The first ferrochrome produced thus had very high carbon content.

The only kind of stainless steel that could have had any chances of being made with such a ferrochrome would have been a martensitic stainless steel for knife blades.

In any case that kind of ferrochrome was not suitable for researching the properties of chromium alloys. The acceptable compositions for alloys like stellite or various kinds of stainless steels have all been discovered, after many experiments, only by using relatively pure aluminothermic chromium, which was a strictly necessary ingredient for enabling chromium alloy research.

Only after the required composition of a kind of stainless steel was understood and only if it was determined that such a composition can be reached by mixing ferrochrome with iron, the manufacturing process was adjusted for using cheaper ferrochrome instead of pure chromium.

Today there exists low-carbon ferrochrome, which is suitable for making most kinds of stainless steels, but even now the low-carbon ferrochrome is much more expensive than the high-carbon ferrochrome from which only martensitic stainless steel can be made.