Tungsten in Peace and War, 1918–1946

Ronald H. Limbaugh

• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780874178210
• Topic: Technik & Maschinenbau
• Subtopic: Maschinenbau Allgemein

Tungsten is a rare ferrous metal whose ability to form molecular compounds with other elements has made it one of the essential elements in steelmaking, electronics, and various military technologies. This is the first comprehensive study of the use of tungsten and its role in modern technology, politics, and international trade. The book combines a detailed general overview of tungsten's uses in science and technology with a history of tungsten mining in the U.S. and elsewhere; international competition for tungsten supplies, especially between the two world wars of the twentieth century; and the complex national and international politics involved in supporting and protecting the U.S. tungsten supply and tungsten-mining industry. Tungsten in Peace and War, 1918–1946 is a significant addition to the history of technology and a revelation of the complex role that tungsten and other critical metals play in national and international politics and in the world economy.

1

STEEL ALLOYS AND THE RISE OF MODERN INDUSTRY

If steel is a critical building block of modern industry, tungsten is an essential component of modern steel alloys. Steelmaking has an ancient history, but making steel harder by adding tungsten is a commercial process barely a century old. Introducing the evolving technologies and industries that led to tungsten’s economic development provides historical context, and helps explain how and why one modest Nevada mining company rose to national prominence in the years between two world wars.

EARLY DISCOVERIES AND EXPERIMENTS

Tungsten was discovered late in the history of civilization, and even then it took another 150 years before it became commercially valuable. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Jared Diamond wisely cautions us to beware of simplistic explanations for inventions that ultimately change the world. Necessity may or may not be the mother of invention, but clearly tungsten required both an advanced technology and an industrial necessity before its properties could be understood and utilized. Long before primates evolved and began using tools, tectonic movements in the earth’s crust folded, fractured, and sometimes exposed on the surface hydrothermal veins of wolframite, the “black ore” of tungsten, along with minerals containing silica, gold, silver, tin, copper, molybdenum, and iron with which tungsten is often associated. Other deposits of wolframite and its “white ore” cousin, scheelite, could be found in the metamorphic contact zones in and around granitic intrusions (the so-called skarn ores), in low-grade “stockworks” containing thousands of tiny veins and veinlets, in sedimentary formations, and even in the solutions of brine lakes and hot springs. Where deposits cropped out on the surface, the corrosive effects of oxygen, the weathering effects of wind, water, and ice, and the pulling effects of gravity altered, eroded, fractured, washed, and carried minerals, along with gravel, sand, clay, and silt, far from their sources. Unlike other less widely diffused elements that went into ferrous alloys such as molybdenum, manganese, and vanadium, tungsten can be found in some thirty-seven countries around the globe, mostly in shallow, low-grade deposits.¹

Probably the first humans to encounter tungsten were Neolithic placer miners and metalworkers looking for pliable pieces of native copper or gold. From streambeds or dry washes they may have picked up rounded “nuggets” of wolframite or scheelite, but tossed them back when heating or hammering failed to yield their secrets. There they lay for the next ten thousand years or so, unusable and therefore uninteresting until civilization crossed the intellectual threshold that separated the medieval and modern worlds.

Isolating and identifying the heavy gray metal were tributes to empirical observation and experiment, a crescendo in the symphony of science and reason we call the Enlightenment. A century after Newton and Galileo, natural philosophy—a premodern term for the physical sciences—was a popular and influential intellectual endeavor in Europe among the educated elite, rich or poor, amateur or professional. Academic institutions across the continent expanded their curricular offerings in chemistry, astronomy, physics, and other disciplines.

By the mid-eighteenth century Sweden had a thriving scientific community. In 1747 Johan Gottschalk Wallerius, a professor of mineralogy at the University of Uppsala, studied the properties of a black mineral that generated a muddy froth in the process of smelting tin ore. Two hundred years earlier the German physician and scientist Georg Bauer, better known as Agricola, in a technical paper published prior to his famous treatise on metals, De Re Metallica, had termed it spuma lupi, perhaps because of its tendency to hide or “eat up” cassiterite to the consternation of smelter workers. Wallerius translated Bauer’s term into German. He thought volf rahm was an ore of tin, but was unable to reduce it.²

