In his late teens Charles Cammell, fourth son of a prosperous father, a shipmaster with Scottish connections, worked in the ironmongery trade in his home town of Hull. He moved to Sheffield in about 1830 when he was 20. Though later it was said he arrived with only £5 in his pocket, his family background makes this rags-to-riches story doubtful. By 1832 he had become a traveller for the 40-year-old file and cutlery business of Ibbotson's of the Globe works. The industrial community he now joined was already firmly dependent on the steel trade, though one very different from that on which his own enterprise was to leave its mark. Output was slight, made in small lots by labour-intensive processes and by a large number of firms.

Uniquely among UK steel centres, Sheffield has owed its existence and importance not to a once-rich mineral endowment, as with south Wales, Teesside or mid-Scotland, but to a heritage of developed human assets, to reputation, ‘atmosphere’ and an unceasing emphasis on innovation in both products and processes. For many generations it had been renowned as a cutlery, tool and steel district. Until the mid-eighteenth century, when the clockmaker Benjamin Huntsman came to the town, most of the blister steel it used came from Newcastle, and was rarely of uniform quality. Huntsman's experiments led to production of cast steel, made in a crucible. For the next century his process dominated the Sheffield scene. Expansion was fostered by growth of the home-demand market but was even more dependent on overseas trade, above all on the large and rapidly expanding United States market.