources
Listed below are the lecture numbers, titles and authors of each of the papers appearing in
this volume. The original place and date of publication are also given.
Seventh Lecture: Development in the Iron and Steel Industry in Great Britain during the
last Twenty-Five years, by T. P. Colclough J. Iron Steel Inst., July 1954, 297
Sixteenth Lecture: Basic Knowledge, Discovery, and Invention in the Birth of New
metallurgical Processes, by F. D. Richardson J. Iron Steel Inst., March 1965, 217
Nineteenth Lecture: Twenty-Five Years On, by H. M. Finniston
J. Iron Steel Inst., February 1969, 145
Twenty-second Lecture: The Place of Mini-Steelworks in the World,
by W. F. Cartwright J. Iron Steel Inst., April 1972, 221
Twenty-third lecture: Electroslag Remelting a Modern Tool in Metallurgy,
by E. Plo¨ckinger J. Iron Steel Inst., August 1973, 533
Twenty-fourth Lecture: Eurosteelresearch, by R. S. Barnes
Ironmaking Steelmaking, 1974, 1 (2), 61
Twenty-fifth Lecture: Materials and Malthus, by Sir Alan Cottrell
Met. Mater., March 1975, 32
Twenty-eighth Lecture: From Invention to Industrial Development, by L. Coche
Met. Mater., February 1979, 25
Thirty-fifth Lecture: European steel: what future? By Sir Robert Scholey
Ironmaking Steelmaking 1987, 14, 267
Thirty-seventh Lecture: Net Shape Solidification Processing of Steel, 1945–1995,
by M. C. Flemings Report from Cast Metals, 1990, 2 (4), 231
Forty-third Lecture: The New World of Steel, by J. Edington
Ironmaking Steelmaking, 1997, 24 (1), 19
Forty-seventh Lecture: Iron, the hidden element: the role of iron and steel in the
twentieth century, by R. Boom Steel World, 2000, 5, 1, 88
Forty-ninth Lecture: Technology: driving steel forward, by M. J. Pettifor
Steel World, 2002, 7, 11
Fiftieth Lecture: Metallurgical Modelling of Thermomechanical Processing, by C. M.
Sellars Previously unpublished
ix
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THE SIXTEENTH HATFIELD MEMORIAL LECTURE
Basic Knowledge, Discovery, and
Invention in the Birth of New
Metallurgical Processes
F. D. Richardson
At the time the lecture was given, Professor Richardson was Professor of Extraction Metallurgy at the Imperial
College of Science and Technology. The lecture was presented at Church House, Great Smith Street, London, in
the evening of Wednesday 25 November 1964.
I am greatly honoured that you should have invited me to give this 16th Hatfield
Memorial Lecture. Honoured because of the importance and standing throughout the
metallurgical world of our Iron and Steel Institute, and honoured because of the
distinction of the man to whom these lectures are a memorial. I was not privileged to
know Dr Hatfield, but from all I have read and heard of his life, I realise that I missed
knowing a truly remarkable man. Many remember him for his obvious achievements
– his work on stainless and heat resisting steels, his post as Director of Firth Brown, his
Chairmanship of three very important ISI Committees, his Fellowship of the Royal
Society and his Bessemer Medal. But to those who worked personally with him there
remains a lasting impression of enterprise, energy and openmindedness: an awareness
of scientific ability in others, great intuition, and style in all things.
When I came to consider a subject for this lecture I looked at Dr Hatfield’s Campbell
Memorial Lecture1 given in the USA in 1928, and I was struck by his sharp interest in new
ideas and new developments: by his recognition of the importance in this connexion of the
growth of purely scientific knowledge and of the need for industrial enterprise and the state
to ‘cast its bread upon the waters’ and help those who work, particularly in the universities,
to develop the fundamental aspects of their subjects. I therefore came to thinking of the
way new processes come about. I suppose that today people are searching as never before
for new ideas which show promise of becoming new processes. At the same time most of us
are unaware of how the new processes which surround us came to be developed. Although
full details of existing processes are often available, the exact ways in which they have come
about are rarely disclosed. I have always found the histories of new developments extraor-
dinarily interesting and I think we can learn from them.
