De la forge au laboratoire: Naissance de la metallurgie physique, 1860-1914 (review)

Nicole Chezeau describes the emergence of the new science of metallography, today called physical metallurgy, and analyzes the transfer of related new concepts to industrial production between the middle of the nineteenth century and World War I. The driving force was essentially economic: first, taxes were higher on steel than on iron but the differences between the two were not standardized because of a lack of scientific knowledge; second, demands for steel with "better properties" for armaments and for railways were continuously increasing.

Such industries needed large amounts of high-quality steel but also new tool steels for forging, rolling, and machining. The great challenge was to standardize these new steels containing chromium, nickel, and tungsten, and to understand why special steels had different properties from ordinary steels with the same carbon content. Tensile tests (begun around 1860) and methods of chemical analysis (generalized around 1880) could give no answer. Only optical microscopy could help to clarify the problem.

The decisive evolution took place between 1890 and 1910, thanks to an international group of twenty or twenty-five engineers and scientists who pushed toward the introduction of science into the metallurgical industry through the establishment of laboratories in steel plants and in firms and organizations concerned with steel products. But the move toward standardization was slow even after many international meetings, the first in 1876. While scientific societies were active in prescribing specifications, metallurgical plants were reluctant to develop new testing methods. Engineering education was moving to a balance between practical learning in industrial firms and fundamental knowledge imparted by means of formal schooling and laboratory experiments. Although the relationship between practice and theory was different in different countries, the goal was the same, the introduction of scientific practice within industry.

Chezeau first deals with the problems related to the production of steel by the new Bessemer and Siemens-Martin processes. She analyzes proposed methods for specifying metallic properties and discusses the numerous international meetings that sought unsuccessfully to implement such methods. In her second chapter, she describes the evolution of metallurgical concepts under the influence of an international group of men whose names are still known by every young metallurgist. Step by step, and against the resistance of steelmakers, they pushed for the adoption of mechanical testing, chemical analysis, and finally microstructural observation. The result was the transmutation of steelmaking into industrial science.

The third chapter concerns the evolution of academic laboratories and the establishment of industrial R&D simultaneously with the beginning of governmental certification, first in the United States and Germany. The fourth chapter, very long and very technical, deals with the discovery of so-called phase diagrams and their relation to thermodynamics. The fifth chapter discusses the shifting curriculum in chemistry and physics aimed at preparing young engineers in the new metallurgical sciences, first at Freiberg, London, Paris, and Columbia University and MIT.

De la forge au laboratoire is well-documented throughout, presenting information gleaned from sources in the United Kingdom, the United States, and France, and to a lesser extent Germany, Russia, and Sweden. Each chapter can be read independently from the others. Chezeau provides biographical sketches of scientists and a glossary to help with technical matters.