For more than 200 years steelmakers fashioned strips and sheets by drawing hot ingots through rolling mills, then laboriously smoothing and polishing the rough surfaces. In 1921 young, blond, solidly-built Abram Peters Steckel, engineering student, watched sweating men in a wire plant reduce cold rods to thin wire by successive draws through rollers and dies. Mechanically-minded Steckel thought the same idea could be used in reducing steel strips and sheets. He built a crude cold-rolling mill in a friend's garage, went broke.
Then a friend named Venice Lamb, attorney, put up some...
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