Steel

US Steel, which came in with a bang in 1901, is going out with a whimper. It has agreed to sell itself to Japan’s Nippon Steel for $14.1 billion, $55 per share in an all-cash deal. While steel is still an indispensable commodity (world production has doubled in the last twenty years, to 1.951 billion tons, about half produced in China), it has long ceased to be the iconic measure of industrial power that it was in the late nineteenth century. Steel — iron with a carefully calibrated amount of carbon added — has been known since ancient times. But it could be made only in small batches, and thus was so expensive to produce that it was almost a semi-precious metal, its use reserved for razors, sword blades and surgical instruments.