Brearley’s greatest vindication, or validation—the climax of his career—came on a steely gray evening in 1920. It had been an unsettled spring: unusually mild in March and then unusually wet in April, and this night was the last of the dreary days, before a hailstorm the following day kicked off one of the sunniest Mays on record. That day, Thursday May 6, Brearley probably rode behind a horse on his way to London, to the fifty-first annual meeting of the Iron and Steel Institute.
The ceremonial dinner preceding the meeting was held at the Connaught Rooms, a palatial hall near Covent Garden, in the center of Westminster. The building, a stately five-floor affair twenty blocks north of Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, is one of the most opulent in the city. From the main entrance on Great Queen Street, Brearley would have walked over harlequin tile, up twenty marble steps trimmed in brass, defended by columns, beneath an impressive chandelier. Ahead, passing through double doors beneath an arch, he would have entered a room that could have served as a train station, with forty-foot vaulted ceilings. It seated five hundred people. It was a far cry from any steelworks.
The dinner proceeded as most meetings do: with minutiae.
New members were announced. The previous year’s annual report was read. The steel magnate Andrew Carnegie (who’d died the previous August) was mourned. To the son of a metallurgist who’d had a medal stolen during the German occupation of Belgium, a replica was given. The budget was reviewed. Library book donations were named. Finally, the retiring president of the institute introduced the new president, declaring that Dr. John Edward Stead had “rendered it possible to decipher those mysterious hieroglyphics which were impressed on steel by chemical reagents.”
After much acclaim, Dr. Stead got to the big business of the night. He announced that the council had awarded the Bessemer Gold Medal—the highest award of the Iron and Steel Institute—to Brearley, “who, if not actually born in a steelworks, was cradled there.”
The medal, for “outstanding services to the steel industry,” particularly innovation in the manufacture or use of steel, was something Brearley had always coveted, on account of the recognition it implied. Isaac Bell, who built an iron works and Britain’s first aluminum plant, and founded the Iron and Steel Institute, won the medal in 1874. Robert F. Mushet, who, as a result of over ten thousand experiments, perfected the Bessemer process, invented a heavy-duty rail alloy that was superseded only by Hadfield’s, and created a self-hardening high-speed tool steel, won it in 1876. Frederick Abel, who studied the carbon contents of steel, the erosion of gun barrels, and all manner of explosives, won it twenty-three years later. Adolphe Greiner, the director of Belgium’s most eminent steelworks, won it in 1913, and then had it stolen while he was taken prisoner by Germans during the Rape of Belgium.
Stead called Brearley devoted, the author of an excellent textbook, the brain behind a number of original researches. He said his work followed that of Faraday, and went through Brearley’s discoveries. Then he said it was a great pleasure to welcome him to the fraternity of Bessemer medalists. All this in front of scores of his most eminent colleagues.
Brearley thanked the president, the council, and the members present, and said it was an additional honor to receive the medal from the hands of Dr. Stead. Then, in an agitated voice, he said:
I have never lacked either good friends or kind counsellors; and I am sincerely grateful both to those who have encouraged me and to those who have opposed me. Indeed, I hardly know whether I owe more to those who approved or to those who honestly disapproved of the things I have tried to do. My brother was already engaged in the furnaces when I began work; since 1882, we have not been separated. All the opportunities afforded to one have been shared by the other, and if it were possible to cut the Bessemer medal in two, I would give my brother half of it. No man ever had a better colleague, a severer critic, or a kindlier friend. Dependence on the willing help of others is part of all who successfully direct a laboratory for industrial research. Most problems relating to iron and steel cannot be definitely stated; and the individual, best qualified by experience to study the problem, and to solve it, might be some workman who was engaged on the job day after day. It is the investigator’s greatest achievement to inspire interest in such men and make them confederates to his plan. The lust to work, the desire to find out and understand things is not confined to those who regularly wear clean collars; and, in thanking the Council of Members of the Iron and Steel Institute for this high honour, I am proud to confess my lifelong indebtedness to scores of friends, with hard hands and black faces, who toil at laborious tasks in mills and forges.
