Men of Iron and Steel

The Iron Bridge at Ironbridge, Shropshire, England (Original)

A Briton named Abraham Darby ignited the industrial revolution around 1710 when he substituted coke (from coal) in his recipe for ironmaking. Traditionally, iron ore had been smelted using charcoal derived from trees (charcoal is "cleaner" carbon). Learning to smelt iron with coke in blast furnaces ultimately freed the iron industry from the natural limits of forests, much like the invention of the automobile would later free arable land from the yoke of producing fodder for horses. Three generations of Darbys stoked the wrought iron age.

Perhaps the most iconic monuments wrought from iron are Gustave Eiffel's eponymous tower in Paris (1889) and the first Ferris Wheel erected in Chicago in 1893 by George Ferris, Jr.  Eiffel also designed and produced the wrought iron framework beneath the copper sheathing of our Statue of Liberty. But even these structures were out of date when they were completed.

By the mid-1800's the demand for wrought iron was so great that inventor Henry Bessemer developed and patented the first modern process for making steel (steel is essentially purified pig iron alloyed with other metals). Vastly superior to wrought iron, Bessemer's steel revolution was so successful that it returned wrought iron making to a cottage industry. European steel maker Alfred Krupp adopted the process, and built his company on cannons and railroad wheels. Andrew Carnegie brought the same process to America but also began buying ore-rich land in Minnesota, developing a vertically integrated business model. By the time Carnegie sold his immense fortune to J.P. Morgan in 1901, the price of steel rails had fallen from $160 per ton to $17 per ton. Carnegie devoted the rest of his life to philanthropy, perhaps returning to the promise of an earlier self.*

Subsequent, more efficient processes eventually supplanted the Bessemer process, including the Open Hearth Process, the Basic Oxygen Process and the Electric Arc Process, first patented by Carl Wilhelm Siemens in 1878.

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*In December 1868, Carnegie wrote in a "memo to self:" 

Man must have an idol and the amassing of wealth is one of the worst species of idolatry! No idol is more debasing than the worship of money! Whatever I engage in I must push inordinately; therefore should I be careful to choose that life which will be the most elevating in its character. To continue much longer overwhelmed by business cares and with most of my thoughts wholly upon the way to make more money in the shortest time, must degrade me beyond hope of permanent recovery. I will resign business at thirty-five, but during these ensuing two years I wish to spend the afternoons in receiving instruction and in reading systematically!  Link

Cold Iron is master of them all! 

He Watches Over Us

First a few words about spectroscopy. That link has a cool animation of what looks like Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon album cover where a prism splits a beam of white light into the colors of the rainbow--the spectrum (pl = spectra) of white light.
Early chemists used colored lines in spectra for the identification of materials when placed in flames.* The flame spectra of individual elements lack the full spectrum of the sun, and more or less resemble a bar code, that is, the spectra have one or several discrete lines separated by spaces. The discrete lines are a “fingerprint” or spectroscopic signature, unique for each element. With that brief introduction, we go back in time to 1868:

On 18 August 1868, a total eclipse of the sun was visible in India, and a number of scientists went there to make observations of the solar prominences. One who examined photographs of the spectra was Joseph Norman Lockyer (1836-1920) who although a civil servant at the War Office had already in his spare time done valuable work in astronomical spectroscopy.
Lockyer was particularly interested in a so called D3 line in the yellow region of solar spectra that had been obtained during the eclipse in India. It was known that the well-known sodium D line was in fact two lines close together, called the D1 and D2 lines. The D3 line could not be obtained from any substance in the laboratory, and Lockyer boldly suggested that it was caused by a new element, found in the sun but apparently not on earth. He gave this new element the name helium, from the Greek helios, the sun.
~The World Of Physical Chemistry, Keith J. Laidler

Lockyer’s hypothesis illustrates one of two ways to advance a theory in science: The first is to amass so much data that the subsequent explanation almost sounds obvious; the second is to boldly assert something with little or no support, and await experimental confirmation.

Helium is the second most abundant element in the universe after hydrogen. Where it does occur naturally on earth, it originates from the radioactive decay of heavier elements. The bulk of our domestic helium supply comes from deposits underground found with gas and oil. Helium is a non-renewable resource: even if made synthetically using radio-decay processes, the supply could not meet demand: link. We recognize helium's use in filling balloons but it is also used in welding and to replace nitrogen in synthetic breathing gas for deep-water diving because its lower solubility in blood minimizes occurrence of the often fatal "bends." However, its greatest use is in liquefied form to cool instruments and for cryogenic research. I used to use lots of it to cool the NMR supercon magnets found associated with nearly every modern chemistry lab.

Helium sits atop the northeast corner of the Periodic Table. From that vantage point, it is possible to look downwards through the eastern border of the chart all the way to the bottom. The elements directly beneath He are the so-called noble or inert elements on account of their general failure to interact chemically with other elements. The other related elements were all given Greek names: Neon (new), Argon (inert) Krypton (hidden), Xenon (strange), and Radon (named after radium but with its suffix changed to conform to the others). The discovery of the noble elements at first confounded the construction of the table--was there another family further to the right? But it was eventually recognized that the noble gas family perfected an understanding of the physical nature of the elements (more on that when we get to Lithium next).

So how many helium balloons would it take to lift a man? Mythbusters apparently did this experiment (I didn’t see it) with helium weather balloons and used about 45 of them, and their balloons were 2.5 meters diameter. I once tried to fill one of those inflatable love dolls (a gag gift) with helium to get it to float for a Halloween party- it didn't work. :(
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*Robert Bunsen was a 19th century German chemist interested in the flame emission spectra of the elements--guess what he invented?