COLUMN ONE : Super Steel--the Stuff of Legend? : Industry is cheering the discovery of a versatile ‘new’ metal. But inventors may have stumbled upon a storied 2,000-year-old process that once forged daggers and swords.

Scientists here are seeking better crankshafts, gears and connecting rods to help out America’s struggling industries. They have no official interest in the colorful legacy of romance and mystification that surrounds their work on “superplastic steel.”

“You’ll have to talk to Oleg about that,” said a researcher at the government’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Oleg D. Sherby, 67, is a friendly and enthusiastic professor of metallurgy at Stanford University who has invented a new, malleable kind of steel with so many desirable properties that government and industry have joined forces to commercialize it.

But as this serious work proceeds, the new steel has also reignited a timeless debate among an unlikely collection of blade smiths, sword fanciers, metallurgists, artists and archeologists who wonder just what Sherby’s stuff is.

The delicious but disputed possibility: that he has rediscovered the art of making Damascus steel, a mysterious concoction of iron and, some say, milkweed, that ancient smithies were forging into deadly but beautiful daggers and swords soon after the birth of Christ.

The technique for making genuine Damascus blades--deemed so superior that the formula was jealously guarded--is assumed lost to the ages despite the efforts of some of history’s more brilliant scientists, skilled artisans and shrewd promoters.

“It’s been one of the Holy Grails of metallurgy for the past 200 years,” says Bennet Bronson, curator of Asian anthropology at Chicago’s Field Museum.

If Sherby has indeed discovered how to make true Damascus steel--and voices of dissent are now heard in the land--it was quite by accident. He says he’d scarcely heard of it until his federally sponsored work on “superplasticity” in the 1970s unexpectedly led him into a small but passionate universe of Damascus junkies.

Sherby has since done enough historical and laboratory research to make a strong case that he has indeed uncovered the secret of Damascus.

But he has mostly kept his eye on the industrial possibilities for his superplastic steel, which has the potential to dramatically boost the strength and wear-resistance of steel products and slash the costs of making them.

Since 1988, a team drawn from Lawrence Livermore, steel innovator North Star Steel Co. of Minneapolis and heavy-equipment giant Caterpillar Inc. of Peoria, Ill., has been trying to turn Sherby’s steel into the tough sort of components that “Cat” needs for its bulldozers. The rest of industrial America is watching.

Such steel can be made to flow like taffy into a mold, called a die, and hardened into a perfect mirror of the die itself. This could eliminate the complex machining, cutting and welding that account for 30% of the cost of making steel products. Moreover, the strength--which in conventional steel is normally sacrificed in return for ductility--is instead greater.

“The things we’re doing have rather grand applications,” says William A. Obenchain, manager of the government-industry consortium for the U.S. Energy Department.

Can it be that these modern-day metallurgists are just going back to the future, struggling to equal the primitive work of the distant past? That would be no great shock to smithies, who have always distrusted high science in favor of the intangibles of instinct and feel in the “beating and heating” of metal.

“The flame, the color of the steel, I adjust these by kan (intuition),” a noted modern-day Japanese blade smith, Akihira Miyairi, has written. “People say sword smiths have secret formulas. I think it is kan, and this sort of thing can never be explained.”

Many Charlatans

Of course, this inexplicability also makes it easier for people to claim they have rediscovered how to make Damascus steel. The centuries have seen some charlatans, says the mildly heretical Bronson, who suspects Damascus swords were overrated. He says a lot of hokum has been written on the subject.

“There can be few other themes in the history of technology that have attracted so much romantic, carefree speculation,” he says.

The raw material for the storied blades was a type of steel, known as wootz, cast secretly in crucibles in India and sold in one-pound “cakes.” It was said that milkweed was added to impart carbon to the brew. The steel was exported to artisans in Persia, Turkey and elsewhere, who would hammer the cakes into blades in a process which, like the sword’s reputation, has perhaps gotten more fanciful in the telling.

The surviving literature speaks of heating the blade to the color of the rising desert sun, then plunging it into the body of a muscular slave to give it strength. Some formulas called for dousing the blade in the urine of red-headed boys or, better yet, of 3-year-old goats fed only on ferns. One advised burying it in the belly of a fat Nubian slave.