It was easily the most emotion-laden statement of the night, and also the funniest, for surely, if anybody knew how to cut a piece of metal in two, it was Brearley.
Afterward, Dr. Stead read a very long speech about blast furnaces, the puddling process, foundries, Bessemer and open-hearth processes, electric furnaces, the production of sound ingots, the application of science to the ferrous industries, and the advent and progress of metallography, among other things.
No photos were taken. Typical of engineers, the only visuals in the journal that records the event are photos of the microstructure of alloys, diagrams of furnaces, and graphs of temperature versus grain size.
Brearley retired in 1925. The year before, the world’s most popular stainless alloy, type 304, was discovered by William Hatfield, Brearley’s successor at Firth’s. But he kept working, and was busier than ever. He helped J. H. G. Monypenny, the chief of the research lab at Brown Bayley’s, write Stainless Iron and Steel, published in 1926—the first English book in the world on stainless steel.
Two years into retirement, Firth’s dropped Brearley’s name from Firth-Brearley without his permission. It made him furious and elicited the class warrior within. He yearned to level the field. When he wrote his memoirs, this bitterness was still potent, and gave him the opportunity to present to the world his only thoughts not directly related to steel. He thought directors should have to live within half a mile of their factories. He thought inheritance should be eliminated, along with dull work. He fumed that only the poor and inconspicuous get persecuted for bumbledom. Tired of being manipulated, he dreamed of meritocracy.
He figured there were four types of workers and four classes of wealth.
Workers
1. inspired and able
2. intelligent and diligent but not capable of improving
3. young promising lads
4. the half-asleep and half-blind.
Wealth
1. poor by luck
2. poor by will
3. rich by luck
4. rich by will.
He thought we should abolish the unfortunate first, honor the saints and philosophers of the second, choose wise men for the third (to which he belonged), and despise the profiteers of the last. Of how, exactly, this ought to be achieved—beyond Riga in 1905—he made no mention.
He proposed that steelmakers buy an abandoned steelworks in Sweden and turn it into a school for “budding manufacturers.” The students would have shifts rather than schedules, and the place would run 24/7. They could sell the steel they produced. Grades would depend on its quality. Teachers—experts in aspects of metalworking—would be invited from all over the world.
In 1941 he founded the Freshgate Trust Foundation, which sponsored organizations making social, educational, medical, artistic, historical, and recreational endeavors. The way Brearley saw it, he wanted to “help lame dogs over stiles.” But mostly, his naivete made him sound like a rambling idealist, a combination of Ayn Rand and Dr. Bronner. Like his steel, his ideas were born from his heart rather than his head. He had a vision of quality, or equality, but no idea how to get there.
These were just ideas; the most action Brearley ever took related to his son’s education, and even then he capitulated. He’d refused to send his son to school; he believed that education ought to be chosen, rather than imposed, and considered the
school system “an unloading of useless information into developing minds interested in other things,” turning children into parrots. He told a few members of the school board that he wasn’t sending his son to school because he wanted him to grow into an educated man. He figured that mass education produced a “kind of industrial unit, obedient, submissive, lacking in healthy curiosity and initiative.” The school board members said his son would have to be tested periodically. He questioned the worthiness of the test standards, and refused to compromise. The episode seemed destined to involve the police—and then Brearley was sent to Riga, and relented. That was two decades earlier.
The only action at the end of Brearley’s life consisted of rolling bowling balls, spinning tops, collecting stones, and playing marbles. Ashamed at the quantity of marbles he took from kids, he gave them back for free, only to win them again. He never handicapped himself. He tried gardening but couldn’t remember the names of all the growing things, even with labels. It just didn’t stick. He relaxed. He read Whitman, Shaw, and finally Shakespeare. He listened to Handel. He wrote his autobiography, as well as an unpublished children’s book, called The Story of Ironie.
