Iron and steel industry

“ One naturally wonders how it is possible to mine and carry these ores to the shipping ports of Duluth, Superior, Two Harbors, Marquette, Ashland, Escanaba, etc., put them aboard ore carrying boats, transport them by steam power to Milwaukee, Chicago, Gary, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburg, Buffalo, and the many other iron centers and convert them into iron and steel at a profit. This, of course, is only possible because of the inventive genius of man. For every operation ingenious machinery has been constructed which has brought the cost of such operations to its lowest terms. ”

“ Steel has no fiber and for this reason it cannot be split as was the wrought iron bar shown in the illustration of page 92.
It will have been noticed that only small amounts of iron can be refined at one time. This, indeed, has been the unfortunate part of wrought iron manufacture, for it may readily be seen that production of any such material in lots as small as a quarter ton results in labor costs which are almost prohibitive in these days of machine-made goods. Not only is the output of a furnace small but much skill and judgment are necessary for the production of a high grade product. ”

“ Of recent years, mild steel has been the great competitor of wrought iron. With marvelous energy, skill, and much capital the manufacturers of Bessemer and open-hearth steels have adapted their products very well to the needs of the iron user, while the enormous tonnages turned out in short time by use of ingenious furnaces and other devices has resulted in a low cost of production. ”

“ It was only after the next great advance that we found man utilizing iron for his purposes of civilization. This metal, which with us is so common, was in those days very expensive, so much so that it could be used only for purposes of war and as the gifts of kings.
But the world was traveling fast and it was not long before the iron-carbon alloy, steel, was produced. Even so, many hundreds of years elapsed before the present wonderful age was ushered in through the great inventions of Henry Bessemer and the Siemens brothers. ”

“ And how many of the materials and articles which we wear, use, and have about us constantly would be in any way possible without the wealth of steel machinery and tools which are available and absolutely necessary for their production?
16The iron industry is often spoken of as the barometer of a people’s civilization. If all iron and iron products and their influence upon the world should be obliterated, it seems impossible that we could be even started on the road to civilization. ”

“ Almost every civilized country has ore enough that it does pretty well. With many the trouble is that the ore has objectionable constituents or that supply of cheap fuel is not available. Germany has large deposits of iron ore, but until the invention of the basic Bessemer process about 1870 she was handicapped because of the high phosphorus content of her ore. The basic processes, both Bessemer and open-hearth, allow of the removal of this phosphorus during the conversion into steel, and they therefore brought Germany to the front as an iron producer. ”

“ However, during the melting down of the charge the steel scrap becomes molten and its constituents merge with those 186of the other iron materials charged. We get out of the cupola, then, a mixture which, disregarding the losses and gains due to the air of the blast, the fuel, etc., is an average of the materials charged. We, therefore, no longer have any steel, but a cast iron which has a somewhat lower silicon, phosphorus and carbon than the softer cast irons. The greater strength of the alloy is due to its composition and only indirectly to the fact that steel was used in its production. ”

“ We still speak of boiler iron, railroad iron, iron ships, etc., but these names are reminiscent, for in the construction of modern boilers and modern ships, steel is used exclusively. In the past decade it is probable that no railroad rails even for the smallest and cheapest of tracks have been made of anything but steel.
The last half of the nineteenth century has been one of triumph of steel manufacture and production in America, and at the present time the United States stands head and shoulders above any other nation in this industry. ”

“ On the other hand, for the open-hearth process can be used pig iron of widely varied character and composition and, further, large percentages of low-priced steel scrap can be utilized in the charges; as no air is blown through the metal and little comes in contact with it, the conversion takes place quietly and smoothly and with much less loss by oxidation, the yield of steel usually being from 90 to 97 per cent of the metal charged as against 83 to 87 per cent which is the yield by the Bessemer process ”

“ Our steel industry is thus another triumph of American inventive skill, made possible by the richness of our mineral resources and the racial energy of our people. An elementary scientific discovery introduced the great steel age. Steel, of course, is merely iron which has been refined—freed from certain impurities, such as carbon, sulphur, and phosphorus. We refine our iron and turn it into steel precisely as we refine our sugar and petroleum. ”

“ It will resist great shock and can be severely battered and bent without breaking. It has about 75 per cent or more of the tensile strength of mild steel and because of the cheapness of its castings the malleable iron industry has developed wonderfully. About a million tons of this product are produced here each year.
Naturally malleable iron castings are used where a material with properties intermediate between cast iron and steel will suffice. Such are castings for railroad cars, for reapers, binders, and other agricultural machines, pipe fittings, and the cheaper grades of tools. ”

“ We have several times referred to the debt which civilization owes to iron and steel structural materials, machinery and tools and particularly to those tools which have hardened cutting edges. Almost every one knows that hardened cutting edges are imparted to tools by sudden cooling in water or oil from a good red heat. Probably most of us, too, know that the blacksmith can again soften such tools by reheating to the same red heat and allowing them to cool slowly. ”

“ As fortune has withheld from Kelly and from this country credit which was deserved, it is desirable to tell briefly the part which he had in the development of this process that with a single furnace converts pig iron into steel at the rate of a thousand tons in 24 hours and first made mild steel available as a building material. ”

