Description
Book SynopsisThe steel industry provides much of the material basis for modern civilisation. Although its end products are numerous, the largest sector of the industry is involved in the production of wide strip. This is used by countless other industries to make a range of products from automobile bodies, and the cases of domestic appliances, to metal furniture and cans for the preservation of foodstuffs and drinks. A hundred years ago sheet steel was made in labor-intensive operations by a large number of small rolling mills. This is an account of how this relatively backward part of the industry was transformed by the invention and industrial application of a revolutionary new technology. In the hot strip mill a slab of steel was passed through a series of rolls to be reduced into a continuous band of wide strip, which was then shipped either as coils or cut into sheets. The introduction of the wide continuous hot strip mill began to concentrate the sheet and tin plate industry into much bigger
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Innovation and Continuous Rolling Mills Abbreviations Chapter 1: Foundations: The Sheet and Tin Plate Industries to the Late Nineteenth Century Chapter 2: Growth, Combination and Rationalization, 1898–1901 Chapter 3: Vandergrift Works Chapter 4: Expansion and Company Promotion, 1900–1920 Chapter 5: A Great Divide: The Sheet Trade in the 1920s Chapter 6: The Search for a Practicable Continuous Sheet Mill Chapter 7: The Wide Continuous Hot Strip Mill Chapter 8: Investment in Adverse Times: The Thirties Chapter 9: Contrasts in Development Planning: Policies in the Pittsburgh District and Opportunities and Initiatives in Michigan Chapter 10: Hand Mills, Continuous Mills, and Social Problems Chapter 11: World War Ii and the Postwar Boom Chapter 12: Corporate Policy after 1945 Chapter 13: The “Second Generation” Mills Chapter 14: Years of Difficulty: The 1970s and 1980s Chapter 15: EAF Steel and Compact Strip Mills Chapter 16: Into a New Millennium Appendix: The Old Sheet Steel Industry and Contrasting Perspectives on the Impact of the Strip Mill on Employment