I know that Halevy wrote ‘We learn from history that we do not learn from history’,
and this pessimistic view may be true as regards politics and international affairs. But
3
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4 Hatfield Memorial Lectures Vol. III
when it comes to scientific development I believe some greater optimism is justified. I
have therefore decided to look at a number of new processes and to examine how they
came about, and at what points basic knowledge, discovery, and invention had their own
particular impacts. I have chosen extractive processes because they are my special interest.
I shall include both ferrous and non-ferrous topics, because much of interest has been
happening in the non-ferrous world, and because I consider we lose a great deal if we
restrict our thoughts, or our reading, to one field or the other.
It is difficult to acquire the detailed historic knowledge with which I am here con-
cerned for it is not to be found in books. I am therefore personally indebted to those who
have so kindly given me the information I have sought. But before I come to discuss
those modern processes I wish to dwell shortly on the character of the men who bring
about new processes – or what may be called the ‘flesh and blood’ aspect of development.
THE INVENTIVE SPIRIT
For a few minutes therefore let us go back to 1870 and to a young man of twenty, who
was the first to look seriously at the chemistry of slags, and what more entrancing subject
could you have than that! I refer to Sidney Gilchrist Thomas who in 1878 brought forth
the basic steelmaking process. A lively, unfinished sketch of him is shown in Fig. 1.
despite his frail physique, Thomas possessed exceptional enterprise, energy and intuition,
and he coupled these with that singleness of purpose, which is usually needed for a great
invention. At the age of twenty he had a mind uncluttered with irrelevant experience and
he was able to think along lines which were closed to experienced metallurgists such as
Percy and Lothian Bell. Thomas epitomises the human aspect of creating a new process.
He had the character of an inventor; and was always looking for unsolved problems. We
see him for example insisting, thirty five years before Haber’s synthesis, that ammonia
should be produced from air and water because the elements hydrogen, nitrogen and
oxygen were to be had for nothing from these sources.
In 1870 Thomas was the clerk in the Thames police court, working to support his
widowed mother and family. Chemistry was his hobby and he attended a course of
lectures at the Birkbeck Institution, delivered by George Challenor. At this juncture
Challenor justified all the lectures he ever gave, for, with Thomas in his class, he had
occasion to say that the man who eliminated phosphorus from iron by means of the
Bessemer converter would make his fortune. This challenge sank deeply into Thomas’s
mind and inspired him to wrestle with the idea for eight years, excited as much by the
commercial prospect as by the scientific challenge.
One cannot but be reminded of the young Hall who was similarly inspired by Pro-
fessor Jewetts when studying chemistry at Oberlin, Michigan. From then on Hall’s
ambition was to find a way of producing aluminium cheaply and he invented the
electrolytic process in 1886, simultaneously with He´roult in France but quite indepen-
dently. I hope we university professors are as inspiring today as we were at the end of the
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Basic Knowledge, Discovery, and Invention 5
Fig. 1 Portrait of Sydney Gilchrist Thomas.
last century! Sometimes I think that in teaching our students we lay too much stress on
the unsolved theoretical problems and too little on the unsolved practical ones. We have
a great opportunity to invent by proxy and we ought not to miss it!
The problem of phosphorus elimination existed because there were great quantities of
phosphoric ores; the orebody was providing the impulse for development as is so often
the case in extractive metallurgy. The problem was solved in principle in the space of five
years; during this time Thomas pieced together in an original way the available chemistry
of phosphoric acid and silica, and of the slag–metal reactions which occur in the acid
Bessemer and the old puddling processes. The problem was solved in practice after a
further two or three years of dedicated work, during which Thomas obtained the help of
his cousin Percy Gilchrist at Blaenavon steelworks in Wales.
In this period Thomas ran, at first secretly, his tests with hot metal and developed the
basic linings and the method of making lime additions. Most of the work was done at
weekends, which started with a night’s journey from London to Blaenavon, and finished
with a dash from the train home so Thomas could be in court on Monday morning. As
Thomas wrote laconically in a letter to his cousin2
‘I have not time enough to do. I only go home to sleep and eat. Most unsatisfactory’.