Introduction
In the paper it will be explained the importance of the steel as a commodity throughout the latter part of the 19th century during the Industrial Revolution in Britain, as well as the impact of the production and its trade, exposing political, economic and social aspects that were directly affected by the technological development of Britain in matter of steel. The steel, according to the Oxford Dictionaries is a hard “alloy of iron with carbon and usually other elements, used as a structural and fabricating material” (2015), and it was usually used for industrial purposes, as well for constructing and railroads. (Gordon, 1910)
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Of the latter it could be say that many systems were already functioning by this time, such as the telegraphs, railroads networks, between others. The railroads, for example, were usually constructed with wrought iron and, apart from making rails, it was also used for constructing (buildings) and machinery parts. Nonetheless, wrought iron was not as desired as the steel, as the latter was stronger. In this matter, before the Bessemer process was invented in the late 1850´s by an Englishmen, there was not a way to produce it efficiently nor massively. With the creation of the Bessemer process the latter changed making a lot of firms that were once producers of iron, to be determined to go for the production of steel, such as Bolckow Vaughan’s (which was one of many firm located in Cleveland, Britain). Nonetheless, the steel quality would be improved by other processes such as the Siemens-Martin process between others that are not going to be mention for the purposes of this paper (Burn, 1961; Mokyr, 1998). In short, the steel then replaced wrought iron in many of their applications, soon being used in weapons, machinery, ships, buildings and railroad tracks. (Mokyr, 1998) During the 1850’s, Britain had a geographical abundance of coal and iron ore, which allowed the country to distinguished in the iron-steel industry due to the technological development that occurred during the Industrial Revolution, enhancing the mass production of them with the new processes invented for this commodity. (Hoskins & Burnham,