Actually, there was one more symbolic action. Before going on his first vacation (beyond Riga, he’d been to New York to serve as a witness, and Berlin for a conference on applied chemistry), at age fifty-eight, he piled up all of his index cards and a few hundred books and burned them in a great bonfire. Perhaps it seemed a fitting ritual to honor his mentor James Taylor, who’d recently died. Perhaps, tired of all the litigation pertaining to stainless steel, he lashed out in that strange way. He’d never been much of a servant to pencil and paper. More likely, he felt that such knowledge, in the changed world of steelmaking, was no longer relevant.
His class warfare turned to paranoia. On the last day of 1931, he left a sealed envelope, with instructions not to open it until 1960, with the Cutler’s Company, in Sheffield. The packet contained his sworn declaration on the history of stainless steel, implying some ugly secret best disclosed when no harm could come to him or others. The revelation was a dud; it revealed more about the man than about the metal.
The next year, Brearley was thinking about posterity. Sorby’s name lived on, in the form of small (£12) annual memorial prizes. Brearley decided to honor James Taylor the same way, by endowing a biennial prize for the same amount in his name, through the Sheffield Metallurgical Association, for the most original or useful metallurgical paper.
His son, Leo, and his brother Arthur both died in 1946, two years before him. Stainless maybe, but not unkillable. Harry Brearley died more than three years after V-E Day—which means that he got to see the metal he fathered contribute to the fighting of another brutal world war. Of the destructive power that his hardened steels contributed to, he made no comment. On his service to the war machine as a veritable military contractor—during his career, he improved on armor-piercing shells, battleships, armor plates, gun barrels, and crankshafts for air force planes—he said nothing. Then again, in his autobiography, he doesn’t mention his wife, his son, or anything funny, much beyond steel. The rebel himself was almost as cold as steel.
The Iron and Steel Institute recorded his death as it did that of any other member of the industry. From its August 1948 volume:
“The Council regret to record the deaths of:
“Mr. Harry Brearley, on the 14th July, 1948, at Torquay, aged 77.”
Two pages of announcements of meetings, scientific advisory councils, refresher courses, and student exchange programs precede an obituary—a full column and a quarter—written by J. H. G. Monypenny, coauthor of the stainless steel book.
“By the death of Mr. Harry Brearley,” he wrote, “the iron and steel industry has lost one of its outstanding personalities.”
Monypenny remembered Brearley as an apt pupil, a keen observer, and said he had “a lucid style of writing.” He went on: “throughout his life he was an individualist and professed to have little use for Technical or Research Committees . . . He had little respect for tradition and often attacked it in his writings. In his last book . . . he attacked, in characteristically iconoclastic vein, a number of traditional views on certain aspects of steel metallurgy which he particularly disliked . . .” And then, craftily: “As a man he was kind and helpful to those who, he thought, needed his help.” Unwritten: most of the time, he was a stubborn, rebellious, opinionated curmudgeon.
The index in that volume of the journal, though, would have made Brearley proud. It lists thirty-seven references to stainless steel—one of the longest in the entire index—among them: arc welding, bright annealing, centrifugal casting, characteristics, classification, cold rolling, conditioning, cutting, descaling, drawing and pressing, ductility, forging, passivation, pouring, properties, self-soldering, and welding. (And one that Brearley would appreciate: “applications in America.”) His work lived on, and was thriving.
One paragraph from Brearley’s memoir, though, describes his outlook best:
The range of the mind’s eye is restricted by the skill of the hand. The castles in the air must conform to the possibilities of material things—border-line possibilities perhaps; or, if something beyond the known border is required, the plan must wait until other dreams come true. If the plan works, the myriad possibilities of the vision, which became an idea and then a selected instruction, become ultimately an object. A vision crumpled into a thing. The Word made Flesh. Something for all mankind to take hold of, to use, to look at, to wonder over, and to utilise as a stepping-stone to other visions.
4
COATING THE CAN
In the quest to design the perfect beverage container, what you don’t want the container to do matters as much as what you do. You don’t want the container to impart any flavors to the beverage within. You want it to be cheap. You don’t want it to be heavy, but you do want it strong and durable and stackable. Also, however minuscule the chance, you don’t want the container to explode. In this regard, aluminum cans outperform glass bottles.
