In the last century, the steel industry experienced a number of epochal innovations. Various of these technologies have revolutionized our processes and products and date back to principles or ideas already formulated very much earlier. The possibility of making a flat steel product in one operation has always been a dream of metallurgists. As long ago as 1866, H. Bessemer registered a patent for a casting machine in which steel was to be cast between two rollers into strip. That the realization of this vision in the form of the twin-roller strip casting process is a subject of relevance today, almost 140 years on, goes to show how long such developments can sometimes take. The underlying technical conditions-in this specific case the process automation and development of materials, for example - need to have reached a stage where a revolutionary idea ultimately evolves into an industrially utilizable process which can compete economically with the conventional production methods.
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