Page 55 - May

HISTORY

charges and further throwing cannonballs, the gunners had
to wait while the metallurgists were looking for suitable
grades of steel.
And finding the desired recipes turned out to be so
difficult that even during the Crimean War, in which steam
ships, an electric telegraph and other modern technical
means were used, volleys of archaic bronze guns thundered
on both sides, firing closer than the guns of soldiers. True,
these volleys were the swan song of the bronze artillery.
Soon after the end of the war, the reddish bronze barrels
were dropped from the carriages, and gray bodies of steel
guns were erected in their place.
Obukhov played a huge role in this technical
revolution. In the huge business he took on, he had almost
no predecessors. Only Anosov, at the end of his life, was
engaged in experiments on casting steel guns and in the
40s created the first sample of a steel gun. However, many
people were striving for the same goal at the same time as
Obukhov. In France, England, Germany, Austria, the military
industrialists, fueled by dreams of future fabulous profits,
were frantically looking for ways to cast steel tools.
Not wealth, not a golden bag seemed to Obukhov
the crown of the business he had begun. The desire to give
the Russian soldier and sailor a reliable combat friend and
powerful assistant in military affairs led him.
To obtain steel, Obukhov smelted cast iron together
Crucible cut with pure ore in graphite pots - crucibles. At the same time,
cast iron impurities burned out: first silicon, then manganese,
sulfur, phosphorus. Carbon was the last to burn. In a word,
everything happened in the same way as in the blast furnace. Only there the impurities burned
in the oxygen of the blast, and during crucible smelting they were burned by the oxygen
contained in the ore. In this difference lay the advantages of the method used by Obukhov.
In the blast furnace, drops of molten cast iron, blown over by an abundant current of air,
had time to completely free themselves of their impurities. Nearly pure iron accumulated at the
bottom of the blast furnace. In the crucible, the situation was different. Ore could be poured
into it so much that its oxygen was not enough for the complete combustion of impurities,
determine in advance the end of the "cooking" of the metal and obtain steel with any carbon
content if desired.
Crucible smelting, known for a long time, was indispensable in obtaining high-quality
steel. No wonder Anosov also used it, preparing metal for his magic blades. However, the

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