To argue that even at the turn-of-the-century the purchasers of steel products had no idea what they were buying (and didn't employ chemists and metallurgists to confirm) is just silly.
To suggest that anyone here made such an argument is even sillier. I would be interested in knowing what prompted this absurd statement???
However, there are examples of steel purchasers making poor decisions when purchasing steel. As we have discussed here in the past, the grade of steel used to fabricate the hull of the Titanic was not the best choice for side-swiping an iceberg in frigid salt-water.
Modern metallurgical testing equipment and methods are much more capable of confirming that testing a single sample of gun barrel steel will only tell you about the steel in that particular heat. Barrels with the same stamp that were produced a year earlier or later may be quite different. But fortunately, that variability has little bearing on the ability of a shotgun to handle standard loads.
