h looked very much like
iron, but which would harden after quenching from a red heat. This
was steel. Not knowing the essential difference between the two,
they must distinguish by the process of manufacture. To-day we
can make either variety by several methods, and can convert either
into the other at will, back and forth as often as we wish; so
we are able to distinguish between the two more logically.

We know that iron is a chemical element--the chemists write it
Fe for short, after the Latin word "ferrum," meaning iron--it is
one of those substances which cannot be separated into anything
else but itself. It can be made to join with other elements; for
instance, it joins with the oxygen in the air and forms scale or
rust, substances known to the chemist as iron oxide. But the same
metal iron can be recovered from that rust by abstracting the oxygen;
having recovered the iron nothing else can be extracted but iron;
_iron is elemental_.

We can get relatively pure iron from various minerals and artificial
substances, and when we get it we always have a magnetic metal,
almost infusible, ductile, fairly strong, tough, something which
can be hardened slightly by hammering but which cannot be hardened
by quenching. It has certain chemical properties, which need not be
described, which allow a skilled chemist to distinguish it without
difficulty and unerringly from the other known elements--nearly
100 of them.

Carbon is another chemical element, written C for short, which is
widely distributed through nature. Carbon also readily combines
with oxygen and other chemical elements, so that it is rarely found
pure; its most familiar form is soot, although the rarer graphite and
most rare diamond are also forms of quite pure carbon. It can also
be readily separated from its multitude of compounds (vegetation,
coal, limestone, petroleum) by the chemist.

With the rise of knowledge of scientific chemistry, it was quickly
found that the essential difference between iron and steel was that
the latter was _iron plus carbon_. Consequently it is an alloy,
and the definition which modern metallurgists accept is this:

"Steel is an iron-carbon alloy containing less than about 2 per
cent carbon."

Of course there are other elements contained in commercial steel,
and these elements are especially important in modern "alloy steels,"
but carbon is the element which changes a soft metal into one which
may be hardened, and strengthe