In the 1770s and ’80s at the same school, Professor Torbern Olof Bergman experimented, lectured, and wrote on the properties of metallic compounds, influencing generations of scholars and students. His chemical analysis of iron provided the first scientific distinction between iron and steel. One of his students, Karl Wilhelm Scheele, an impoverished pharmacist with a modest pension from the Stockholm Academy of Science, studied the reduction of metals and other substances, working after hours with a few simple laboratory instruments. Over a lifetime of experimentation Scheele discovered more new chemical compounds than perhaps any other scientist before or since. In 1781, building upon the work of Wallerius and Bergman, he boiled in nitric acid a light-colored mineral that was thought to be an ore of tin or iron, and precipitated a spongy substance that dried to a yellow powder. His experiment proved that the mineral was calcium combined with a “peculiar” acid. His mentor Bergman suspected that further reduction of the insoluble acid would reveal a metallic element, but neither he nor Scheele was able to break it down. Scheele labeled the suspect metal tungsten, combining the Swedish words tung (heavy) and sten (stone). Forty years later a British mineralogist, C. C. Leonard, honored Scheele by applying his name to calcium tungstate (CaWO₄), thereafter known as scheelite. The term tungsten was then given to the metallic element.³

Unknown to the Swedish scientists, the work they had done had been carefully noted in the spring of 1782 by one of Bergman’s students, who was in reality a chemist employed by the Spanish government to engage in industrial espionage for the benefit of homeland defense. Returning to the Seminario Patriótico in the Basque province of Vergara, Juan José de Elhuyar worked with his brother Fausto, a professor of mineralogy, to successfully reduce tungstic acid and isolate the powdery steel-white metal for the first time.⁴

THE IRON AND STEEL AGE BEFORE TUNGSTEN

As a technological by-product of the modern steel industry, tungsten became useful only after advancing science and technology in both Europe and America made mass production of steel compounds and alloys possible. The wars and imperial rivalries of the late nineteenth century spurred expanded steel use in both hemispheres. In Europe, steel became big business during the two decades between the Crimean War and the Franco-German war, a period marked by accelerating industrialization, nationalist uprisings and unification movements, and expansionist drives and colonial rivalries in Asia, Africa, and South America. In the United States, the end of the Civil War marked a watershed in the industrial growth of a nation that was resource rich, economically integrated, and culturally eager to exploit whatever raw materials lay in its path. On both sides of the Atlantic, with capitalism the primary engine of economic growth, steel was the industrial icon of the age.

Strengthening iron by adding carbon and removing impurities through heating, quenching, beating, and blowing were techniques nearly as old as the Iron Age itself. Before the first mass-production process was developed in the 1850s and 1860s, however, steelmaking was laboriously slow and inefficient. For three thousand years practical ironworkers made steel without understanding the chemistry behind it. The charcoal they used to heat iron ore also oxidized, reduced, and fused the molten metal with very small amounts of carbon. Depending on the amount and quality of charcoal used as well as the heating time and temperature, the carbon content in early steels varied from under 0.02 percent to 3 percent and above. Oxidation and reduction removed impurities that floated to the top of the molten metal as slag. Carbonation through fusion created a molecular structure with a crystal lattice that could be altered by heating, hammering, and cooling. This added tensile strength and hardness to iron but also made it brittle. The properties of steel could also be changed by eliminating almost all carbon and adding other metals and chemical compounds to the molten mass. Yet not until the late nineteenth century did metallurgical science and technology advance far enough for those possibilities to be tested empirically and marketed as new products.⁵

By trial and error, early metalworkers learned to make malleable wrought iron by repeatedly heating, stirring, and hammering brittle cast-iron “pigs” in a refining forge with a strong air blast, thereby oxidizing some of the carbon and other impurities. They learned to homogenize and shape wrought iron into blooms or billets by hammering or rolling out slag and diffusing the carbon. They learned to make blister steel in a carburizing process called cementation, whereby wrought iron is slowly baked in a bath of carbon powder, creating blisters where the carbon was absorbed. They learned to improve blister steel by hammering, to soften and toughen it by annealing, and to balance hardness, toughness, and ductility by tempering.⁶

