[Sheffield, England - 9:01 AM 29/05/1920]
What exactly were the Americans thinking, banning alcohol when the majority of their population is ethnically Angle, Irish, and German? Three people that are notoriously known for their ability to obviously refuse alcohol when it is given to them.
I chuckled to myself at the thought as I read a newspaper that had an article about a group of masked men raiding a government whisky store in New York, while in the back of a car driving me to the steel mill I had recently bought alongside the fabrication and tooling plants down the road from it.
Money is a fickle thing; once you have a certain amount, you really don't need much more.
The licensing agreements for the two dozen patents I had filed over the parts of the rubber process that would have been impossible without my knowledge from the future had been very profitable, and there was exceptionally more coming with the royalties that were in store as production ramped up; after all, the global demand for rubber was voracious, especially considering that America and continental Europe were going through the roaring twenties and Japan, along with several secondary powers, were rapidly industrialising.
I had taken about 5% worth, or about £10,000, and put it in an even split of the US and UK stock markets, and in all honesty, with an average 6.5% return, that would be more than enough for me and my family to live off comfortably for the rest of our lives as well as the generations that followed, even if you include things like the 1929 crash and having to grow the portfolio faster than inflation.
Everything else was just greed, to be honest with myself, and remembering how billionaires had acted in the future made me uncomfortable with how I would act. After all, dozens of studies from the modern day indicated that the way people thought changed when they became rich.
I didn't quite like the thought of that.
So I might as well spend as much of it as possible to avoid becoming a billionaire, because at the rate I was going, things were heading that way, at least in nominal terms if you included all the patents I planned on making and licensing.
A vague goal I had was to help Britain survive the Great Depression a bit better, and I had eight years or so to at least lessen it. I mean, to be fair, Britain was fully prepared for the crash, and by that I mean they were already around rock bottom in 1929, so there wasn't much further down to crash, which, in truth, is a strategy…not a good one, but still…a strategy.
A combination of war debt taken on by Britain who had funded most of the war effort for the whole continent; a loss of trade dominance due to a combination of nations like Japan and the US gaining market share; the demand for traditional British goods like textiles, coal, and steel declining; hyperinflation; a coming forced return to the gold standard in 1925; high employment; and the loss of Russian markets, who used to be our biggest market, meant that Britain would be in a tough spot and only get back to pre-war levels in the mid-thirties…right before the Second World War.
British industry had gotten fat as the first country to industrialise and had not pursued modernisation, unlike its counterparts in other nations.
Britain still remained on top when it came to quality of things like weapons and ships, even outproducing Germany, which had access to the resources of most of europe in sectors like aircraft during the war and that was before we start using said aircraft advantage to start bombing them, but we made things more bespoke, which gave us a disadvantage against mass production, which, thanks to Ford, now made america's industry so large…
…it simply made one feel inferior in every possible way.
And I wasn't delusional; I alone couldn't drag Britain, kicking and screaming, into the 20th century, but I could set up individual mills to allow my access to high-quality raw materials to experiment with and then use the resulting patents on all the innovations we come up with as we experiment based on my admittedly prudent yet vague instructions when it came to anything outside of chemistry and then license them for an appropriate fee.
To start off, I mainly need a mill that produces high-quality tool steel. Now early tool steels were invented just before the Great War, but they're not quite adequate enough for my insane, by 1920s standards, tolerances. Hence, I bought controlling stakes in these factories that were in a spot of financial bother.
Over the last few weeks I had spent my time hopping between Manchester and Sheffield. The first step was to source better-quality coke and pig iron as well as high-quality tungsten, chromium, molybdenum, vanadium, and cobalt.
All this is so expensive that I'm contemplating going into mining as well because I can always use more cash to burn, fuck. I don't want to form monopolies, but at a certain point reality starts making it damn difficult for a time traveller not to.
Next was to improve the actual steelmaking process. I watched the stream of molten metal flow from the latest batch.
The Bessemer process, while revolutionary for its time, has limitations in its control over steel quality and alloying precision due to phosphorus and sulphur not always oxidising. properly, as well as nitrogen in the air also reacting, meaning even the highest-quality steel made this way had microscopic brittle points, which was fine for most uses in things like ships, tanks and guns, but for high-stress things like machine tooling, it was inadequate.
