A Pictorial History of Welding

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A pictorial history of welding as seen

through the pages of the Welding Journal

from 1919 to 1994

• The wars, one of the most severe market crashes

the world has ever seen, the landing of man onthe moon, periods of enormous prosperity, theinvention of electron and laser beamtechnologies, and production lines where robots

help manufacture millions of automobiles, thewelding industry kept rising to the occasion. TheWelding Journal covered these times.



• In the 1920's, electric arc welding was startingto be used in the field to make repairs on costly

equipment. In this picture a welder used barewire steel electrodes to make a repair in asteam shovel dragline bucket.

A pictorial history of welding

• The bare electrode

remained the maintool for electricwelding until theearly 1930s when it

started to bereplaced by thecovered or shieldedmanual arcelectrode.



• Electric welding (shown right)was used on a 33 sleeve weldsfor the flange joints, while the

92 butt joints were made usingoxy-acetylene welding. Theentire line consisted of 12-in.-diam. steam line and a 3-in.-diam. water return line. The

chemistry of the pipe included0.07C, 0.30Mn, 0.045S,0.100P. The electrodescontained 0.011C, 0.032S,0.025O.


• Butt welds and sleeve welds were used in thefabrication of Philadelphia Electric Co.'s 2200-

ft-long steam line in 1922.



• An early structural

design, known as the

Ewertz type of electric

arc welded vessel, was

used to compare the

relative costs andstrengths of welded vs.

riveted shops. This

picture, taken in 1924,shows a 400%

overload on a Ewertz

type of welded vessel.




• In 1929, pipelines were welded using theoxyacetylene process. The necessary cylinders of

oxygen and acetylene are shown here beingdelivered by what could very well have been oneof our nation's earliest welding distributors.




• Back in the old days, a fierce competition developed between the manufacturers and vendors of electric arc andoxyacetylene welding equipment. Here we have welds bent to elongations of 30%. The two specimens on the leftwere made by oxyacetylene welding, while the specimenson the right represent electric arc welds.




• First, the steels didnot have to beoverlapped as they

are when riveting isused, thus saving agreat deal of steel.Second, he said, newwelders could betrained much fasterthan new riveters.And third, weldinglends itself morereadily to productionline assembly.


• Regarded as a "first" at the time, three 10,000-ton cargo shipswere launched simultaneously at Todd Shipbuilding Corp.,South Portland, ME, in 1942. W.H. Hobart, vice president of

Hobart Brothers Co., attributed the feat to three things:



• Without warning and with a report that washeard for at least a mile, the deck and sidesof the S.S. Schenectady, a World War II

tanker, fractured just aft of the bridgesuperstructure on January 16, 1943, whiletied up at pier on Swan Island in Oregon.


•

The shophad beenlaunchedfrom akaiser

shopyardtwo weeks before inPortland,Ore. Thevessel wasrepairedandreturned to

service.



• During World War

II, Americanindustry covered

numerous fronts.

Here, welder is busy at work on a

mass production

line to make

LeTourneauCarryall scrapers.




• Here two men with gun

welding machines at the

Fisher Body Division ofGeneral Motors in

Detroit weld the

component parts into a

strong, shock-resisting

body.


• During the post-World War II years, all of the large

factories had converted from defense to commercial

products once again.



• In this photograph taken from the September 1959 issue

of the Welding Journal, a plasma gun is shown sprayingaluminum oxide to form a thick coating on a shapesimulating a missile nose cone. By James A. Browningwho was the president of Thermal Dynamics Corp.,Hanover, NH.




• In this 1962

photograph, threeelectron beam welds

are being made

simultaneously in a

hard-vacuum chamber

for the welding of

steel and exotic

metals for use on theB-70 bomber and

supersonic aircraft.




• A technician, protected

by a pressurized spacesuit, welds stainlesssteel pieces with anexperimental electron beam gun inside a space

chamber at HamiltonStandard Division,United Aircraft Corp.The same conditionsone would experience ataltitudes of 380,000 ft.were maintained withinthe chamber.




• Welded stainless steel reached a high point in the early1960's when Pittsburgh-Des Moines Steel Co. erected

the famous St. Louis Arch on the banks of theMIssissippi River. The main metal in this structure isType 304 stainless steel.


A i i l hi f ldi



• Construction of the 798-mile-long Alaska pipeline, stretching fromPrudhoe Bay in the north of Valdez in the south. Already concernedabout the effect this pipeline might have on Alaska's wildlife, the

environmentalists were also worried about stories of "thousands ofdefective welds" in the 48-inch-diameter Alaska pipeline. The weldsin question were not defective; they had just not been inspected

properly. All told, 2700 tons of weld consumables were required tomake the 100,000 welds in this massive project. The shielded manual

arc electrode of choice was an E-8010-G filler metal from Thyssen inGermany. The main line pipe was produced in Japanese steel mills.


A i t i l hi t f ldi



• Some 30 miles of gastungsten arc welding was

used for the membranesof each of the threetankers build by Newport News. The filler metalwas Type 308L stainlesssteel. Some 150 Cyber-Tig power sources fromHobart Brothers Co. wereused on this project


• Austenitic stainless steel was the metal of choice as the membranematerial for the liquefied natural gas (LNG) tanks Newport NewsShipbuilding welded in 1979. These "waffle" membranes were calledfor in the Technigaz design from France.




• By 1984, the self-shieldedversion of flux cored arc

welding was becomingmore evident in theerection of high-rise buildings throughout the

country. IN the field, it was proving to be verycompetitive with gas-shielded welding processes.


• Perched high atop the Georgia-Pacific headquartersin Atlanta, a welder is shown depositing a criticalstructural joint. The process was the Innershield

method from The Lincoln Electric Co.<




• By 1988, robots had become

familiar sights on automobilemanufacturing lines all over theworld. The squadron of robotsseen here is used to assist in theresistance spot welding of car bodies. What had started out asa tool-handling contraption wasnow a precise instrumentcapable of vision, touch

sensing, and coordinatedmotion. Robotics is also beingused more and more in arcwelding, both in large and

small manufacturing plants.





• In 1984, CosmonautSvetlana Savitskaya of theSoviet Union used a hand-

held electron beam gun toconduct welding, brazingand spraying experiments inspace. To perform theseexperiments, she spent three

hours "extravehicular" fromSalyut 7, her spaceship.General VladimirDzhanibekov, a fellowcosmonaut, followed her.The EB gun used for this particular job by engineersat the EO. Paton ElectricWelding Institute in Kiev,

Ukraine.


A pictorial histor of elding



SC to weld the 5083 aluminumliquefied natural gas (LNG)tanks for a fleet of ships beingconstructed by GeneralDynamics Corp. in Quincy,Mass. The storage tanks were

fabricated according to theKvaerner-Moss design out of Norway. The plate for this project was rolled at Alcoa's

Davenport, Iowa, Works. Atthe time, it was considered the


largest aluminum plate order in Alcoa's history. The main process of construction was as metal arc welding.

In 1976, an unusual facility was set up outside of Charleston,




• Welding's biggest role in thefabrication of the SpaceShuttle was in the weldingof the liquid oxygen and

liquid hydrogen fuel tanks.The welds were performedusing the variable polarity plasma process from HobartBrothers co. Each externaltank of 2219 aluminumrequired 36,000 linearinches of weld in order to join the 138 separate

sections of metal together.


• Space Shuttle Endeavor lifts off on mission STS-57. On thismission, pilot Brian Duffy soldered 46 connections on a printed circuit board.

A Pictorial History of Welding

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