Page 41 - february

HISTORY

Pieces of cast iron began to the remaining carbon was burned out, iron was obtained.
be placed in forges - small open Getting a layouts and making steel from it was a very
furnaces. Cast iron was covered slow, painstaking business. Indeed, for one smelting, the
with hot coal and blown with air. blast furnace produced only 50 - 80 kilograms of metal.
The cast iron melted and dripped It is not surprising, therefore, that when mechanical
down to the bottom of the forge. On engineering began to develop and the demand for steel
the way, the droplets fell into the increased many times over, all countries zealously set
blast jets, and the oxygen in the air about searching for new methods of converting cast iron
burned out the carbon, silicon and into steel.
other impurities contained in them, In 1784, the Englishman Kort managed to invent
making iron brittle cast iron. the so-called puddling method of redistribution of cast
The iron itself burned out too. iron. However, this method, more productive than the
But not much, since it burns much flashy one, gave not the desired steel, but soft iron. The
worse than, for example, carbon. metallurgists were not satisfied with this invention, and
Already soft, malleable metal was the search continued. Russian steelmakers also took part
accumulating at the bottom of in them, having achieved great success, especially in the
the forge. It was taken out of the field of obtaining high-quality steels.
furnace in the form of a red-hot, In 1813, at the Botkin plant, the serf Semyon
shapeless lump, called the same Ivanovich Badaev invented a method of producing cast
as the iron, mined at the dawn of steel, which was named "Badaevskaya" by the name of its
metallurgy, kritz. Hence the name creator. Tests have shown that it has excellent mechanical
of this method of redistribution of properties and excellent weldability. In addition, when the
cast iron - screaming. So, the horn inventor even improved his method, it turned out that
was called critical. The grits were his steel is no worse than English. "Badayevskaya" steel
beaten with hammers in order to was used for the manufacture of tools and coin stamps,
compress the metal, squeeze out the requiring particularly high quality metal. The treasury
slags from it, and then chop it into has benefited more from this. The government became
pieces. Russian metallurgists called interested in the activities of Badayev. It bought him for
these pieces of metal the "order". 3,000 rubles from a serf owner and awarded him a gold
It was, in our understanding, a medal. Another fate, more characteristic of those times,
semi-finished product from which befell the invention of the merchant Polyukhov, who in
both steel and soft iron could be 1820 proposed his own special method of making steel.
prepared. The style occupied an Despite the numerous accolades that his steel received,
intermediate place between them. Polyukhov's case was not given a move.
If it was saturated with carbon, it
became steel, if, on the contrary,

To be continued.
"Stories about the Russian Championship"
Moscow, 1950

Stanochniy park 41