Steel mill

“ 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. ”

“ The expansion of the steel industry in the South is further limited by the fact that it is an agricultural, not an industrial, section. A steel mill does not, in the main, make products to be sold direct to the ultimate consumer. Its output must be manufactured by other companies into machinery, locomotives, and a thousand and one other things. Its customers are other industries, and there are comparatively few industries in the South. ”

“ Under the most favorable conditions the steel mill, as a well-known steel maker said once, is far from being a drawing room. Under the conditions that prevailed toward the end of the last century, when men were worked to the breaking point in the mad fight for “tonnage,” it was no wonder that the majority of steel workers collapsed early under the strain and were thrown on the human scrap pile, their vitality sapped and their youth gone. ”

“ On the day he left, he went out the usual gate at the tempered after-work pace, walked the gravel path to the railroad embankment, and stopped for a moment to look back at the mill. He stood like a stone-pile on the embankment for a quarter of an hour, looking at the cluster of steel buildings and stacks. He had spent a life in them, making pipe, and I haven't a doubt this was the first time it came to him in perspective. From my own brief memories, I could guess at those fifteen minutes: pain, struggle, monotony, rough-house, laughter, endurance, but principally toil without imagination. ”

“ Since air flows through with the grain the flour is not heated very much. This type of mill is small, very fast, intermediate in price between steel mills and stone mill, lasts a long time, but when grinding, sounds like a Boeing 747 about to take off. ”

“ Since no man who has worked in an American steel mill, whatever his sympathies or his indifference, can fail to have opinions on these points, I have decided to set down mine, for what they are worth, as simply and informally as I can.
There is a proper apology, I think, that can be made for the presumption of conclusions based upon an individual experience. An intimate and detailed record of processes and methods and the physical and mental environment of the workers in any basic industry is rare enough, I believe, except when it is heightened or foreshortened for a political purpose. ”

“ There were still the three great groups,—the Western group, the Carmichael group and John’s—all growing very fast. Minor groups were continually springing up at precisely the wrong time. They generally smashed up or had to be bought out by the others to save themselves from ruinous competition. The steel age cared nothing about profits. All it wanted was steel—more and more and more.
Next was the phase of specialization. One mill made rails exclusively, another merchant steel, another structural shapes for bridges and skyscrapers, another sheet steel, another steel pipe, and so on. ”

“ Crawford pointed out that many young men who might be marked out for advancement in the steel industry, where their energy and ability would be quickly recognized136 and rewarded, prefer to go into offices or stores as clerks, although the field of advancement there is much smaller because natural conditions in a steel mill or coal mine, unless mitigated by the efforts of the employer, were such as to injure their self-respect. ”

“ The largest employer of labor in the world, by its adoption of such a policy, forced the recognition of this policy upon industry generally, and as a result of the safety campaign inaugurated by the Corporation in 1906, safety-first methods and appliances are generally employed in every steel mill in the United States to-day, and, in fact, by a vast number of plants devoted to other industries, and they have spread and are still spreading to other countries. ”

“ To the left I could make out tracks. Railroads seem to run through a steel mill from cellar to attic. And at intervals, from above the tracks, torrents of sparks swept into the dark, with now and then a small stream of yellow fire.
We stumbled over bricks, mud, clay, a shovel, and the railroad track. In front of a narrow curtain of molten slag, falling on the floor, we waited for some moments. We were under the middle furnaces, I [Pg 18] calculated. Gradually the curtain ceased, and Pete leaped under the hole from which it had come. ”

“ In the great steel mills the boys were to work among the roaring furnaces, the swiftly moving cranes and the moulding mills, where the metal that they had helped to mine ran in rivers that turned into gold. ”

“ Even in the iron industry where could a line be drawn-at the end of mining the ore, the production of the pig-iron or steel ingots, when the rolling mill operation is completed, fabrication on order or at some stage of manufacture into standard merchandise? ”

“ The tyre mill, plate mill, and merchant mills require no detailed description, as, although the machinery employed is powerful and admirable of its kind, it is analogous to what may be seen at work in other rolling mills, and possesses no features of special interest. In the steel works there are thirty-seven furnaces for heating the metal, all of which are Siemens' Regenerative Gas Furnaces. There are also seven for making steel by the Siemens'-Martin process, viz., three 20-ton, two lo-ton, and two 5-ton furnaces. ”

“ The even whirr of the power house increased it, and the shrieks of machinery gave it a streaky quality. There were staccato punctuations, of course, by the whistles, [Pg 119] and when a distant "blaw" came to me, I thought how loudly it drove into the ears of the hot-blast man, turning his wheel by a stove. But it was mostly the summed-up roar that occupied your head—an insistent thing, that made you excited and weary at the same time. The mills had been running for ten years; they always had a night-shift in Bouton.
It is easy to get excited about a steel-mill sky at night. ”

