Founding Brass: George Stewardson and Extruded Metals

Australian History Memoir Biography Industrial History Engineering Technology Business Entrepreneurship STEM Narrative Non-Fiction

Founding Brass: George Stewardson and Extruded Metals is the only full-length biography of the Australian industrial pioneer who quietly reshaped the global non-ferrous metals trade. In 334 fast-moving pages Robin Stewardson—George’s grandson—traces how a small Adelaide brass-foundry became Extruded Metals, the company whose continuous-extrusion techniques still underpin everything from aerospace hydraulics to high-end architectural trim. Written for curious adults and STEM-minded teens, the book blends family memoir with industrial history, delivering a rare insider’s view of patents, wartime copper shortages, 1950s export drives and the birth of Australia’s modern manufacturing sector.

Collectors value the 2011 first-edition paperback because it draws on unpublished company ledgers, oral histories and private photographs never reproduced elsewhere. Stewardson’s narrative style is anecdotal rather than academic, so readers meet the eccentric metallurgists, risk-taking bankers and colourful shop-floor characters who turned experimental brass rods into a worldwide business. Along the way the book explains technical extrusion processes in plain English, making it a handy primer for engineering students and vintage-machinery enthusiasts alike.

This copy is in very good condition: crisp, unread pages, no inscriptions, no spine creasing, and stored in a smoke-free home—ideal for gifting or for completing a technologist’s library. Whether you’re researching Australian industrial heritage, tracing family connections to the metal trades, or hunting a narrative non-fiction title that reads like a boots-and-all start-up story, Founding Brass offers a satisfying, hard-to-find window into an era when Australian ingenuity punched well above its weight on the world stage.

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