By the eighteenth century steelmaking was a venerable craft in its third millennium, yet still limited by small batch size and lack of quality control. Those limitations became increasingly apparent under the modernizing pressures of empirical science and emerging industrialization. The chemistry and metallurgy of iron and its alloys were just beginning to be understood in 1742 when Benjamin Huntsman, a “Quaker clockmaker” in Sheffield, England, took a stride toward improved quality by melting blister steel and wrought iron in a crucible and casting an ingot. By improving carbon diffusion and slag removal, crucible steel set a new standard of quality. It increased steel demand and established Sheffield as the center of crucible steel production. For 150 years Sheffield steel remained the favorite for makers of fine cutlery, precision tools, gun barrels, saws, axes, and other high-quality cast-metal products. But making crucible steel was time consuming and labor intensive, hard on both men and equipment. Cast steel was hard but also brittle. It tended to fracture under pressure and heavy use, and was thus unsuited for many industrial applications. By the mid-nineteenth century, with the pace of industrial growth accelerating and global demand rising for railroads, plows, pumps, mills, machine tools, and heavy equipment, the need was clearly apparent for a cheaper, faster, and more durable mass-produced iron alloy.⁷

As a world-renowned steelmaking center for more than a century, Sheffield brought the best minds and materials in the business together with the most advanced techniques. Out of this critical mass came the “puddling” process for producing cheaper and more ductile steel than the crucible method. Puddlers made essentially a “high-carbon wrought iron” by reducing pig iron in a reverbatory furnace, oxidizing impurities with lime and other fluxes, removing slag, and homogenizing the product by repeated hammering, rolling, and reheating. Though puddling may have earlier origins, Joseph Bennett Howell, a Sheffield metalworker, is given the principal credit for developing the process, largely based on patents he registered in the late 1850s. Before the advent of bulk steel production, puddling was the only way to make large quantities of high-quality carbon steel.⁸

IRON AND STEEL IN AMERICA

Steelmaking know-how crossed the Atlantic before the American Revolution, but iron was the only real choice for most industrial and commercial applications prior to the Civil War. A desultory colonial iron industry developed first near coastal settlements where bog ore was available, then inland as ironmasters tapped into shallow hematite and magnetite deposits in the carbonate terrain of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and other regions. Some antebellum iron makers also made small batches of blister steel and experimented with the crucible process for making iron alloys, but high cost, poor transportation, and limited markets hindered development. Even after domestic bulk steels became available, they were hard to sell.⁹

Throughout most of the nineteenth century, American craftsmen preferred Sheffield steel for making cutlery, saw blades, and other high-quality metal products. They resisted the efforts of steel industry protectionists to thwart foreign competition with tariff barriers, primarily for economic reasons but partly for the sake of tradition. In steelmaking as in mining, Americans improved on older inventions and methods rather than creating something entirely new. Innovation, rather than inventiveness, characterized America’s contribution to the advance of industrial technology.¹⁰

Iron making grew rapidly after 1800, spurred by the proximity of urban markets in the Northeast and rising domestic industrial demand. Along the Susquehanna and its tributaries, in the Juniata region of central Pennsylvania, and west of the Alleghenies into the Ohio Valley, dozens of furnaces, fineries and refineries, forges, foundries, machine shops, and mills sprouted near sources of ore, fuel, and water. Eastern woodlands provided abundant hardwoods for the production of charcoal, the chief power source before the coal era. A generation of ironworkers in the 1840s and ’50s experimented with anthracite as furnace fuel, though it was tricky to use and hard to light. After the Civil War, when Connellsville coke proved the superiority of bituminous over anthracite, major iron production in Pennsylvania shifted westward. By relocating to Pittsburgh and the Allegheny Valley, iron and steel entrepreneurs gained better and cheaper sources of fuel. Using low-cost transport by rail and barge, they tapped abundant raw materials from the newly opened Lake Superior iron deposits. They also profited from the burgeoning inland market for bridges, rails, railcars, and tools for factory and farm.¹¹

