Living up to my username - an ongoing thread about Silver Steel

[mikew]

Am I missing something here? As far as I know silver steel has never contained silver. It certainly doesn't these days.

[edhewitt]

Attachment 154420,,,,,,,what's an element ?

The fruit of the elementree see that was simple john.

[Voidmonster]

I'll let ScienceGuy field the science parts, but I'll back up and elaborate a bit on the history involved here.

First, a summary, because this is long-winded:

Stodart and Faraday published in 1822 that a small amount of silver alloyed with steel (a in a ratio of 1 part silver to 500 parts steel) produced a significantly better steel. They explored other alloys, including platinum/steel (1:100 ratio) and found them promising but expensive.

One of the factory managers at the company who ran their large scale experiments soon after produced goods stamped 'silver steel'.

Green, Pickslay & Co began producing 'Peruvian Steel' after Pickslay read the Stodart/Faraday papers and they sent samples to Faraday (while misspelling his name) after first experimenting with most of the alloys in the original paper.

----

In the very early 1800's, about 1815, the Royal Society commissioned James Stodart to explore different alloys for toolmaking in the hope that they could advance agricultural science (I think the main hope here was better scythes, which were still the vastly dominant method of harvesting, and represented a huge portion of the steel-blade industry).

Stodart got as his assistant a very young Michael Faraday because Faraday had spent his summer vacation schlepping Humphrey Davy's luggage around Europe, and during the time Davy was impressed with how bright Faraday was.

The two of them worked on alloying all sorts of things and famously came to the conclusion that an alloy of Indian steel with a tiny amount of silver (1 part in 500) produced superbly wearing silver steel. They published in 1820, and then again on March 21, 1822, after mass production.

To accomplish the industrial scale production they hired out the job to the Sandersons in Sheffield (most likely because the Sandersons supplied the steel for Stodart's cutlery trade in London).

The conclusion of the second paper was that Silver Steel (that is, steel with one part in 500 silver) was just better. Platinum steel was a lot better, but obviously a bit expensive, and Rhodium and Iridium/Osmium steel was awesome, but not very likely to be practical for anything but high-end luxury goods and the best scientific equipment. Palladium steel was amazing but ain't nobody gonna be doing that because: palladium.

Following relatively shortly after the publication was an explosion of goods marked Silver Steel coming out of Sheffield, among them razors stamped with William Stenton's name, a manager for the Sandersons, and a fellow with quite a lot of fingers in a whole lot of pies.

James Stodart died in 1823, at a time when Faraday had just been admitted to the Royal Society and was under a lot of stress due to politics and general backbiting. Specifically, Davy -- in a nitrous-huffing haze of paranoia -- accusing Faraday of plagiarism.

Faraday never continued the alloying experiments, but in 1824 Charles Pickslay wrote to both he and the deceased Stodart asking after more details on the alloying because he wanted to manufacture the stuff.

In 1826 an argument broke out in the letters column of the Sheffield Independent. An argument between people naming themselves things like 'Flat Back', 'An Enemy to Fraud', 'A Friend to Invention', etc. There was a wide range of opinion on the subject ranging from 'it's outright fraud, like painting pig iron and calling it brass' to 'this is the innovation of our time!' along with a middle-ground of 'a London assay office agrees that there's a tiny bit of silver in these things, but it's not at all clear it's actually doing much'.

Be that as it may, the same year Green, Pickslay & Co sent Faraday this letter:

Green Pickslay and Co. have great pleasure in informing Mr. Ferrady[sic] that they have made a number of experiments with the alloys, recommended by him, and find the Steel greatly improved by them they send a specimen alloyed with Silver, Iridium and Rhodium, which they consider the best they have produced, these alloys with some valuable practical hints, have been furnished by Mr. Johnson No 29, Hatton Gardens; the report of the Forgers is that the steel works better under the Hammer, than any they have before used, and likewise hardens in much superior manner. Green Pickslay & Co. beg Mr. Ferrady's[sic] acceptation of a pair of Razors made from this Steel. They will have great pleasure in sending other Specimens of Cutlery &c as they continue their experiments.

It was then also that someone writing as 'Another Friend to Invention' responded to the silver steel controversy in the paper by claiming that anyone who'd worked with the famed Peruvian Steel would know it was superior.

Some Sheffield firms continued producing goods labeled Silver Steel, most notably Joseph Elliot, who seemed to really love the stuff. Pickslay burned through several partnerships and went bankrupt.

[Voidmonster]

Am I missing something here? As far as I know silver steel has never contained silver. It certainly doesn't these days.

At the very, very beginning, it absolutely did contain a tiny quantity of silver. At least in the experiments that lead to it being a marketing term.

