We all know stainless steel is an almost common product of modern life, with chromium and smaller amounts of other metals providing protection against rust.
The advent of stainless steel is believed to be around 1800, and was first widely applied in the mid-nineteenth century. However, history will probably have to be rewritten because Dr. Rahil Alipour from University College London found evidence that the Persians, the master steel builders, were the creators of stainless steel.
Evidence for this relates to a manuscript titled al-Jamahir fi Marifah al-Jawahi dating from the tenth or eleventh century on the Western calendar. In this manuscript there is a special recipe for making steel in a crucible. This is the only known document like this that ever existed from an era when very few steelmakers were literate.
Abu-Rayhan Biruni, who is famous for his academic prowess, mentioned an important raw material for steel making. However, as time goes on, modern scholars are uncertain what the ingredient Biruni is talking about really is.
In the Journal of Archeological Sciences, Alipour claimed that Biruni’s secret ingredient was chromite. "Our research provides the first evidence of intentional addition of the mineral chromium in steel production," emphasizes Alipour.
Ancient documents refer to Chahak, Persia, as a center of steel making. Alipour and co-authors found scrap steel left in piles of baked bricks found in one of Iran’s villages known as Chahak. They contain 1-2% chromium, much less than today’s stainless steel uses, but enough to provide some resistance to oxidation.
Alipour has also translated a manuscript from the thirteenth century praising Chahak steel for its beautiful patterns. In an age when the lives of soldiers depended on the lifespan of the weapon but didn’t have much time to clean them, rust resistance was no more important than hardness. However, if this method is preserved, it could easily lead to modern steelmaking techniques long before they were discovered. Instead, the value of chromium’s addition to steel needs to be rediscovered from the start.
The authors hope their findings can be used to study steel artifacts that may have been widely traded or collected for their Persian-origin museums.
