Bessemer process and Carnegie steel wealth

That's kind of 1880s, after Henry Bessemer taught people how to make steel. Andrew Carnegie became the richest man in the world. In today's dollars Andrew Carnegie would be worth about 300 billion dollars. He exceeded Bill Gates or Carlos Slim or any other rich guys today, in terms of his wealth. But it wasn't really until after World War II that we started to take an appreciation for this property called toughness. People actually measured it back in the olden days. [Tom holds up Charpy bar samples.] These are some Charpy bars that I actually produced when I was a 25-year-old engineer at Bethlehem Steel. There's half of one which is a brittle fracture, and the other one is the ductile fracture that stopped the impact hammer. The Charpy bar — you make these little one-square-centimeter by ten-centimeter-long bars, you put a little two-millimeter notch very carefully, very precisely machined, and you whack it with a big calibrated hammer. It's just a big pendulum, and 260 foot-pounds of energy comes in, hits it, snaps it in two, or it doesn't snap it. Every time it doesn't snap it you have to spend $400 to recalibrate the machine. They didn't like me, I was coming up with some pretty tough steels. Not that it was great rocket science to make tough steels.