Steel pipe has been around longer than most people think. The modern story starts in the early 1800s and reads like this:
1815. William Murdock, a Scottish engineer, joined discarded musket barrels into a continuous line to carry coal gas for London's street lamps. It worked, and suddenly everyone wanted long metal tubes.
1824. James Russell patented a way to make tubes fast and cheap: heat a flat iron strip, fold the edges, weld them with a drop hammer.
1825. Cornelius Whitehouse improved on it with the butt-weld process, heating thin iron sheets and drawing them through a cone so the edges curled up and fused. That process is the ancestor of today's pipe mills.
1832. The first welded pipe works in the United States opened in Philadelphia.
Late 1800s. Seamless pipe arrived. Early methods drilled a hole through a solid cylinder, but keeping the hole centered was hard, so pipes came out uneven. In 1888 an improved method cast the billet around a fireproof brick core, then removed the brick, leaving a clean hole. By 1895 the first seamless plant was running, feeding the booming bicycle industry.
1911. John Moon came up with the continuous process, letting a mill turn out pipe in an unending stream. Most plants adopted it.
