Metallurgist

“ 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. ”

“ The mineral is treated, and the crude metal, which is of greater value, is obtained. The crude metal is refined, and iron is got, which is better. The iron is treated, and, by cementation, it is converted into steel. The steel is wrought, and a thousand things directly useful to man are produced.
The utility of these last products increases in a direct ratio to the amount of labor which men have expended. An anvil weighing a thousand pounds is less useful than a thousand wrought files; it costs less labor. ”

“ The arrangement adopted with these is first to show the ores from each district, next the mode of smelting those ores, the metal procured, and generally the manufacture of the metal. The Iron, of course, assumes the first importance. The Pig Iron is the first state in which the metal is obtained; it is then submitted to the refining and “puddling” processes; then rolled into bars, nails, and plates, or drawn into wire; we then see it converted into steel, by various processes including Bessemer’s, and this leads us to the manufactures of Sheffield. ”

“ Every department of human industry is represented, from the quarrying and the cutting of the stones, the mining and smelting of the ores, the conversion of iron into steel by the pneumatic process, to the final shaping of the masses of metal into useful forms, and its reduction into wire, so as to develop in the highest degree the tensile strength which fits it for the work of suspension. Every tool which the ingenuity of man has invented has somewhere, in some special detail, contributed its share in the accomplishment of the final result. ”

“ Thus, when combined with carbon, in varying proportions, substances are produced, so different, but each so valuable, that they might almost be regarded in the light of distinct metals,—such, for example, as cast-iron, and cast and bar steel; the various qualities of iron enabling it to be used for purposes so opposite as a steel pen and a railroad, the needle of a mariner's compass and an Armstrong gun, a surgeon's lancet and a steam engine, the mainspring of a watch and an iron ship, a pair of scissors and a Nasmyth hammer, a lady's earrings and a tubular bridge. ”

“ Thus the last field of activity for the laborer and his shovel, in the iron-ore industry, has been usurped by mechanical devices. From the time the ore is taken [283] from the mine until it appears as molten metal from the furnaces, it is not touched except by mechanisms driven by steam, compressed air, or electricity. And yet, so rapid is the growth of the iron and steel industry that there is almost always a demand for more workmen. ”

“ The alloys of iron and steel have now attained importance and a new science known as metallography has developed. Professor Arnold, of Sheffield, Sherard Cowper-Coles, Roberts-Austen, Sorby, Tschermak, Tschernoff, Wüst, and Ziegler have been active promoters of this branch of metallurgy, and a closely related one dealing with the effects of the heat treatment of metals.
Developments in the iron industries led to others in the metallurgy of copper, lead, and zinc.
The application of the blast furnace to copper, lead, and zinc smelting was chiefly made in America. ”

“ Outside the car window, ore piles were visible, black stacks and sooty sheet-iron mills, coal dumps and jagged cuts in the hills against greenness and the meadows and mountains beyond. There were farms, here and there, but they seemed to have been let in by sufferance amid the primary apparatus of the steel-makers.
What an amazingly primary thing steel had become in the civilization we called modern! Steel was the basic industry of America ”

“ Your progenitors learned to dig the hard and soft ores from the earth and produce iron, then took a step forward and converted it into steel, of greater strength and durability, capable of light forms and high polish, and there you have stopped at the very beginning. You [84] are incapable of saving your own handiwork from disintegration. The elements corrode your finest steel products, and they flake away to the original conditions of the crude ore, losing a large proportion of their original virtues and constituents. We have, on the contrary, gone forward to the ultimate. ”

“ We forget that, with primitive methods but fine ores and a fuel devoid of sulphur, the production of steel of fine quality is as easy a process as the manufacture of iron, in fact the only difference between the method of procuring iron and steel under these circumstances is the length of time the process is allowed to go on. The ancient founders used the finest ores, often containing 75 per cent. of iron, and, working with charcoal fuel, which was nearly pure carbon, they could produce steel as easily as iron. ”

“ At length, after many trials and much fatigue, on the 25th of April several bars of iron were forged, and transformed into tools, crowbars, pincers, pickaxes, spades, etc., which Pencroft and Neb declared to be real jewels. But the metal was not yet in its most serviceable state, that is, of steel. Now steel is a combination of iron and coal, which is extracted, either from the liquid ore, by taking from it the excess of coal, or from the iron by adding to it the coal which was wanting. ”

“ Between these rolls, which are placed horizontally, and form a tank or channel when they approach each other, the molten metal is poured, and thus a sheet of any desired width or thickness may be formed, and only limited in length by the supply which the crucibles are capable of keeping up. The ore goes into the furnace a crude stone, and comes out of the rolls a sheet of tough metal. Iron-making is thus rendered as simple as the paper-making processes, where the rags go in at one end of the train of apparatus, and come out at the other perfect paper. ”

