Ironworker

“ The worker's body is in perfect physical shape and the work does not injure him but only exhilarates him. No iron worker can be a communist, for communists all have inferior bodies. The iron worker knows that his body is superior, and no sour philosophy could stay in him, because he would sweat it out of his pores as he sweats out all other poisons.
The old man that I worked with when I first entered the rolling mill was gray with his sixty years of toil. ”

“ And even this labour has now been got rid of; for, by an arrangement of the gearing, the slide itself has been made self-acting, and advances with the revolution of the work in the lathe, which thus supplies the place of the workman's hand. The accuracy of the turning done by this beautiful yet simple arrangement is as mechanically perfect as work can be. The pair of steel fingers which hold the cutting tool firmly in their grasp never tire, and it moves along the metal to be cut with an accuracy and precision which the human hand, however skilled, could never equal. ”

“ Many of these work automatically—that is, they engage and disengage themselves; setting to work only when they are fed with material, and, when their rodent-like teeth have gnawed away as much metal as is requisite, they stop of their own accord. The effect of this is so extraordinary, that it almost seems as if those bright limbs of iron, which stop and move on without human agency, must be directed by some sort of metallic brain. The most common form of tool employed is what is termed the circular cutter or milling-tool, which is constructed to fit every class of work. ”

“ So I quit school just where the Monitor had sunk the Merrimac in the “first fight of the ironclads.” Thereafter my life was to be bound up with the iron industry. My job was in a nail factory. I picked the iron splinters from among the good nails that had heads on them. This taught me that many are marred in the making. Those that are born with bad heads must not be used in building a house or the house will fall. In the head of the nail is its power to hold fast. Men are like nails, some have the hold-fast will in their heads. Others have not. ”

“ Prescott,” said Billy, “explained to me about steel, and about forges.”
“When this country was first settled,” said Uncle John, “men had little forges to make iron, just as their wives had spinning wheels to make wool for clothes.
“When they began to make nails—they couldn’t build houses without nails—there was a forge in almost every chimney corner. Children, as well as grown people, used to make nails and tacks in the long winter evenings. People then took nails to the store to pay for things, as in the country they now take eggs.
“That old forge iron was never very pure. ”

“ The other “joiners” and spinners did not try to keep at it. They gave up the work as soon as they discovered how useless it was to try to make a decent wage from the worn-out machines. Only myself and a few poor men who were there because they could not get any better place stayed on and fought the one-sided fight. Every time the machinery broke—and breaks were constant—the machinist grumbled, and took his own time in coming with his wrenches. ”

“ Wherever there is a stream with a fall, there is the grinding-wheel at work: and in hundreds of workshops the nicer labour of the artificer is fashioning the steel into every instrument which the art of man can devise, from the scythe of the mower to the lancet of the surgeon. The machinery that made the steel has called into action the skill that makes the file-cutter. No machine can make a file. ”

“ It is as if there were two iron tools, or instruments, the one of which was continually in the workman’s hands and in constant use, and by the use of which he made whatever he pleased, and displayed his art and skill, but the other of which remained idle and useless, never being called into operation, the workman never appearing to make anything by it, and making no use of it in any of his labours ”

“ He succeeded in finding employment in a small factory at Kirby Stephen, a town some thirteen miles from Great Ashby, where he worked at making power-looms. From an old statement of account against his employer which we have seen, in his own handwriting, dated the 6th September, 1805, it appears that his earnings at such work as "fitting the first set of iron loames," "fitting up shittles," and "making moddles," were 3s. 6d. a day; and he must, during the same time, have lived with his employer, who charged him as a set-off "14 weaks bord at 8s. per weak." ”

“ Even carpenters and masons squat down to theirs. Cheap labour is but an arbitrary term, and a country smith at home might do the work of ten or twelve men in India; but it is just as well to get an idea of existing differences. On many of the factories there are very intelligent mistrees, which is the term for the master blacksmith. These men, getting but twenty-four to thirty shillings a month, and supplying themselves with food and clothing, are nevertheless competent to work all the machinery, attend to the engine, and do all the ironwork necessary for the factory. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When to these we add the adze, plane-irons, the anger, and the chisel, we sum up the tools principally relied on by the early mechanics for working in wood and iron.
Such continued to be the chief tools in use down almost to our own day. The smith was at first the principal tool-maker; but special branches of trade were gradually established, devoted to tool-making. So long, however, as the workman relied mainly on his dexterity of hand, the amount of production was comparatively limited; for the number of skilled workmen was but small. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If one can combine the iron industries of the valley, one can, almost as easily, combine those of the country. It will be done by gradual, inevitable accretion. It was first my mission to introduce a more enlightened and liberal policy towards labor into my own mills; it is now my mission to propagate this wherever the industry flourishes; in another decade, if I am spared to set this work properly on its feet, the condition of the iron-worker will be improved a hundred per cent., and a strike in the iron and steel business will be as unlikely as an earthquake in New York. ”

