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Harry Brearley, the creator of stainless steel (2016)

The creation of stainless steel took equal parts metallurgy and perseverance.

Inside the steelworks, the action compelled him so much that he spent hours sitting inconspicuously on great piles of coal, breathing through his mouth, watching brawny men shoveling fuel into furnaces, hammering white-hot ingots of iron. To his surprise, he found that if he heated it further—to salmon and yellow—the steel got superhard; so hard that machinists could run their cutting tools two or three times as fast as before, until the blades glowed red, at 1,000 degrees Celsius. Hadfield grumbled in a letter to his American agent, “The material is being tried for a considerable variety of purposes but the people are so slow on this side & inventors here have so many prejudices.” Finally, 10 years after he made it, it was found ideal for railroad tracks.

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