page_title: Creusot steam hammer
section_title: Description
hierarchical_section_title: Creusot steam hammer / Description
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Dampfhammer in Le Creusot, Postkarte, frühes 20. Jhdt. English: Creusot Steam Hammer, early 20th century postcard Français&#160;: Marteau-pilon du Creusot, carte postale, début du XXème siècle
context_page_description: The Creusot steam hammer is a giant steam hammer built in 1877 by Schneider and Co. in the French industrial town of Le Creusot. With the ability to deliver a blow of up to 100 tons, the Creusot hammer was the most powerful in the world until 1891, when the Bethlehem Iron Company of the United States purchased patent rights from Schneider and built a steam hammer of almost identical design but capable of delivering a 125-ton blow.
  The Creusot hammer is no longer operational, and is a tourist attraction in the town of Le Creusot, where it was built. With few remaining rivals, the hammer today is once again the largest of its kind in the world.
  The Creusot steam hammer was named a Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1981.
context_section_description: The hammer is composed of four distinct parts — the foundation including the anvil, the legs, the steam cylinder and its valves and linkages, and finally, the active mass itself — the piston, piston rod, hammerhead and die.
  The anvil weighed a massive 750 tons, and in order to support the weight and the hammer blows, the machine's foundations were built of solid masonry resting on bedrock 11 meters below the soil. A one-metre thick bed of oak timber topped the masonry foundation and provided the immediate floor for the giant anvil.
  The four legs are hollow cast and rectangular in cross-section. They were originally bolted to plates embedded in the masonry. The legs are 10.25 meters high and connected to one another at the top in a rigid A-frame design by a 30-ton "table", that in its working life both guided the hammerhead and distributed the shock of its blows. One leg supports the operator's platform from which the machine was controlled.
  The steam cylinder itself is 6 meters high and has an inside diameter of 1.9 meters. Steam pressure averaging 5 kg/cm² or 71 psi drove the cylinder upwards through two balanced single-acting slide valves, after which the force of gravity would allow the hammer to fall and deliver a blow.
  The piston had a maximum travel of 5 meters and the piston rod was 35 centimeters in diameter. The hammerhead or tup was interchangeable, with a number of differently shaped dies which may account for the hammer's reported variable force of between 75 and 100 tons. The actual energy delivered may have been in the order of 3.3 million foot-pounds (or 500,000 kilogram-metres).
  Four separate furnaces provided steam power to four adjacent swan-necked cranes, which were used for manipulating the massive 120-ton iron and steel ingots delivered to the hammer for forging. Six Bessemer converters supplied the steel for the ingots, which were transported on a railway line built expressly for the purpose through the works.
  For a comparison of scale, the world's largest modern hydraulic forging presses can apply force of about 80,000 tons.
caption: The Creusot steam hammer at work in its original location
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