From Puddlers to Minimills
The business of steelmaking is a recurring story of entrenched interests resisting change, only to see the industry pass
them by. To be fair, it is the heaviest
of heavy industries, with huge facilities
tying down vast amounts of capital. It
was not simply JP Morgan’s largesse
that made US Steel the first billion-dollar
company; it was sheer necessity.
From ancient times through the
middle 1800s, steel was made through
time- and labor-intensive processes that
consumed great amounts of energy and
resources for a very limited volume of
finished material. That is why steel was
reserved for essential tools, including
weapons. Industrialized war brought the
need for more steel of higher quality
than could be made by “puddling,” an
early industrialized process that was better than its cottage predecessors.
Sir Henry Bessemer is credited with
inventing a quantum improvement in
steelmaking, a process that still bears
his name. Iron, coke (roasted coal) and
limestone are melted together in a blast
furnace. Then hot air is blasted through
the melt. Impurities form a slag on the
top of the melt, and steel is tapped fro B