Welding handbook electrode consumption survey

Tom's keynote-lecture survey of 199 welding processes in the welding handbook, used to show the explosion of process development 1900–1950 and the near-cessation of new process development after 1975 (with friction stir as the lone exception).

I did a paper once, a keynote lecture at a welding conference. I looked in the back of the welding handbook — there's a list of 199 different welding and cutting processes. That includes soldering and brazing and plasma cutting and oxy-acetylene cutting, but lots of arc welding processes. They list 199. I looked at how many were developed between 1900 and 1950, and it was seventy-five percent of them. Between 1950 and 1975 it was 24.5 percent of them. And there was one new welding process that had been developed in the previous twenty-five years between 1975 and 2000 when I was given this talk, and that was friction stir.

Tom's 1980s back-of-envelope estimate of US welder population (700,000 full-time equivalent → ~2 million total counting part-time). Calculated from stick-electrode pounds sold ÷ pounds-per-hour deposition rate ÷ assumed hours. Estimate later appeared in the eighth edition of the AWS welding handbook (~early 1990s) attributed to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which had in fact called AWS for the number — Tom's number.

Right. Yeah, these excavators, a lot of them are using 100 ksi strength material, and it's stupid if you don't control your hydrogen on a high-strength steel. I've seen people lose their lives because of it. There's a lot of, I call it, farmer welding. I once estimated — 30 years ago I was trying to figure out how many welders are in the country. So I did an estimate. This is another story, I'm never going to get to welding. I knew at that time 60% of all the welding was done with stick electrodes. I knew how many pounds of these electrodes were sold each year. I knew how many pounds per hour a welder could put down. Put all this together and I calculated, in order to burn up all those millions of pounds of electrodes, you needed 700,000 welders in the United States.

Tom's circa-1980 back-of-envelope estimate (half-million full-time + half-million part-time welders in US) was later cited as a Bureau of Labor Statistics figure in the *Welding Handbook*. Used to make the point about questionable provenance of authoritative-looking facts.

I have another example from my own personal experience. Around 1980 I was up for tenure in welding, and I decided, well, how many welders are there in the United States? I thought of a way to estimate it. I knew how many pounds of stick electrodes they made, and 70 percent of the welding back then was stick electrodes, and I knew how much someone could use in an hour. I could divide that number and get a total number of people, and estimate how many were full-time and how many might be part-time. I came up with half a million full-time welders in the United States and another half million part-time welders. I said this at some conference. About 10 years later, about 1990, they come out with another edition of the Welding Handbook, and I'm flipping through it, and there it says, "Department of Labor Statistics, there are a million welders in the country." I called up my friend at the American Welding Society — hey, where'd you guys get this number? He says, "Well, that's your number, Tom." I said, what? "No, it's in the book, it's referenced." No one has a clue except me where it came from. It was a very simple estimate. A high school student could have done it. But there is the Bureau of Labor Statistics as a reference to me. I didn't get any royalty on that. Well, Steve, we should talk.