At the end of the 19th Century, Andrew Carnegie led the creation of industrialized American steel. Following his adoption of the Bessemer process to mass produce affordable steel, the nation’s infrastructure boomed. As a direct result of abundant, readily available steel, buildings grew taller, bridges extended and railroads crisscrossed the nation with greater durability.

The Model T, widely considered the world’s first affordable automobile, was made possible by steel. Its inventor, Henry Ford, like Carnegie, was an advocate of material engineering. The Model T’s front axle and all of the car’s gears were forged from vanadium steel alloy.

Today, our infrastructure – roads, bridges, buildings and cars – are all built with steel. The complex mechanisms that enable global trade and power the global economy depend on airplanes, ships and trains that are built with steel. Remove steel and modern America would be unrecognizable, long destroyed by Mother Nature or left behind by stronger, more advanced nations.

America is often considered great because of its intangible principles: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But America is also great because of the very real, very tangible benefits of steel: jobs created, products invented and infrastructure built.
It’s the steel of America’s spine that protects this great nation from war and human life could not survive without it.

Aligned with the forward progress of humanity, steel is the most recycled material in America. More than 60 percent of new steel is made from recycled scrap metal, a product of the last 30 years of innovation. Even alternative energy needs steel.

American steel is the culmination of four thousand years of dedication to the process that strips the impurities from raw iron and alloys the necessary elements to produce different grades of steel. Manufactured at lower costs than at any point in history, steel made today is stronger and lighter – key characteristics of a safe, energy-efficient building material.

Highly engineered from different metallic components for a variety of functional purposes, steel is the most durable, sustainable product man has ever created. It can handle stress, is formable and can be flexible without breaking.

Steel has stood the test of time, aging gracefully against the worst hurricanes, earthquakes and tsunamis nature can muster. Steel makes the best roof over our heads, frames of our trucks, cages of our automobiles and supports our bridges. America makes the best steel on earth.