The result was a blade whose texture was graced with hundreds or thousands of intricate, meandering markings. The cause of the markings remains a mystery, but their beauty has captivated people down through the centuries.

The weaponry spread with Islam, historians say, and came to be known as Damascus steel after the ancient Syrian capital where Westerners first encountered it. The fine markings on the blades were called damasks, the term now used to describe fabrics with similar patterns.

Damascus blades achieved great fame as their use spread through the Middle East and Europe over some 1,500 years. The swords were said to be so unimaginably sharp as to slice a thin piece of gauze floating in midair, yet hold their edge from one beheading to the next.

But only sketchy versions of supposed recipes for Damascus steel were passed down. In the 19th Century, as the Industrial Revolution created a huge new demand for steel, several leading British, French and Russian scientists--including Michael Faraday, inventor of the electric motor--tried to rediscover the process of making Damascus steel.

Hoarded by Collectors

Perhaps hoping to profit from the steel’s commercial potential, they too put few of their findings in writing. Skeptics satirized their efforts as a dubious attempt to capitalize on a then-current vogue for “damascened” metals.

Today, the genuine Damascus swords exist mostly in private collections or museums, especially in India, Russia, England, Germany and the Middle East, although they can turn up anywhere. A Florida man has a big collection, and Stanford’s Sherby says he found one in an antique shop in Palo Alto.

“See the dull blue tint to the steel? Beautiful,” he says, holding a saber to the light during a recent conversation at his home near the Stanford campus.

The Damascus connection grew out of Sherby’s work under a federal research contract in the mid-1970s with a colleague, Jeffrey Wadsworth, in the area of materials science called superplasticity.

Metallurgists have learned that under the right conditions, numerous materials can be made “superplastic,” meaning that they will flow “plastically,” almost like molasses. Ceramics and alloys based on nickel, titanium and aluminum are being made superplastic and formed into such commercial products as artificial hip joints. The U.S., Japanese and other governments are chasing the technology.

There is even a world record for superplasticity, held by an alloy of bronze and aluminum stretched to about 80 times its original length.

Sherby and Wadsworth discovered that they could make steel superplastic by roughly doubling the amount of carbon--from less than 1% in conventional steels to as much as 2%--and subjecting it to the right combination of heating, cooling and forming. It could then be stretched to 11 times its normal size (compared with conventional steels that can be elongated by only about 8%), made to withstand much higher pressure and achieve extreme hardness without becoming brittle.

Great stuff, in other words. They collected several patents and embarked on the metallurgical lecture circuit. Before long, Sherby says, they encountered a sword buff.

“Hey, Sherby, all you’ve done is rediscover Damascus steel,” the man said.

Sherby and Wadsworth spent several years wooing industry with their new steel while poring over the history books. It appeared the internal structure of their superplastic steel was consistent with the old blades.

They attempted to duplicate the fine markings embedded in genuine Damascus blades. Though their results weren’t as pretty, they wrote scholarly articles declaring their belief that where others had failed over the centuries, they had succeeded.

But had they?

Blacksmith’s Forge

Enter the unlikely team of Al Pendray, a Florida blacksmith who has shod five Kentucky Derby winners in his long career, and John D. Verhoeven, a metallurgist at Iowa State University.

In testimony to the lure of the slippery Damascus tale, Pendray and Verhoeven have spent several years’ worth of their spare time banging away at the secret in Pendray’s forge in Williston, Fla., and at Verhoeven’s metallurgy lab in Ames, Iowa.

Now, they are debunking the idea of any link between Sherby’s superplastic steel and genuine Damascus steel. Instead, it is they who have rediscovered how to make the exotic material and duplicate the true damasks, Pendray and Verhoeven politely insist.

This debate is taking place on the otherwise worlds-apart pages of Materials Characterization, a scientific journal, and the latest issue of Blade, a magazine for an eclectic audience of American knife nuts.

Unlike Sherby and Wadsworth, the Verhoeven-Pendray team actually cut three genuine Damascus swords into pieces for better analysis. One graced the office wall of an Iowa State chemistry professor until he learned it was worth $5,000 and merited a tax deduction if donated to the research effort.