“ A careful workman uses a steel die for only a short service before he returns it to the annealer, well assured that the metal, despite its seeming wholeness, has suffered severe internal strain at every blow, which, were no caution exercised, would soon reveal itself in fracture of the die, or ruined work. Facts of this kind, which every day confront the mechanic and engineer, convey a prophecy of the sensibility and memory which dawn with life. ”

“ To be mothers of iron ore (F. rust) , to be generators of "blue mouth".
The maidens stood in a dell, the "tin-breasts" lay powerless
On a little bank of land, on a narrow piece of ground.
There they made (F. built) iron, and by degrees formed steel,
Pulverised iron seeds, pounded lumps of steel.
God happens to arrive at the place where the iron seeds were.
Found the pounded bits of iron, the manufactured lumps of steel,
Carries them to the smithy of a smith — under the forge of Ilmarinen. ”

“ In the United States a relatively small proportion of the workers, especially those employed in continuous industry, have been engaged on 12-hour shifts. More men have been so employed in the iron and steel industry than in any other one industry. There was prolonged agitation for the abolition of that practice, not at all by the workers themselves but rather by persons who thought that no man should be required to work so long. ”

“ When each bit of ironwork, every hinge, every lock scutcheon, was hammered out with care and consideration by the individual blacksmith, even if he were but an indifferent performer, it bore the stamp of the thought of a man's mind directing his hand; now there is only the stamp of a machine running the metal into a mould. ”

“ The machinery that is now employed in the iron trade, not only enables the people to be supplied cheaply with all sorts of articles of iron, but it enables a great number of people to find employment, not in the iron trade only, but in all other trades, who otherwise could not have been employed; and it enables everybody to do more work with [Pg 154] the same exertion by giving them better tools; while it makes all more comfortable by furnishing them with more commodious domestic utensils. ”

“ We should now make our own iron. We have already spent about one hundred and fifty thousand dollars to make iron here, but we have failed, not for want of ore or for want of skill. Where is the difficulty? There has not been union enough in the men who engaged in that work. After we had spent about one hundred thousand dollars, an ingenious man, named Peter Shirts, would have brought out the iron as good as ever was made, and that, too, by means of a small furnace of trifling cost ”

“ Clean-up man in the pit was my first job, which I held until I passed to third-helper on the open-hearth. Later I worked in the cast-house, became a member of the stove-gang, and at length achieved the semi-skilled job of hot-blast man on the blast-furnace. I acquired the current Anglo-Hunky language and knew speedily the grind and the camaraderie of American steel-making. In these chapters I have put down what I saw, felt, and thought as a steel-worker in 1919.
Steel is perhaps the basic industry of America. ”

“ The twelve-hour day makes the life of the steel-worker different in a far-reaching manner from the life of the majority of his fellow workers.
It makes the industry different in its fundamental organization and temper from an eight-hour or a ten-hour industry.
It transforms the community where men live whose day is twelve hours long.
"What is it really like? How much of the time do you actually work? Are you 'all in' when you wash up in the morning after the shift, and go home?"
To tell it exactly, if I can: You go into the mill, a little before six, and get into your mill clothes. ”

“ Notwithstanding these early reproaches, I have lived to see the nomenclature of my youth furnish a vocabulary of terms in the art of iron-making, which is used by many of the ironmasters of the present day with freedom and effect, in communicating with each other on the subject of their respective manufactures. Prejudices seldom outlive the generation to which they belong, when opposed by a more rational system of explanation. ”

“ And failures in iron experiments are ruinous. Nothing ever can be saved and the capital outlay will have been enormous.
The skill to build such a blast furnace as they required was not only dear and hard to find: when found it was pessimistic and disbelieving and disclaimed all responsibility for the outcome because it was something that had never been done before. Expert iron workers [31] to man the process were of the same grey mindedness about it.
These iron workers had to be imported from England under guarantees and inveiglements. ”

“ And does not all this machinery, and this economy of labour, it may still be said, deprive many workmen of employment? No. By these means the iron trade gives bread to hundreds, where otherwise it would not have given bread to one. There are more hands employed at the iron-works than there would have been if there had been no machinery; because without machinery men could not produce iron cheap enough to be generally used. ”

“ Thomas Murphy the timekeeper.”
“Exactly,” said Uncle John.
“Mr. Murphy,” Billy went on, “says that iron moves the world.”
“I should say,” said Uncle John, deliberately, “that power generally has to be put into an iron harness before anything can move; but Mr. Murphy evidently knows what he is talking about.”
“He says,” continued Billy, “that iron mills are very important places; and that, for his part, he’s glad that he works in an iron mill.”
“That’s the way every man ought to feel about his work,” said Uncle John; “all the work in the world has to be done by somebody.” ”

“ No matter how we try, probably none of us ever realizes the immensity and importance of the iron and steel industry with approximately 460 huge blast furnaces here, 5000 cast and malleable iron foundries, about 1000 Bessemer and open-hearth steel and some 3000 puddling furnaces, and the many thousands of factories which each day are turning the products of these into rails, plate, wire, pipe, and the infinitude of finished articles which enter into and are mighty factors of our civilization. ”