I was confident I could drastically improve quality.
The first step was to introduce pre-treatment of the pig iron by adding manganese to molten pig iron in a pre-treatment ladle to reduce the sulphur content; we then add fluorite as an additional flux to bind with and remove phosphorus, but those were both things the Americans and Germans were already doing, and it just hadn't been picked up by the innovatively stagnant British industry.
The two principles that eventually replaced the Bessemer process are that, first, varying the air blast duration and creating longer exposure reduces carbon further, but it also risks overheating the steel and introducing oxides that weaken it; and second, preheating pig iron ends with a slight improvement in flow and oxidation, but it's inconsistent.
I really wished to jump straight to electric arc furnaces while using pure oxygen made from electrolysis, but since both required bonkers amounts of electricity, both would have to wait until after the second war when I could start spamming nuclear reactors across the Cotswolds.
I chuckled to myself about ruining those posh twat's views with large concrete monoliths to the holy atom.
After getting everyone at the plant to tear down the furnaces and build them back up from scratch, we now had our first open-hearth furnaces.
They were admittedly a lot slower, requiring 8–12 hours per batch compared to the 20 minutes the Bessemer process could do, but it allowed for careful regulation of temperature. The addition of scrap iron seems to help control carbon content even more.
It took some time, but with the use of preheated air to maintain consistent temperatures and optimising the positioning of the tuyeres, it helped ensure even oxygen distribution throughout the molten iron. After much experimentation, we developed a dual-slag process to remove an initial slag layer midway through the blow to extract early impurities, then allow secondary slag to refine the steel further.
We then began introducing alloying elements at the end of the blow to prevent oxidation losses, and we also started experimenting with different specialised ladles to mix the alloying elements homogeneously before casting. This process still needs work, though.
We improved ladle design first by switching over to dolomite to survive the heat, applying a layer of alumina to reduce wear and tear, and incorporating a chute into the ladle to allow for the gradual introduction of alloying elements, which took ages to come up with a design that didn't end with it all clumping inside the chute.
We also introduce strict maintenance on all parts and machines, as well as retrained workers. We introduced a wet chemical analysis that is done every 5-10 mins during a batch where a tiny portion of the steel is taken off, cooled quickly, and dissolved in hydrochloric and nitric acid, which converts the metals into ions.
It is then split into several samples to react with chemicals that are compared on a colourimeter to what they should look like. It is allowed to oxidise normally to measure carbon content, mixed with potassium periodate to measure manganese levels, which turns the liquid purple; mixed with ammonium molybdate to check for phosphorus, turning yellow; and used to test sulphur levels. We precipitate sulphur as barium sulphate using barium chloride, then weigh the precipitate to determine sulphur content.
We also began work on larger converter vessels powered by steam-based motors to allow for larger batches as well as incorporating dolomite into the metal used for them.
We began training workers to be able to make decisions on the fly, which required giving most of them secondary-level maths and English lessons as well as documenting each batch, including raw material composition, air pressure settings, and final steel properties.
We also changed around alloy percentages to find better mixes. More tungsten meant more durability, while more chromium meant more shock resistance.
It was going to take years to improve it fully, but we were slowly making progress, and I was confident that they would now be able to continue on their own, which is good because after six months, I think I now smell of steel.
I thought the urge to make a man of steel joke… no one would get it for the next 17 and a bit years…
At the tooling company they also began developing lathes, milling machines, spindle moulders, routers, and grinders equipped with the new tool steel as well as ball bearings for smoother and faster operation. I gave some vague suggestions about experimenting with early hydraulics but didn't expect much from it.
We then equipped the factory with micrometres, callipers, and dial indicators for precise measurements. Developed a standard operating procedure for regular calibration of these instruments, Designed and implemented assembly-line techniques for higher efficiency in repetitive tasks; began training workers in batch manufacturing to minimise waste and maximise output. Developed a rigorous training programme covering metallurgy, machining techniques, and quality control. And finally instituted workplace safety standards, including protective equipment and machine guarding.
[Author's Note]
'Tuyeres' is the word used for air nozzles.