What makes steel such a universally used metal? If we didn’t have steel, what’s the next most universally applicable metal?
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Steel has two great things going for it:
* It’s strong
* It’s cheap
This is actually why ironwork ingredients become popular in the first place; early ironwork was probably worse than bronze at the same time, but iron was more common than copper or tin.
Iron and carbon (the main ingredients of steel) are both very abundant. For reasons related to how nuclear fusion works(!), iron is the most common metal on Earth and the second most common in the crust. Aluminum, the most common metal in the crust, is more expensive to make and not as strong in many ways, though it other ways it is stronger and lighter. (As an aside, aluminum is more abundant in the crust despite being less abundant on the planet because iron is heavier and so sank down further when the Earth was still young and hot and mostly liquidy).
Still, steel has a good combination of strength, hardness, and flexibility, and we know how to make different kinds with lots of different properties very well.
If we didn’t have iron, aluminum is probably the most likely substitute, as it’s also strong and relatively inexpensive. We could probably develop alloys with all kinds of different properties, except magnetism (generally speaking, only iron, nickel, and cobalt can be magnetic).
The thing is that aluminum is impossible to purify from ore in large quantities before electricity, but we’ve been making some form of steel for about 2000 years and iron at least 2000 years before that!
Before about 150 years ago, steel was not yet cheap and people used wrought iron and cast iron for similar applications (like making railways, bridges, some large buildings, etc), though they weren’t as good.
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