STEEL, ENGRAVING ON. This highly important art has been recently revived and perfected by our countryman Mr. Warren, an engraver in London. Mr. Warren unfortunately died in the middle of his labours, but the art has been generally introduced into Great Britain by Messrs. Perkins and Fairman, two American gentlemen, who, along with Mr. Heath, an eminent London engraver, formed an establishment in 1819 for printing bank notes and engravings for popu lar works from steel plates.
The following history of Mr. Warren's experiments and discoveries was drawn up by a committee of the Society of Arts.
" Some of the earliest specimens of engraving upon steel were produced by Albert Durer. There are four plates etched by this artist, impressions of which exist in the British Museum, which in all books of art are recorded as having been executed on steel; of these one has the date 1510 inscribed upon it. Since that time attempts have been made occasionally to em ploy steel instead of copper as a material to engrave upon, but apparently with little success, on account principally of the great hardness of the material, which in a short time blunted and destroyed the tools which were made use of.
Steel exists in two states, the elastic and the brittle, the former being considerably softer than the latter; of the elastic steel a saw blade may be considered as an example, and in fact pieces of saw blade were the material upon which nearly all the first attempts have been made, of late years, to revive a practice which, if successful, offered so many advantages to the artist and to the public. Mr. Reimbach, a few years ago, executed an engraving on a block or thick plate of steel, but met with so many difficulties in the execu tion that his experiment remained insulated, and pro duced no sensible effect on the art of engraving.
Mr. Warren, in his early youth, was much em ployed in engraving on metal for the use of calico printers and gunsmiths, and the experience thus acquired induced him afterwards to turn his mind to the subject with a view of applying it to the fine arts. It was suggested to him by Mr. Gill, that
the Birmingham artists, in the manufacture of ar ticles of ornamented steel, subjected the steel, when rolled into sheets, to the process of decarbonization, by which it was converted to pure soft iron. It was then made into the required instrument, the ornamental work engraved or impressed upon it, and it was then by cementation with the proper materials, again converted supetficially to steel, and thus rendered capable of acquiring the highest polish.
In the attempt, however, to apply this process to plates for the engraver's use, two opposite difficulties occurred. A plate of steel of the same thickness as that of common copper plate, when thoroughly decarbonized, and thus reduced to the state of very soft iron, yields readily to the graver and other tools, and, especially, is susceptible of the process of knock ing up; this consists of scraping out the error, and afterwards striking the under side of the plate with a punch and hammer, in order to raise the cavity to the general level, and thus allow the artist to take the error out without occasioning any unevenness at the engraved surface: it was found, however, that plates of the thinnesss requisite for this operation, and of the usual dimensions, were very liable to warp in the last, or re-carbonizing process, and were thus ren dered incapable of giving perfect impressions. If, in order to avoid this disadvantage, blocks, i. e. plates of three or four times the ordinary thinness, were made use of, the warping indeed was prevented, but at the same time the process of knocking up became impracticable and it was necessary, in order to remove an error or defective part, to grind out the surface, or to drill a hole from the under surface almost through the plate, and then, by forcing in a screw, to raise that part of the face which was immediately above it. This latter process, however, was so tedious and difficult, as exceedingly to detract from the advantage of substituting steel for copper.