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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[Voidmonster]

I gotta admit to being itchy to get one of my very early Stenton razors stamped 'Silver Steel' out to ScienceGuy for XRAY BOMBARDMENT.