“ The top part which contains the pipe is cut off and goes back to the furnace to be remelted. It is termed “discard.”
The big steel makers themselves shape most of their steel into such finished products as rails, plates, rods, and wire. Some of it is by them reduced from the ingot into intermediate “blooms,” “billets,” “bars,” etc., and sold in this form for the manufacture of axles, drop forgings and the hundreds of products which we each day see. ”

“ This was not only because of the American Steel Company’s competition; the steel industry as a whole was running wild. There was no controlling it. For a year or two the demand for steel would exceed the utmost supply at prices which made a steel mill more profitable than a gold pocket. Then new mills would appear everywhere at once and presently, although there never could be enough steel really, the bowl would slop over from sheer awkwardness. ”

“ As the basis for its cast iron, many thousands of tons of pig iron are each year used direct from the blast furnaces. The raw materials come in railroad cars or by boat. The inspector who represents the metallurgical department enters each car and inspects the materials, taking from each a representative sample for analysis. ”

“ For ages iron workers had obtained the finer metal by applying this heat in the form of charcoal, never once realizing that unlimited quantities of another fuel existed on every hand. The man who first suggested that so commonplace a substance as air, blown upon molten pig iron, would produce the intensest heat and destroy its impurities, made possible our steel railroads, our steel ships, and our steel cities. When William Kelly, an owner of iron works near Eddyville, Kentucky, first proposed this method in 1847, he met with the ridicule which usually greets the pioneer inventor. ”

“ The high phosphorous content of southern pig iron prevents the use of the cheaper Bessemer process which is used on the low phosphorous pig iron of the northern district and the fact that no Bessemer steel industry exists in the South to furnish the scrap required in the straight open-hearth process prevents the economical use of this process in the South, a disadvantage which does not exist in the North, where scrap is available. ”

“ The production of wrought iron has been a diminishing industry for many years, while that of steel increases. Though the plant employed for both is alike in essential principles of design, the growth in the use of steel has revolutionized the practice, chiefly on account of the more massive dimensions in which steel sections are rolled. ”

“ The development of the world's productive resources during the 19th century, accelerated in general by major innovations in the field of power, transportation, and textiles, was retarded by the occurrence of certain bottlenecks. One of these affected the flow of suitable and economical raw materials to the machine tool and transportation industries: in spite of a rapid growth of iron production, the methods of making steel remained as they were in the previous century ”

“ But future historians may well be tempted to substitute the word steel for iron, for it is an undoubted fact that improved processes of manufacture, and the resulting easy and cheap production, are causing steel to be widely substituted for its parent metal. In railways, steel rails are now almost entirely replacing iron ones, and that modification of the metal known as ‘mild steel’ is finding great favour just now among shipbuilders. ”

“ Now in the series of operations, the blast-furnace, puddling and crucible processes, through which the iron passes from the state of ore to that of crucible tool steel, it is so difficult to detect just which are the conditions essential to excellence in the final product that, once a given procedure has been found to yield excellent steel, every one of its details is adhered to by the more cautious ironmasters, often with surprising conservatism. ”

“ Among the improved processes invented of late years for the manufacture of steel are those of Heath, Mushet, and Bessemer. The last promises to effect before long an entire revolution in the iron and steel trade. By it the crude metal is converted by one simple process, directly as it comes from the blast-furnace. ”

“ Whenever we have the good fortune to intersect India with railroads, steel-iron will be among the number of our enlarged imports.
The hard and elastic qualities of steel, known as “temper,” are obtained by heating and then cooling rapidly. For this purpose baths of mercury and of boiling oil are used. Some waters are supposed to have peculiar virtues for tempering steel.
Case-hardening, a process much used for tools and plough-shares, consists in superficially hardening cast iron or wrought iron by heating it in a charcoal crucible, and so converting it into steel. ”

“ That steel should so speedily overcome the initial difficulties incident to the introduction of every new material, adduces important evidence in its favour. In shipbuilding, for example, the inconvenience and delay occasioned by employing steel side by side with iron presented a formidable barrier to its use, the alternate demand for iron and steel built vessels causing no small confusion in the yards. The gradual and, before long, probable abandonment of iron in this class of constructions, is rapidly enabling shipbuilders to lay themselves out for steel, and steel only. ”

“ Gold and silver are now secured from ores so poor as to have rendered them of no value a hundred years ago. The Bessemer process of steel making (1856) has revolutionized the world, and made possible railroads and steamships. The basic Bessemer process of making steel from pig-iron rich in phosphorus, has opened up rich mines of iron ore hitherto valueless. ”

“ The production of iron remained nearly constant, and the production of steel increased by one-half, but the metal was urgently needed for military purposes, the shops that worked it up were turned into military establishments, and their products were in large part withdrawn from general trade. In recent years before the war the United Kingdom had exported every year nearly 5 million tons of iron and steel and manufactures thereof. ”

“ The developing countries' share in world production of iron and steel rose from 3.6 per cent in 1955 to 17.3 per cent in 1984, when four countries – Brazil, China, India, and the Republic of Korea – produced more than 10 million tons of steel each, as much as in many medium-sized industrialized countries. ”

“ The story of railroading leads naturally to that of progress in iron and steel work generally, which has been extraordinary during the century. Of inventions in this direction perhaps the most notable is the Bessemer steel-making process, which converts iron into steel by the direct addition of the necessary quantity of carbon, and has had the important result of making steel cheaper to-day than iron was not very many years ago. In iron-working machinery the progress has been very great, and in no other field has the genius of the American inventor been more conspicuously displayed. ”