the vintage chisels that warren likes are softer. In my opinion, if you can grind and sharpen a ward chisel from 60 years later, they're not as good because the ward is pretty much the same thing, but with more edge strength. The fineness of the steel is the same. 

I think the seaton chest chisels are nifty. I'm going to make four more of that style shortly, but they are not as good at being a chisel as the ward chisel, and the early 1800s butcher chisels and others of the type are very good chisels, but they're not better than mid and late 1800s english chisels.

What the early 1800s chisels do offer is being on the lower end of hardness before a chisel is soft enough to roll, and also having a composition that doesn't hold a wire edge obnoxiously, which is also a good indication of being able to shed very tiny damage instead of allowing it to propagate a foil. 

It is true that anything that I've gotten that's high hardness in the early 1800s or really high hardness in the mid 1800s doesn't perform better. 

You can still find those older chisels on ebay, but you have to know what they look like (marks, etc) to find the really old ones instead of just buying a more recent firmer chisel. it's not uncommon to find early 1800s chisels that would be better if they were harder. 

there's sort of a golden age for everything. 

Chisels - mid to late 1800s. Early 1800s are a softer version of similar quality otherwise.

Laminated wooden plane irons - mid to late 1800s. Early 1800s are a softer version of similar quality otherwise. 

Saws - late 1800s to early 1900s. Saw plates are nicely made before that but hardness is often inconsistent - from a little soft to file-destroying in the same plate isn't uncommon. 

Razors - turn of the 20th century through early mid 1900s (and another good while after that if japanese made western style razors)

Files - early 1900s, especially for really neatly made files. 

when industrial process is figured out to replicate what's being done by hand and do the bulk work quickly without compromise, that always seems to be about the top, and then cost cut follows. 

I'm guessing a little bit on the files because it's not that easy to find unused files. Unlike chisels, files get consumed and the range of acceptable hardness for metal. 

I've had a lot of chisels, files saws and plane irons and am not guessing at any of the above, though. one of the things that sent me down this road long ago was a protracted discussion about how much worse steel was before current steel (it wasn't, especially in steel at the eutectoid limit or a little above or below), and terms like fine grained for a lot of the air hardening alloys (it isn't other than the matrix steels - like 3V and AEB-L - matrix steels always or almost always short carbon a little bit to prevent formation of big carbides with other elements). I had an early 1800s butcher plane iron under the microscope and compared to what an A-2 iron looks like, it looked like it was made of fine clay instead of sand for the A-2 iron. The worn edge was uniform. the same is true for everything through O1 and including water hardening steels that have *a little* bit of tungsten or something else. O1 seems to be the limit for tungsten before grain coarsens and carbides are poorly dispersed (japanese blue has a big problem with this). 

that's more depth than is needed here. 

the bottom line is finding the sweet spot in a steel, matching it to an abrasive and getting it to wear instead of chip or deflect. After that, abrasion resistance can be a fair trade off, or it can be less than fair, and branching out into more steels has a lot to do with what their qualities are in the region where edge strength is good in a tool. 

it is, unfortunately, not that simple to make blanket rules - like more toughness is better, finer grain is better, etc, as O1 is finer grained than 26c3, but it isn't tougher and isn't stronger, and it doesn't hold a fine edge better. Razors are made of similar steel - it's stronger than the finest grain steels and makes a better razor than a lower carbon steel that can't reach teh same strength level.