For his part, Sherby says he could never bring himself to carve up a Damascus sword.

Verhoeven says their analysis showed a different internal structure than the superplastic steel: “Their superplastic materials do not look like Damascus steel. We don’t believe it’s the method used by ancient blacksmiths.”

Sherby stands by his theory. But after a long chat with Pendray--they ran into each other at the May annual meeting of the Bladesmith Society of America in Washington, Ark., birthplace of the Bowie knife--he admits Pendray’s work must be taken seriously. The debate continues.

Like others before him, Pendray refuses to divulge all the particulars of the latter-day wootz he cooks up in his shop. Specifically, he won’t say what kind of green leaves he uses to add carbon. His wootz includes smidgens of manganese, silicon, sulfur, phosphorus, copper and nickel, as did the hacked-up Damascus blades they inspected. It also has some oyster shells.

“I just throw stuff in the pot,” he says. “But I don’t believe in this urine-from-the-goat stuff.”

Sherby says respectfully, “Good old Al makes his own wootz from ground zero.”

Pendray and Verhoeven have documented their technique for forging genuine Damascus blades out of the wootz, and claim success about 40% of the time in producing a blade whose damasks are in the same league with the genuine Damascus steels.

Toward what end?

Though people will apparently pay many thousands of dollars for a nice custom-made sword, many blade smiths make that sort of money with a “pattern-welding” process that simulates the Damascus appearance but isn’t genuine.

“I won’t ever sell enough knives to pay for all the time I’ve spent on this,” says Pendray. “It’s silly because there’s no real value to what we’re aiming toward. We’ve filed for a patent on our process, but that and 25 cents will get us a cup of coffee. But how many times in life do you get to work on something that nobody else understands?”

The nice thing about the quest for the Damascus sword is that it could last until the end of time. Bronson, the skeptical archeologist, says the old blades varied wildly and there might be no such thing as a true Damascus sword or a true wootz.

“A very large proportion of the superlatives bestowed on wootz and Damascus steels originated in romanticism and commercial hype,” he says. On the other hand, “a surprising amount of metallurgical progress has been made trying to crack the perhaps nonexistent secret of Damascus steel.”

Indeed, if anything, rival Verhoeven says, Sherby’s steel is not superior to the mysterious old blades--just different.

Sherby finally saw his efforts recognized with the formation of the government-industry consortium in 1988. Now semi-retired, he is a consultant to the program.

The first and biggest project in the Energy Department’s “metals initiatives” program, the consortium has become the model for a growing role by former weapons researchers in public-private partnerships to make U.S. industry more competitive.

Consortium Goals

This consortium is considered ideal: It has the Livermore National Laboratory’s materials experts to play with Sherby’s steel, North Star Steel to cast the steel in real mills and Caterpillar as the final customer whose needs for real products are driving the whole project.

They have narrowed their search to about 10 compositions of the steel to satisfy Caterpillar’s need for extreme wear resistance in its components, says Richard Landingham, a section leader at Livermore’s materials science department.

The trick is to maintain the superplastic properties as the team members “scale up” to commercial volumes. They started with 10-pound pieces of steel, or “heats,” and are now casting 1,000-pound heats. The final step is a 40-ton heat, to be cast at a North Star mill near Detroit this summer.

Caterpillar’s head of engineering and research materials, Egon Wolff, won’t say much about it: “We have successes and failures. We are not ready to announce anything.”

Unless Sherby’s steel can be made at high volumes, it can’t compete economically with more conventional steels that are formed by machine tools and other sophisticated equipment. Success for Caterpillar would point to much wider applications, and Livermore is discussing a possible research consortium on superplasticity with General Motors.

“My gut instinct is there’s a 50-50 chance that this will be an important material within 10 years,” says Sherby.

But whether this turns out to be a breakthrough to the ancient past seems irrelevant in these commercial circles. Frankly, the consortium doesn’t give a damn about Damascus steel.

Says the Energy Department’s Obenchain, “I don’t know whether Damascus steel was superplastic steel or not. If Sherby says it was, maybe it was. . . . He is not a member of this consortium.”