rolling steel flat

there are still a few around who know the significance of rolling steel into continuous coils. Tytus led the project after spending his early days around the family paper mill in Middletown. he declined to stay in the family business and started at the American Rolling Mill Company. he wondered why steel couldn't be rolled like paper in a continuous process. the handling of individual sheets seemed so inefficient and brutal.

but the rollers were the kings of the mill;  there are photos of a few rolling mill crews on display at the Marco's pizza restaurant in the Middletown Shopping Center on Breiel Blvd.

the next post will discuss how the kings were toppled by technology. in the meantime, try to remember how cars refrigerators and washing machines looked before the mid-1930s.

 - sq^3

it's rare for change in a manufacturing process to have such a profound effect on the culture of a nation and the world but that's what the continuous rolling of steel had on the US in the 1930s.

prior to rolling steel flat into coils - coils so often seen on the flat bed trailers of trucks and trains leaving Middletown today - steel was rolled flat, one small sheet at a time. there were many rolling crews pulling ingots from furnaces and passing them back and forth to each other on a single stand mill.

http://www.middletownlibrary.org:8080/cgi-bin/viewer.exe?CISOROOT=/Crout&CISOPTR=1570&CISOMODE=grid

Each sheet from each mill had small but significant differences in dimension - variations in thickness were particularly vexing for automobile and appliance makers. Think of big body parts on cars of the 1940s vs. the 1930s - imagine the look of the engine hood with hinged cowlings and the later broad, flat hoods we're familiar with today.

Each roller ran his crew - the company paid him as a contractor - and he paid the assistant roller, the finisher, the assistant finisher, the pusher and the helpers. the Roller was one of  the highest paid employees in steel making and commanded the respect of an artisan. this was true in Middletown as well as the rest of the industrialized world.

but Armco's continuous mill changed all that.

next post will discuss how the son of a Middletown paper maker and his men transformed the manufacturing world.

Just after World War 1, about the time that Tytus and Charlie Hook were convincing George Verity to invest some money into the continuous mill concept - a young Polish engineer was in Shanghai China working on a galvanizing line that dipped steel fencing into molten zinc.

Tad Sendzimir figured out that a hydrogen atmosphere as steel was heated before dipping reduced spots of corrosion that inhibited good adhesion and significantly lengthened the life of the fence. Sendzimir invented the method of hydrogen galvanizing.

His expertise at coating steel with zinc was the main reason Armco pursued him in the late 1930s to come to Middletown. Tad came but was done with galvanizing. He expressed an interest to build a new kind of rolling mill. Tytus, by now the head of rolling at Armco, thought of his mill was a toy.

Sendzimir wasn't getting the kind of response Tytus got from Hook and Verity but Anson Hayes - then director of Armco Research, thought it was at least worth a try. It was about this time that a big customer came calling looking for steel real thin and real flat.

It was Westinghouse and they wanted new dimensions for electrical steel necessary for a newly invented device - a device that today is in almost every American kitchen - a magnetron.

Doc Hayes was summoned to give advice on the new requirements for a product that Armco practically invented. At this time, electrical or silicon steel was still rolled the old fashioned way - by hand on a single stand mill. Armco hadn't figured out how to roll such a brittle product on a continuous mill let alone roll it extremely flat and just 0.002 inch thick.

Why 0.002 in. thick? That's the dimension MIT's Radiation Laboratory was demanding to make aircraft mounted radar.  The British had just invented the magnetron and the War Department was funding a project to find a manufacturer. MIT asked their electrical steel supplier Westinghouse to help. Westinghouse went to Doc Hayes who said "it can't be done - but we have this Polish engineer who thinks he's got a mill that can."

Fast forward to 1992 and Armco, Incorporated of Parsippany NJ announces the acquisition of Empire Detroit Steel with plants in Mansfield, Dover and Coshocton, Ohio. The jewel was Coshocton Stainless - a non-union plant full of Z-mills - the industry shortened term for the Sendzirmir Mill.

next post will discuss the reasons Tad Sendzimir left Middletown to start his industry in another state, an industry still alive and working today.

I find this info quite interesting as well.

I love Middletown history.  This is very good stuff.  Keep it coming.