BULK STEELMAKING

Despite centuries of experience in metals development, steel remained an expensive commodity until the 1870s and the advent of successful pneumatic bulk processing. For twenty years or more prior to the widespread adoption of the Bessemer converter, practical metalworkers on both sides of the Atlantic had tried to make large batches of steel out of pig iron by injecting the charge in a closed furnace with blasts of superheated air. Henry Bessemer’s process saved money by utilizing economies of scale in the construction of massive converters that pivoted on an axis to load and unload. Smelting heavier charges in a closed container improved efficiency and shortened the conversion time by eliminating slow and expensive intermediate steps. It also reduced both the number of workers needed and the skill level required. Though Bessemer by 1859 had perfected his process using a selective sample of low-phosphorus iron ore, the poor quality of Bessemer steel made from more common pig iron with high phosphorus content marred his reputation and left some consumers resistant to change. A lengthy patent dispute in the United States also delayed recognition of Bessemer’s achievement and the widespread adoption of his process. In 1864 Alexander Holley, an American engineer, obtained rights to the Bessemer process and began building a converter at Troy, New York. Before he could blow in, however, he was slapped with a suit by a midwestern investment group that controlled the patents of William Kelly, a Kentucky metalworker who asserted an earlier claim to the same process. After a two-year fight the rival contenders settled their differences by pooling patents and organizing the Bessemer Association, a holding company that controlled the licensing of steel plants using Bessemer converters.¹²

As a wide-ranging consultant for the Bessemer Association, Holley designed nearly a dozen steel mills in the United States between 1865 and 1876. His most innovative was the Edgar Thompson works he built for Andrew Carnegie at Braddock, Pennsylvania, in 1875. Combining the latest technological advances with improvements in shop design and organization, Holley, along with Carnegie’s brilliant mill superintendent William R. Jones, made Edgar Thompson the nation’s most efficient—and most profitable—steel plant. For the next quarter century the Bessemer process dominated bulk steelmaking technology, and Carnegie mills dominated the market for steel rails and structural steel.¹³

Across the Atlantic, however, blast furnaces gradually gave way to a new mass-production technique. Early in the 1860s Carl Wilhelm Siemens, a German inventor living in England, built an open-hearth furnace based on reverbatory principles. In a process called regeneration, coal-fired and preheated exhaust fumes drawn back and forth through brick-lined chambers built up superheated gases that melted pigs and burned off carbon and impurities. The open-hearth process made slow headway at first. Brick linings sagged under the intense heat until hearths were strengthened by adding iron framing. Only low-phosphorus pig iron could be used, since silica in the firebricks raised the acidity of the charge and inhibited chemical reactions that removed phosphorus compounds. In 1878 two practical metallurgists in England solved the phosphorus problem by changing the pH value from acidic to basic, using firebrick linings composed of calcined dolomite or magnesite and adding more lime to the charge. The Gilchrist-Thomas process, adaptable to both blast and open-hearth furnaces and eventually controlled by the Bessemer Association, made feasible the commercial development of common high-phosphorus ores in Britain, Sweden, the Lorraine basin, and other parts of Europe. The more deliberative pace of open-hearth processing also improved the quality and consistency of bulk steels. By 1900 on both sides of the Atlantic it was the predominant method of converting pig iron into standard carbon steel.¹⁴

By the beginnings of the twentieth century, the steel mill was “the exemplary industry of the material age,” in the words of economist George Gilder. Cheap carbon steel produced by conversion in blast furnaces or by regeneration in open hearths accelerated the pace of urban-industrial modernization, but there were limits to its quality and utility. The extreme heat and agitation of pneumatic-bulk processing fused metals into a molten mass. This made slag removal easier, but the process left oxygen pockets that weakened the refined product unless such “blow holes” were treated by adding expensive ferromanganese or other deoxidizing agents to the charge. Moreover, inexpensive bulk steel made from a mixture of crude pig iron, iron ore, and scrap steel was brittle and often contained undesirable metallic elements that lowered its quality and consistency. Despite the increasing price differential, American precision toolmakers still preferred more expensive crucible steels from Sheffield to the cheaper bulk steels. Even puddled steel, though increasingly harder to find after 1870, was more homogenous, less brittle, and had fewer impurities than bulk products.¹⁵

Bulk steel also lacked the versatility required in modern urban-industrial societies, where munitions, high-compression engines, electric motors, and other specialized machines and tools took an increasing share of the consumer dollar. Keeping up the pace of modern life required steel that was not only superior to earlier versions but better suited to special needs of government, home, and industry. Improving steel’s quality and versatility without limitin...