A world with no steel structures in it would be unrecognizable as modern in any

meaningful way. Steel is the predominant material used all over the planet for the
construction of anything that needs to be strong and enduring: skyscrapers, railroad
tracks, bridges, automobile frames, and countless household tools that have to
tolerate a lot of stress, wear and tear.

Carbon steel is a kind of steel containing amounts of the element carbon, which you
perhaps recognize from other domains of study as a very common and versatile atom.

Changing the amounts of carbon in carbon steel, which never rises above
approximately 2.0 percent, can drastically change the steel's properties; high-carbon
steel is a variant that, despite being brittle by industry standards, has become
indispensable across countless walks of everyday human life.

What Is Steel?
Steel is not a metal but an alloy or a mixture of metals. It consists overwhelmingly of
the metallic element iron (Fe), which is not only essential for construction but is
required for the formation of the oxygen-carrying red blood cells in your body.

When iron is heated to very high temperatures, such as 1,300 °C, the lattice structure
formed by its adjoining atoms changes shape and allows other elements, such as
carbon, to in effect slop through the cracks and infiltrate the lattice. When the lattice
cools, the other elements are in a sense baked into the lattice at regular intervals,
becoming a part of the lattice and changing the material's properties.

 Besides the base element iron and of course some amount of carbon in many
instances, other elements found in steel include manganese, cobalt,
silicon and chromium. 

Types of Carbon Steel

Carbon steel, as you can probably gather from the title of this article, comes in forms
graded by their specific carbon content. Low-carbon steel is that which contains less
than 0.25 percent of carbon; medium-carbon steel contains 0.25 percent to 0.55
percent carbon; and high-carbon steel is every other kind of carbon steel.

Low-carbon steel is not as hard as higher-carbon varieties, but is also less brittle.
Although it is probably hard for you to think of any kind of steel as "soft," you can
probably think of differences in how different steel objects feel even as you read this,
without ever having known that this was likely because of their different carbon
content.