Since 1911—when Sam Payne, in Rome, Georgia, lost sight in one eye when a bottle of Coca-Cola exploded and the court found fault with the bottle maker—victims of exploding glass bottles have included everyone from infants to housewives. Waitresses and grocery store customers have suffered greatly, mainly with injuries to their appendages. At least one victim of an exploding bottle has endured a severed Achilles tendon. Most common, or at least most often litigated, and most frightful, are eye injuries. An exploding bottle will take an eye out. It doesn’t take a JD to recognize the liability to a company in the beverage-container industry.
The beverages inside exploding bottles run the gamut. You name it, it’s exploded: soda, beer, champagne, Perrier, grenadine, milk. Bottles have exploded in bars and restaurants, hardware stores, drug stores, and liquor stores. They’ve exploded at Stop & Shop. They’ve exploded at Safeway. Bottles have exploded in the parking lot, in the car, in the kitchen, in the garage, and in a dorm room. Bottles have exploded during the walk home, and at a picnic. They’ve exploded while putting bottles in the fridge, while putting bottles in the pantry, while transferring bottles to a cooler, while transferring bottles from a cooler, and while not transferring them at all. They’ve exploded during delivery and months later. One case sounds like something out of a James Bond movie: room service delivers a soda to a hotel guest. It explodes in his hands. Another sounds like something out of the Onion: an employee at Pepsi loses an eye when a Pepsi bottle explodes. Injured parties have described the sound of an exploding bottle as like a shotgun, or a lightbulb dropping, or a firecracker.
At least 130 such cases have gone to trial. One plaintiff asserted that there were at minimum 10,000 exploding bottle episodes annually in the carbonated beverage industry. As the court stated in 1961, the danger that a glass bottle filled with Coca-Cola under pressure may explode is obvious. Bottle makers, desperate to demonstrate that exploding bottles have been dropped, kicked, abused, misha
ndled, tampered with, run over, treated negligently, or left rattling around in the back of a pickup truck for a summer day, dream of the calm litigious waters at the offices of their can-manufacturing rivals.
Yet those waters aren’t entirely placid. In 2008 Lynda Ryan, of Blythe, California, lost vision in her left eye when a can of Diet Pepsi exploded as she was opening it. On the day it happened—July 9—the temperature reached 109 degrees, a few degrees shy of the record. It didn’t get much below 90 at night. The Diet Pepsi was in a cooler in the back of Ryan’s van, and had been there for several days. The temperature inside her vehicle was probably near that of the sun. The company could certainly argue that no respectable, let alone perfect, aluminum can could survive those conditions. She settled confidentially out of court.
Other exploding can incidents never made it to court but did make their way into the record books of the Consumer Product Safety Commission. A sample of some entries:
Urbana, IL: soda can explodes in fridge, cuts thumb of consumer.
Undisclosed location: soda can explodes in hand of consumer. No treatment necessary.
Waldwick, NJ: beer can explodes in fridge, lacerates hand of consumer.
Zebulon, NC: two soda cans explode on top of fridge. No injuries reported.
Undisclosed location: beer can explodes while loading a cooler, lacerates nose of consumer.
Red Bank, NJ: three soda cans explode inside fridge. No injuries reported.
Undisclosed location: soda can explodes in minivan, at the hand of twelve-year-old. Child is unhurt. Dad drives into guardrail.
As a result, new cans made by the world’s largest can manufacturer contain an “anti-missiling” feature. It keeps the panel from blowing out and getting you in the eye.
Also relevant in the quest to design the perfect beverage container is the likelihood that a foreign object may find its way into the container. In this regard, aluminum cans underperform glass bottles. Between the time that a two-piece can is made and the time it is filled and the end is fastened on lies a vast opportunity for objectionable things to find their way in. These things could be as simple as beans, peanuts, dirt, or pine needles, or they could be lightbulbs, bells, bobby pins, paper clips, tacks, safety pins, matches, film, AA batteries. These have all been found in drinks, and pose similar problems of liability.
Rust: The Longest War Page 9
