Tytus was born on December 6, 1875 in Middletown, Ohio, where his grandfather, Francis Jefferson Tytus, a native of Virginia who had come to Ohio in 1827, and his father, John Butler Tytus, operated a paper mill. His mother, Minnesota (Ewing) Tytus, was from Fort Wayne, Ind. John was the oldest of four brothers.
After local schooling and preparation at the Westminster School, Dobbs Ferry, N. Y. , he entered Yale, which his father had attended, and received a B. A. degree in English literature in 1897.
He returned to Middletown and began work in the shipping department of the family paper mill.
Since boyhood he had been interested in the mill's machinery; as he later recalled, he was particularly fascinated by the way in which the Fourdrinier machines converted wood pulp into a continuous sheet of paper. After his father's death and the subsequent sale of the family's interest in the paper mill, Tytus went to work for a bridge builder in Dayton, Ohio. His employer, noting his ability to comprehend engineering problems, set him to work on blueprints.
Becoming interested in steelmaking, Tytus in 1904 took a job as a laborer with the American Rolling Mill Company (Armco), which in 1901 had begun operations in his hometown of Middletown, fabricating "black" and galvanized steel sheets. As a "spare hand, " one who took the place of any member of the crew who might be absent, he learned steelmaking firsthand and observed the time-consuming process by which sheets of steel were passed by hand through a succession of wringerlike rolls until they had reached the desired degree of thinness.
Remembering the Fourdrinier machines that produced an unending sheet of paper, Tytus began to study the possibility of designing machinery that would dispense with these separate manual operations and would produce a continuous and uniform sheet of steel. The idea of a continuous-strip rolling process was not new. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a number of English and American steel men had attempted to design a practical continuous mill, but all had failed. The principal problems were determining the exact contours of the successive rolls through which the steel sheets passed and overcoming the tendency of sheets to buckle during the rolling process.
Tytus took on increasing responsibilities in the operation of Armco, which before World War I was beginning various expansion programs.
In 1906 he became superintendent of the company's new plant in Zanesville, Ohio; and in 1909, as operations chief at Middletown, he planned a new mill in that city. Meanwhile, he continued to work at designing a continuous process, aided by the addition of new research facilities at Armco. Progress in the development of electric motors powerful enough to drive the giant rolls envisioned by Tytus, and the increasing demand for steel, especially by the automobile industry, made him confident of eventual success.
The coming of World War I and the immediate postwar demand for steel forced Armco to postpone innovative capital projects, but its acquisition in 1921 of blast furnaces and open hearth furnaces from a financially distressed company in Ashland, Ky. , gave Tytus his opportunity. He persuaded George M. Verity and Armco's board of directors to authorize the construction of a mill at the Kentucky site to test his ideas for a continuous sheet process. Designed by Tytus, with the backing of Charles R. Hook, then general superintendent of Armco, the revolutionary plant began operation in January 1924, its mills linked together in a giant moving line.
After some early breakdowns and repeated testing, the plant began to turn out sheet steel at a rate many times greater than that achieved by the old process, and within three years it was producing 40, 000 tons a month, a figure far in excess of the estimated 18, 000 tons needed to justify the capital investment.
The continuous mill won almost immediate acceptance within the steel industry. Nearly all large companies, under licensing granted by Armco, began to employ Tytus's invention.
By 1940 at least twenty-six continuous mills had been constructed in the United States, at a cost of more than $500, 000, 000. As one consequence, national production of steel rose, consumption increased, and costs fell. Tytus's invention of the continuous mill was a landmark in the history of technology, and it contributed significantly to the growth of the steel industry. But it would be a mistake to attribute to its inventor the rank of genius. Rather, he was a man of singular determination who had at his command the services of money and science; and, like other inventors, he owed much to men who had labored in the field before him. He and his invention were characteristic emanations of an industrial age attuned to science, technology, and expanding markets.
Tytus died in Cincinnati, Ohio, of a coronary thrombosis and was buried in Woodside Cemetery, Middletown, Ohio.
John Butler Tytus, Jr. was the inventor of the first practical wide-strip continuous rolling process for manufacturing steel. This process greatly reduced the cost of manufacturing steel, and was first implemented in a new Armco plant in 1924. By 1940, twenty-six plants had been built. In 1935 he received the Gary Memorial Award from the American Iron and Steel Institute. He died of a heart attack on June 2, 1944. His home in Middletown, Ohio, the John B. Tytus House, was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1976. In 2012 Tytus was inducted into the American Metal Market Steel Hall of Fame, Class of 2012 for his invention of the first workable wide-strip continuous rolling process for making steel.
Although his father had been a Baptist, he became an Episcopalian.
Tytus was a tall and rather handsome man.
On June 27, 1907, he married Marjorie Denny; they had a daughter, Elizabeth, and twin sons, Francis Jefferson and John Butler.
