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In the two decades before the First World War, steel alloys had revolutionized the machine tool industry and altered the course of modern industrial development. After 1914 steel alloys changed the course of war. Copper, lead, zinc, aluminum, iron, and other metals were all enlisted as never before in the global struggle that followed the Sarajevo crisis, but to many contemporary observers the “key metal” of World War I was tungsten. From 1914 through the cold war, the enormous military demands for heavy equipment, tough steel tools and weapons, armor plate, and heat-resistant components of military hardware made tungsten one of the world’s strategic metals, an element with political as well as economic importance. THE ARMS RACE Technological innovation is a commonplace feature of war, but it is easy to exaggerate the consequences. New military prototypes are often failures, and even the successes are long in the making. In World War I, the “critical technologies ,” as Alex Roland has argued, were not airplanes or tanks or other innovations, but older weapons that took years to perfect and fully utilize. Breech-loading rifles, cannons and machine guns, artillery shells, and even submarines, along with the technical and industrial infrastructure necessary to design, fabricate, test, and improve them, had been in various stages of development at least since the Crimean War. Other military historians give less importance to weaponry “as a shaping force” in war and more to nontechnical factors, including political decisions that influenced military strategy and tactics . But whether old or new, decisive or incidental, the killing machines of the First World War and the factories that made them depended on steel and steel alloys. Indeed, as some military historians have claimed, the rapid advance in steelmaking technology after 1880 can be explained largely by the demand for bigger, faster, and more durable armaments.1 TUNGSTEN IN WORLD WAR I 2 Tungsten in World War I 19 As steel metallurgy advanced, so did experiments to improve arms and armor by using special alloys made of nickel, manganese, chrome, tungsten, and other metals. Silicon steel was used in the production of shrapnel bars. Tungsten’s strength and hardness under extreme temperatures proved essential in the manufacture of airplane engine valves and other parts, both military and domestic. Long before 1914 nickel steel had replaced bronze, wrought iron, and carbon steel in the construction of rifles and heavy cannon barrels, but even barrels made of modern steel alloys eroded quickly and lost accuracy under the tremendous heat of rapid fire. During the war, however, metallurgists found a solution by lining the barrels with special alloys using molybdenum or tungsten.2 British leadership in the commercial production of specialty steels gave Brown and Cammel, Vickers, Armstrong, Firth, and other firms a head start in the arms race that preceded the outbreak of hostilities in 1914. Britain was the largest exporter of weapons in the two decades prior to war. From shell casings and projectiles to heavy guns and gun steel, British firms kept ahead of their competitors in both volume of production and advances in design. Even the Krupp company in Germany, Britain’s biggest competitor, modeled some weapons along British lines.3 To the public and their political leaders in the industrialized world, the most visible part of the arms race was not guns or projectiles but big naval vessels. The great wooden-hulled sailing “ships-of-the-line” that gave Britain command of the seas in the first half of the nineteenth century had by the 1880s given way to steel-hulled, steam-powered battleships with a top speed of sixteen knots or more, armed with four twelve-inch guns in two turrets fore and aft, and a variety of secondary guns amidships. With the largest navy and the most to lose in an imperial conflict, Britain remained the dominant sea power over the next twenty-five years by outspending and outpacing all other countries in the number, armament, and size of its capital ships.4 Although the basic design of naval vessels changed little before the dreadnought era, advances during the 1890s in the development and processing of steel alloys set the stage for a technological revolution in naval armament and weaponry. Armor plate made prior to that time varied widely in thickness, hardness, and tensile strength. To improve it was a major concern of naval officials and a challenge to leading steel manufacturers. German and British firms led the way with experiments using hardened nickel steel, tungsten...

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