The history of seamless steel pipes

The history of seamless steel pipes

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Seamless steel pipe appeared more than 100 years ago. It is a significant invention that has provided immense convenience for various industries in our country.

Seamless steel pipe is a round, square, or rectangular steel with a hollow section and no joints around it. It is made of steel ingots or solid tube blanks through perforation to create capillaries, followed by hot-rolled, cold-rolled, or cold-drawn processes.

The production of seamless steel pipes has a history of nearly 100 years. The German Mannismann Brothers invented the two-roll cross-rolling piercing machine in 1885 and the periodic tube rolling mill in 1891. Various extension machines, such as continuous pipe rolling mills and pipe jacking machines, appeared after that, forming the foundation of the modern seamless steel pipe industry.

In the 1930s, the adoption of three-roll mills, extruders, and periodic cold rolling mills improved the variety and quality of steel pipes. The 1960s saw enhancements in continuous rolling mills and the emergence of three-roll piercing machines. The successful application of tension reducers and continuous casting billets improved production efficiency, enhancing the ability of seamless pipes to compete with welded pipes.

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Seamless Tube Industry Historical Marker

From the 1870s, rolling mills could form precut sheets of iron or steel into tubes, which were welded closed. However, all these tubes had seams where they inevitably split open.

During the great economic expansion of the late 1800s, more tubes were used in America for piping water, steam, natural gas, chemicals, and oil. The bicycle craze of the 1890s inspired Ralph Stiefel to invent a seamless tube.

In 1895, Stiefel installed the first seamless tube plant in Ellwood City, Pennsylvania. Rather than starting with flat sheets, Stiefel developed a process for piercing a hole straight through a cylinder of solid steel. Imagine poking your finger through the center of a blob of dough to form a doughnut; that's how Stiefel made seamless tubes. Eventually, he patented several of his inventions for rolling tubes.

The Ellwood Weldless Tube Company became highly profitable and quickly merged with other companies, reorganized as the Standard Seamless Tube Company. In 1899, it merged with sixteen tube makers to create a larger entity.

The independent Shelby Steel Tube Company of Ohio, which made bicycle tubes using a British manufacturing design, was not part of the National Tube companies in 1899 but was included in the U.S. Steel merger two years later. Tubes of various types were among the numerous products that U.S. Steel dominated for years, helping to form the infrastructure of steel production in America.

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