The South Yorkshire Steel Industry and the Industrial Revolution

Abstract

Sheffield was famous for its cutlery long before it became Steel City. By the early modern period Hallamshire cutlers were importing steel from the Continent. The earliest reference to cementation steel making in South Yorkshire is from 1642. The Sheffield steelmaking district had little or no reputation outside the area before Benjamin Huntsman invented crucible steel in 1742. The early steelmakers simply supplied the cutlers, but by the mid nineteenth century nearly half the European output of steel was made in the Sheffield district. The population of Sheffield grew from 14,531 in 1736 to 135,310 in 1851. Yet the scale of the steel industry in the classic period of the Industrial Revolution was still small compared with that of Victorian times, and it depended on the handicraft skills of its workers. A new era began in 1837 with the giant steel works of the East End, which soon used Bessemer converters to manufacture railway rolling stock and then armaments. The cutlers were no longer the major customers of the steelmen. At the end of the nineteenth century Sheffield remained the leading world centre for special steels, and its population had risen to over 400,000.