Page 24 - Welding Robots Technology, System Issues, and Applications

Welding Robots
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Arc welding with the carbon arc and metal arc was developed and resistance
welding became a practical joining process.

In 1881, Auguste De Meritens, working in the Cabot Laboratory (France), used the
heat of an electric arc for joining lead plates for storage batteries. The process was
patented in France by his Russian protégé, Nikolai N. Benardos, which also
secured, with a Russian colleague named Stanislaus Olszewski, a British patent in
1885 and an American patent in 1887. The patents show an early electrode holder.
This was the beginning of carbon-arc welding. Bernardos' efforts were restricted to
carbon arc welding, very popular in the following 20 years, although he was able to
weld iron as well as lead.

In 1890, C.L. Coffin registered the first U.S. patent for an arc welding process
using a metal electrode. This was the first record of a welding process where the
metal, melted from the electrode, was carried across the arc to deposit filler metal
in the joint to make a weld. This neat idea of transferring metal across an arc was
presented, about the same time, by the Russian N.G. Slavianoff, to cast metal in a
mold. Interesting coincidence.

Around 1900, Strohmenger introduced a coated metal electrode in England. The
coating, made of clay or lime, was very thin but sufficient to provide a more stable
arc. Oscar Kjellberg and the ESAB Company, both from Sweden, invented a
covered or coated electrode during the period 1907 to 1914. Stick electrodes were
produced by dipping short lengths of bare iron wire in thick mixtures of carbonates
and silicates, and allowing the coating to dry.

Meanwhile, resistance welding processes were also developed, including spot
welding, seam welding, projection welding and flash butt welding. Elihu
Thompson originated resistance welding in the nineteenth century: his patents are
dated from 1885 to 1900. In 1903, a German named Goldschmidt invented thermite
welding that was first used to weld railroad rails. The first automobile body spot
welded was built by E.G. Budd in Phyladelphia (USA) in 1912.

Gas welding and cutting were perfected during this period as well. The production
of oxygen and later the liquefying of air, along with the introduction of a blow
pipe, or torch, in 1887, helped the development of both welding and cutting.
Before 1900, hydrogen and coal gas were used with oxygen. However, in about
1900 a torch suitable for use with low-pressure acetylene was developed.

World War I brought a tremendous demand for armament production, which means
huge production of heavy and very dissimilar metal parts. Consequently, welding
was pressed into service as a way to respond to those production demands, giving
the opportunity to several companies to appear, both in America and Europe, and
manufacture the necessary welding machines and electrodes.

Immediately after the war in 1919, 20 members of the Wartime Welding
Committee of the Emergency Fleet Corporation under the leadership of Comfort