Inland Steel HSLA development and Navy / Japan technology transfer

Inland Steel pioneered water-spray cooling for HSLA sheet in the early 1960s but couldn't sell it to automakers. Japanese steel mills applied the technique to shipbuilding plate (sweetheart deal with shipyards). Tom's 1980s Navy-sponsored ONR trip to Japan led to $100M of Title III funding for Lukens Steel's HSLA plate line in the 1990s.

In the early 60s, some of the U.S. steel companies — not U.S. Steel, it was actually Inland Steel — started trying to make sheet steel for cars by cooling the hot-rolled steel with basically a water spray. Just like a spray from your garden hose. They put this in the steel mill and they could cool the steel down more quickly, get a finer grain size, and double the strength, and they called that a high-strength low-alloy steel. Started out as sheet metal. They spent hundreds of millions of dollars building facilities to cool this stuff and temper it and everything, and they never could convince the automotive companies to buy it at that time.