“ It is worthy of remark, that the ruder the method employed for the reduction of the ore, the better the quality of the iron usually is. Where the art is little advanced, only the most tractable ores are selected; and as charcoal is the only fuel used, the quality of the metal is almost invariably excellent. The ore being long exposed to the charcoal fire, and the quantity made small, the result is a metal having many of the qualities of steel, capable of being used for weapons or tools after a comparatively small amount of forging. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Too, the metal for valves and fittings and other more or less complicated castings for high steam, air, ammonia, water, etc., must be uniform, of close grain, strong, yet soft enough to machine easily at the extremely high speeds which modern efficient tools and methods demand. The production of the best metal for such work requires the use of properly selected materials, judicious mixing, and clever operation of the cupola furnace, that the molten metal delivered to the foundry for the pouring of the molds may be hot and fluid and of the right composition for the particular work in hand. ”

“ Power Presses in Metal Working.
From glass let us now turn to metals. It is their tenacity that chiefly gives them value; this tenacity is usually accompanied by a hardness which disposes us to regard nickel, for example, as of a solidity quite unyielding. But the coins in our pockets prove that under the pressure of minting machinery they are as impressible as wax. In molds and dies, each the counterpart of the other, brass, bronze, iron, steel, and tin-plate take desired forms as readily as if paste. Solid though these metals appear they yield under severe stress with a semi-fluid quality. ”

“ Railways were stretching their lines into the golden regions of the West; manufacturers of farm implements were calling for steel to be fashioned into tools to reap the rich crops of the wide prairie lands; inventors were each day evolving some new use for the metal. Was it any wonder then that steel became a world necessity and that the blast furnace became a philosopher’s stone that transmuted dull ore into precious gold? ”

“ The open-hearth process of steel-making consists in making pig iron mixed with a greater or less quantity of wrought iron, steel, or similar iron products by exposure to the direct action of flame in a regenerative gas-furnace, and converting the resultant bath into fluid steel. Like the Bessemer process, the open-hearth process is divided into an acid process and a basic process; in the first the hearth is lined with sand and the slag is siliceous, and in the second the hearth is lined with a basic material and the slag is basic. ”

“ There are several plants of independent steel companies that run on a three-shift, eight-hour basis; [Pg 153] and the steel mills in England, France, Germany, and Italy operate with three eight-hour shifts. The long day is not a metallurgical necessity, therefore. The metallurgical explanation of the twelve-hour day, however, is this. The process of making iron or steel is necessarily a continuous one, because the heat of the furnaces must be conserved by keeping up the fires twenty-four hours a day. ”

“ Returning to the eleven well-known true metals, viz., aluminum, copper, gold, iron, lead, mercury, nickel, platinum, silver, tin and zinc, wonderful progress has been made during recent years in the matter of their production. Few of us appreciate the extent to which we are absolutely dependent on some of these substances which, a generation ago, were so rare. It is quite impossible now to conceive of a metal-less civilization, or one in which they were so costly as to be practically unavailable for the ordinary affairs and circumstances of life. ”

“ While no one can desire to cast the slightest disparagement on the product of that period, much of which was excellent, astonishingly so considering the period, a moment’s consideration will convince one that modern products not only do not suffer in comparison but in reality are immensely superior. The ancients had little or no knowledge of the reason for the proper qualities of their tools and they made the metal from variable materials in a crude way in such small quantities that little uniformity was possible. ”

“ We have given these particulars of the advance in man’s knowledge of the metallurgy of steel and its results by way of illustration. A parallel story could be told of the metallurgy of copper and tin, and of a multitude of metals, nickel and aluminium to name but two, unknown before the nineteenth century dawned. It is in this great and growing mastery over substances, over different sorts of glass, over rocks and plasters and the like, over colours and textures, that the main triumphs of the mechanical revolution have thus far been achieved. ”

“ Let me also tell you, I once heard a big Westminster engineer say, 'Timber we understand, iron we know a good deal about, and steel also; but we have plenty to find out yet both in the manufacture and use of nearly all metals,' or something like that, he said.
"I acted up to that; and always say to myself, We understand timber, and know how to treat it‌—‌and so I don't mind cutting it, as I know what I am about with it, although I represent unskilled more than skilled labour. Metals are different goods, and it wants skilled labour to tackle them nicely." ”

“ 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. ”

“ The production of this metal by the original cause of all things, and its manufacture, are indispensable for the whole business of mankind. The blacksmith and manufacturer of iron and steel stand at the head of all other mechanics. If the productions of the former were to pass out of existence, that of the latter would inevitably become extinct and the farmer would have to abandon the cultivation of the earth, and the wheels of all the hydraulic works and manufacturing machineries whatever would cease to move. ”

“ 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. ”