Was it manufactured that way? Well, that's the question, isn't it? To date there hasn't been a particularly deep exploration of the subject. Robert Hadfield did some tests in the 1930's, but he was terribly constrained by his sample size. He had three razors to work with, one was a Stodart that Faraday gave to his father-in-law, one was a modern (for 1930) razor and one was supposedly Faraday's and stamped 'silver steel' -- but it was a late Victorian model and I'm not even sure it dated to Faraday's lifetime.

[JimmyHAD]

The conclusion of the second paper was that Silver Steel (that is, steel with one part in 500 silver) was just better. Platinum steel was a lot better, but obviously a bit expensive, and Rhodium and Iridium/Osmium steel was awesome, but not very likely to be practical for anything but high-end luxury goods and the best scientific equipment. Palladium steel was amazing but ain't nobody gonna be doing that because palladium.

Great write up as usual Zak. When you were editing looks like the conclusion of "because palladium" got lost in the shuffle ...... I suppose it is prohibitively expensive ?

I hope one or more of the custom guys that still forge their blades see this and somebody tries to whip up something with rhodium and iridium/osmium ...... and that I can afford one .....

I wonder where the Green, Pickslay & Co razors gifted to Faraday ended up ? If you ever get 'em Zak, let us know how they shave .

[Jimbo]

I'm not sure if you mentioned this - I skimmed a bit of the OP, sorry :0 - but is there a figure or profile for the sensitivity of the test?

Do samples really matter that much here? Unless I'm missing something (a definite possibility!) what it seems you want to do is ascertain whether a specific razor contains a certain element or not, and in what proportion if the former. Surely that simply requires a "presence" cutoff higher than the measurement error?

If you are trying to infer something about the population of all "silver steel" razors ever produced, that's when sample size (and other things like representativeness of the sample) would definitely be important.

Again, apologies if I'm not really understanding your research question here.

James.

[Voidmonster]

Great write up as usual Zak. When you were editing looks like the conclusion of "because palladium" got lost in the shuffle ...... I suppose it is prohibitively expensive ?

I hope one or more of the custom guys that still forge their blades see this and somebody tries to whip up something with rhodium and iridium/osmium ...... and that I can afford one .....

I wonder where the Green, Pickslay & Co razors gifted to Faraday ended up ? If you ever get 'em Zak, let us know how they shave .

That bit with the palladium was me being slangy. It wasn't merely prohibitively expensive, they were simply not able to get enough of the stuff under any circumstances to do large scale experimentation.

Faraday gave those Pickslay razors to John Wilson Croaker when Croaker wrote asking about the silver steel experiments. I recall it was a good fifteen or twenty years later. Needless to say I have my eyes peeled for those but don't really expect to ever find them.

I can't find any references now, but I recall there is a highly specialized commercial steel alloy using one of the rare earths.

[ScienceGuy]

I'm not sure if you mentioned this - I skimmed a bit of the OP, sorry :0 - but is there a figure or profile for the sensitivity of the test?

Do samples really matter that much here? Unless I'm missing something (a definite possibility!) what it seems you want to do is ascertain whether a specific razor contains a certain element or not, and in what proportion if the former. Surely that simply requires a "presence" cutoff higher than the measurement error?

If you are trying to infer something about the population of all "silver steel" razors ever produced, that's when sample size (and other things like representativeness of the sample) would definitely be important.

Again, apologies if I'm not really understanding your research question here.

James.

I mentioned this in the OP but maybe it wasn't so clear. Basically after presenting everything, there's really no conclusion and further testing is needed. I glossed over a lot. EDX is good down to the area of 1 atomic percent, however that's just the sensitivity as far as pure background noise is concerned. The problem here is that there's a lot of elements present that can generate overlapping peaks, so it's hard to say with certainty what comes from what, and since the concentration of metals would be quite low, any peaks they generate get lost.

So really at the end of it I came to the conclusion that I don't think this would be the ideal technique - something like elemental analysis would be better. This is just nice because you can mount the whole blade and it is non-destructive.

As far as sample size, yes, n=2 is not good for anything, but I wasn't trying to draw any meaningful conclusion, just trying out the technique on some razors I had.

[Mike Blue]

It might be a useful indicator, or purposeful for rapid sampling on the hunt for Faraday's alloy. Then you could probably date the razors more accurately. Spectrographic destruction would give better percentages.

I was interested in the 14% carbon vs oxygen sample. My thoughts are the superficial oxidation was the source. Cleaning that to bare deoxidized metal would have given a more accurate carbon content. Still fascinating to play with such nice toys though.

[ScienceGuy]

It might be a useful indicator, or purposeful for rapid sampling on the hunt for Faraday's alloy. Then you could probably date the razors more accurately. Spectrographic destruction would give better percentages.

I was interested in the 14% carbon vs oxygen sample. My thoughts are the superficial oxidation was the source. Cleaning that to bare deoxidized metal would have given a more accurate carbon content. Still fascinating to play with such nice toys though.

Yes, being a surface technique, this one had a nice coat of oxides which gave those results - polishing first is a must. But it was nice as a first try to get the hang of working with the blades.