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As the clock ticked down towards 12.01am Eastern Standard Time on 12 March, Liam Bates kept refreshing his browser.
Over the preceding weeks, Marcegaglia, the stainless steel company whose long products division he headed up, had rushed to melt and ship as much metal as it could from its furnaces in Sheffield across to the east coast of America, ahead of the imposition of tariffs.
Stainless steel
UK and US industrially interlocked
Of all the varieties of steel, stainless steel – an alloy of iron and chrome, along with other elements like nickel, molybdenum and carbon – is among the most important. Unlike most other iron alloys, which can rust when they encounter oxygen, stainless steel has a passive film that protects it from corrosion and can even self-heal. That makes it essential not just for use in sinks and cutlery (where most people will encounter it on a daily basis) but, arguably even more essential, in surgical instruments, heavy machinery and the pipes and ducts out of sight but essential to keeping civilisation working.
The trick of how to make stainless steel in large quantities was discovered here in Sheffield by Harry Brearley, and while the laboratories he worked for shut down long ago, the furnace at Marcegaglia, in an industrial park just outside the city, can trace a continuous thread back to him. This furnace used to be owned by British Steel, the nationalised corporation responsible for most of Britain’s steel manufacture until the days of privatisation.
Ever since the invention of stainless steel, Britain has melted, cast and exported vast quantities of the stuff to America. For all that the US has a sizeable stainless steel sector, the two countries’ stainless sectors have nonetheless been industrially interlocked since the days of Henry Ford. You can see it in the way Marcegaglia functions.
It melts down scrap in its…
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