The Seamless Tube and American Steel

About one block from here, in the eighteen nineties, an engineer named Ralph C. Stiefel is credited with developing a rotary piercing process for making seamless steel tubing. The technique used rollers to bore a hole through a solid billet of hot steel, creating a tube with no seam and no weld, stronger than welded tube.

Stiefel helped found the Ellwood Weldless Tube Company on the strength of that invention. That company grew and was eventually absorbed into the National Tube Division of United States Steel, one of the largest industrial enterprises in American history. Seamless tubing became essential to oil drilling, boilers, and later to aviation and automotive manufacturing. A single invention made in this corner of western Pennsylvania quietly underpinned much of the twentieth century's industrial infrastructure.