Energy & Industry / Manufacturing & Construction

Welding (Arc and Gas)

Carbon-arc (1885) and metal-electrode (1888) welding let workers fuse steel instead of riveting it; in 1941-45 the US builds 2,710 welded Liberty ships, about three every two days.

Olszewski and Benardos developed carbon-arc welding in 1885 and Slavyanov introduced the metal electrode in 1888, while Elihu Thomson patented resistance welding in 1885 and acetylene torches became practical around 1900. Cammell Laird's Fullagar (1920) was among the first ocean-going ships with an entirely welded hull, and the first welded road bridge opened in Poland in 1928. Welding replaced riveting, which had accounted for about a third of labour costs on earlier ship designs, and the median building time of a Liberty ship fell to 39 days by 1943. The continuous hull let cracks run unchecked: nearly 1,500 serious brittle fractures occurred and 12 ships broke in two, Constance Tipper traced them to steel that turns brittle at low temperatures.