THE BACKGROUND TO THE INTRODUCTION OF AUTOMATION
E. J. Miller, A. K. Rice · 2013
The five processes therefore could be - and in the past usually were - carried out independendy of each other. Historically, each process has acquired its own experts, its own distinctive modes of working, its own culture. Production expertise has also acquired a mystique, especially in the iron-making and steel-making operations. These offer dramatic and awesome examples of man&s;s mastery of his environment; yet it is a mastery that is not quite complete: occasionally molten metal runs wild and men die. Thus the good iron-maker, it is believed, needs to know more than the chemistry of the process: he must have a flair that will enable him to judge from the sound of the furnace, or through some sixth sense, that something critical is happening. 1 This is not to say that major technological changes have not taken place. The modern continuous wide-strip mill, perhaps half a mile long, which converts a thirty-ton red-hot slab into several hundred feet of coiled strip travelling along at thirty m.p.h., is a far cry from the hand-mills and primitive mechanized mills on which most of Britain&s;s sheet steel was produced until twenty-five years ago. Novel techniques of steelmaking have been introduced. In iron-making there has been considerable elaboration of the pre-treatment of the ore fed into the blast-furnaces. And in the blast-furnaces, as elsewhere in the industry, big increases in size have themselves created new technical problems to be solved. But all these changes have taken place within processes. It could be argued that the traditional technological boundaries have inhibited technical developments that might have breached them. Continuous casting of slabs, for example, which cuts through the boundary between heavy end and finishing, appears to have been used effectively in Russia for wide flatrolled products for a number of years before it was tried out in Britain. Again, it would seem to the layman that the development of direct reduction processes (which would convert iron ore direcdy into steel without the need for blast-furnaces) has been inordinately slow.