Firth Brown Steels

In 1908 the two companies came together and established the Brown Firth Research Laboratories and it was here, in 1912, under the leadership of Harry Brearley they developed high chrome stainless steel.

With land available they moved to a large site in Savile Street, Sheffield, adjacent to the works set up by John Brown.

It was named Norfolk Works and had crucible furnaces, a file making shop and what was, at the time, the largest rolling mill in Sheffield.

In the 1850s and '60s Thomas Firth supplied Samuel Colt with most of the iron and steel used at his firearms factories both at Hartford Connecticut and the short-lived facility in Pimlico, London.

Mark, whilst at his Norfolk Works, suffered a stroke on 16 November 1880 and died at his Sheffield home 12 days later; he was buried in the General Cemetery.

Over the years the emphasis moved to the manufacture of railway track, made from steel provided by the new Bessemer process, and later to rail coach springs.

In 1934 the stainless steel business, based at the Staybrite Works, Sheffield, was split off as a jointly-owned company with English Steel Corporation Ltd. and was re-incorporated as Firth-Vickers Stainless Steels Ltd.[1] In 1936, in an attempt to extend and diversify its business interests they bought a considerable number of shares in Westland Aircraft Ltd. of Yeovil and the following year they purchased Markham & Co., of Chesterfield a company well known for its machinery, especially its winding engines and ancillary machinery for the mining industry, and tunnelling machines, which were used in excavations for the London and Moscow Undergrounds and the Paris Métro.

In 1982 Johnson Firth Brown and its near neighbour, British Steel Corporation's River Don Works, amalgamated to form Sheffield Forgemasters, with a 50:50 division of the shares between JFB and the government.

[citation needed] In the late 1890s a spate of company mergers left John Brown's in the position where it could be forced out of the lucrative Admiralty market unless it could find another way for its products to be sold and used by the Government.

During the first decade of the 20th century, the company succeeded becoming a leader in marine engineering technology with the development of the Brown-Curtis turbine, the propelling machinery chosen by the Royal Navy for many of its major warships.

In 1967, as the Cunard liner Queen Elizabeth 2 neared completion, the shipyard became part of Upper Clyde Shipbuilders but this was the beginning of the end, in 1971 UCS went into liquidation.

The well told story is that Brearley noticed in his sample bin one of his pieces which had not shown signs of rusting after being exposed to air and water.

Although Harry Brearley resigned from the Brown Firth Laboratories in 1915, following a disagreement over patent rights, the research continued under the direction of his successor, Dr. W. H. Hatfield.

It is he who is credited with the development, in 1924, of a stainless steel which is still the widest-used alloy of this type, the so-called "18/8" – Staybrite, which in addition to chromium, includes nickel in its composition.