Thread: Silver

Were there ever straights made that utilized some silver in their metallurgy make-up? I'd have thought it would have at least have been tried with all of it's properties to sterilize e.c., etc.

Just wondering.

There were so called Silver Steel razors and the alloy is possible. I am not sure whether the material was actually used. Silver Steel is a vintage term for tool steel in the UK.
~Richard

Originally Posted by Geezer

There were so called Silver Steel razors and the alloy is possible. I am not sure whether the material was actually used. Silver Steel is a vintage term for tool steel in the UK.
~Richard

Thanks Richard. I'd love to have a blade with some real silver in it - for a multitude of reasons. With silver prices having been relatively stable throughout the time straights were in their prime,

The Industrial Age:

By the 18th and 19th centuries, the use of paper money was increasingly common alongside silver and gold coins. What’s more, the price of gold and silver were increasingly fixed and stable for long stretches of time. Sir Isaac Newton fixed the price of gold in 1717, and it pretty well stayed at that price (excluding the years of the Napoleonic Wars) until World War I.

Likewise, the price of silver more or less stayed at $1.30/oz from the founding of the United States through the Civil War. Prices were exceptionally turbulent during the Civil War (rising to nearly $3/oz) and stayed above $1.30/oz until the late 1870s. Prices generally declined through the latter years of the 19th century, dipping below $0.60/oz in 1897, mostly hovering in the $0.50s through to World War I. From a low of about $0.25/oz in 1932, silver generally climbed thereafter, moving to above $0.70/oz after World War II, past $0.80/oz in 1950, and crossing $1/oz in 1960.

Silver jumped alongside gold throughout the 1970s and spiked to $50 an ounce in January of 1980 as the Hunt brothers, Nelson and William, manipulated silver in an attempt to corner the market.
- https://commodityhq.com/education/a-...silver-prices/

...I can only surmise that compared to other alloys, it was way too expensive, or there is something about silver that doesn't work for a straight. But I couldn't imagine what? And even if silver was expensive relative to other metals, there's a ton oh rich people who'd want it for the same reasons people want sterling silverware for cutlery and drinking cups and I'm sure would have had them commissioned.

I'm more curious than ever.

Often times trace amounts of an element added to the mix can cause properties having little to do with the original properties of the element by itself.

I guess that would be the reason to add silver to the mix. I think I've seen some old posts here where someone claimed the really old silver steel razors had a tiny amount of silver in them but unless you assay them you wouldn't know if this was fact or fiction.

Of course the other question is what properties silver would bring to a razor.

Silver by it self has no anti bacterial properties. Silver compounds are admixed to things to give this effect however they would not be in a razor.

I thought it did have anti bacterial properties.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16766878

Stodart & Faraday experimented with a bunch of metal additives whilst researching wootz steel. Silver was one of the metals used but not from an anti-microbial perspective..
https://straightrazorpalace.com/razo...tml#post942511

.. very cool ..

Originally Posted by earcutter

I thought it did have anti bacterial properties.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16766878

Yes in different compounds and forms but if you take just plain Ag like a .999 silver bracelet it has no special properties when you wear it.

Real silvered steel (steel actually containing silver) does exist, but it is for art, not for blades. Silver and steel do not mix well. The silver tends to form globules on the surface of the steel or short fibers of silver throughout the steel. In both cases, these cause stress concentration points in the steel and make it fragile. Obviously, if you get soft silver into the edge of a blade, then it is not going to be sharp; furthermore, the steel around that silver will crumble away due to the stress point.

If I remember correctly, adding silver to steel also caused large pearlite particles to develop in the steel.

Silvered steel is very unique in appearance. If you shine it up to a mirror polish, it looks like shiny steel with shiny, slightly darker gray squiggles in it. Almost like engraved steel where the engraving has been nearly been sanded off.

As Onimaru mentions, James Stodart and Michael Faraday (yes, that one) experimented with alloys that included silver steel. They concluded from their first round of extensive tests that alloying steel with silver was the most commercially viable material (the best was steel alloyed with palladium, but that one ain’t commercially viable).

For their purposes, commercially viable meant ‘could be used to manufacture better quality tools for industries in large quantities’.

Their first large experiment was not intended to be the last, but Stodart died and Faraday was too crushed by the loss of his friend to continue them.

But they published thier paper and some of the Sheffield foundries took it and ran. The early 1820’s saw an absolute explosion of ‘Silver Steel’ produced in Sheffield.

Now it’s worth mentioning, this alloy — as per the Stodart & Faraday formula — involved very, very small quantities of silver. %0.02 by volume.

The practice persisted in Sheffield into the early 20th century, and treated basically like a superstition. The workers simply tossed a single shilling coin into the crucible with the steel.

What did it do? Stodart & Faraday claimed it made the steel easier to work, less likely to break during forging, and just generally more durable.

Is this true?

Well, James Hadfield set out to test this in the early 1930’s. Unfortunately, his experiments were based on a lot of faulty assumptions. He was looking for much larger quantities than were actually used, and as a result, he came to the conclusion that it was all a lot of hooey.

Well, Sheffield foundries definitely added silver to their ‘silver steel’.

As for the wear properties, it’s hard to know. There aren’t a lot of people working with early 19th century English crucible steel who can compare it to early 19th century English crucible steel with silver added.

It really isn’t unreasonable to think it was a genuine improvement. Stodardt was an old hand at metalurgy, and I’m inclined to think he’d know improvement when he saw it.

At the same time, not everyone in Sheffield was convinced even at the time. A super catty fight broke out in the newspapers between proponents and detractors using pithy pseudonyms like ‘flat back’ (a traditionalist) and ‘friend to progress’ (you can probably guess his position).

There were other alloys that came out of that too. Charles Pickslay latched onto the higher-end platinum-group alloys and went bankrupt a couple times, then moved to America and tried it again. He called his alloy ‘Peruvian Steel’ and it was india steel and iridium-osmium (or maybe rhodium, he’s unclear in his letters).