“ Carnegie was subsequently associated with others in establishing a rolling-mill, and from this has grown the most extensive and complete system of iron and steel industries ever controlled by an individual, embracing the Edgar Thomson steel works, the Pittsburgh Bessemer steel works, the Lucy furnaces, the Union iron mills, the Union mill (Wilson, Walker & Co.) ”

“ But the ladle continues to pour, with twenty tons of steel to go. It can't be allowed to make a steel floor for the pit. It must get into those moulds.
So the craneman swings her on to the next mould, with the stream aspurt. It's like taking water from the teakettle to the sink with a punctured dipper: half goes on the kitchen floor. But the spattering of molten metal is much more exciting. A few little clots affect the flesh like hot bullets. So, when the craneman gets ready to swing the little stream down the line, the workers on the platform behave like frightened fishes in a mill pond. ”

“ These two inventions of Cort’s were epoch making, though of the two the more important one was the invention of the rolls from which has developed the modern rolling mill.
There remains to be described in a little more detail the making of wrought iron as practiced to-day. The puddling furnace used has a grate upon which is built the coal fire. ”

“ Yet he had no impulse to change them. They were unfair because nothing was made of those two intangible assets which [58] sometimes in business are worth more than the physical properties—namely, spirit of organization and good will of trade—all of which would automatically belong to the one who bought out the other’s interest in the mill. This was so because the mill was now the crown of the business. What the firm sold was no longer pig iron, as at first, but wrought iron in standard bars manufactured from the pig by remelting, kneading, hammering and rolling it. ”

“ But now the place was noted for its great steel mills, where the famous Williams Drop Forge Steel was made and shipped27 to all parts of the world. Three hundred workmen were employed in the low brick buildings that stood on the edge of the town to the north, close to the railway tracks; and most of these workmen lived in pretty new cottages that had been built on grounds adjoining the mills, and which were owned and rented to them by Chester D. Williams, the sole proprietor of the steel works. ”

“ These works had been built originally by a syndicate of manufacturers, with the view of obtaining the necessary supplies of steel which they required in their various concerns, but the steel-rail business, being then in one of its booms, they had been tempted to change plans and construct a steel-rail mill. They had been able to make rails as long as prices remained high, but, as the mills had not been specially designed for this purpose, they were without the indispensable blast furnaces for the supply of pig iron, and had no coke lands for the supply of fuel. ”

“ Pig iron was for some time the sole product. The mill to draw and roll the iron came later.
In five years the population of New Damascus trebled. The mines, the blast furnaces and later the drawing mill,—the first in this country to pass iron through rollers,—employed thousands of workers. Their wants made business. The town was rebuilt. That made more business. Enoch on his own venture built houses for the iron workers and opened a large company store. ”

“ Much the same is true of rails for railroads, girders, eye-bars for bridges, and the like. Thus the product of any factory or mill may be used to piece out or to repair work turned out by any other similar concern. Yet more, if a subway or a tunnel is to be built in a hurry, two or more steel-works may co-operate in furnishing beams, columns, or aught else, with no departure from ordinary gauges. Steel works in Pennsylvania have produced every detail for a bridge erected in Africa, a factory in Germany, a stamp mill in Canada. ”

“ The charcoal is ground in a mill, either to a fine powder and sifted; or into a coarse granular state, like gunpowder, for the preparation of which two sieves are required, one with moderately fine meshes, to allow the small dust to pass through, and one with large meshes, to separate the proper sized grains from the coarser lumps. Either a corn-mill, an edgestone mill, or a steel cylinder mill, may be employed for grinding bone-black, and it is generally damped in the operation to keep down the fine dust. ”

“ Aaron, therefore, might choose between seeking a market outside for his pig iron or building a mill to work it. To build a mill would require, first, a large outlay of capital, then an organization of expert workers and superintendents, and thirdly a market for his wrought iron in competition with the product of the established mill, now Enoch’s. ”

“ These mills produce mild steel bars, window sections, angles and channels and other metal products used in building construction. Although some rods and bars are shipped abroad, principally to South-East Asian countries, the steel mills rely heavily on domestic sales which have suffered from the recent decline in the building industry. Several rolling mills produce brass and aluminium sheets and circles, most of which are used for the manufacture of consumer goods. ”

“ Scrap from anywhere in America; a broken casting, the size of a man's trunk, down to corroded pipe, or strips the thickness of your nail, salvaged in bales. The overhead crane gathers them all from arriving flat cars by a magnet as big as a cart wheel, and the pieces of steel leap to meet it with apparent joy, stick stoutly for a moment, and fall released into iron [Pg 32] charge-boxes. By trainloads they pass out of the stockyard and into the mill, where the track runs directly in front of the furnace-doors. There the charging-machine dumps them quickly into the belly of the furnace. ”

“ And when at length there was a useable product at all it was a poor and very uncertain product, comparing unfavorably with English steel, and how the English steel rails compared with good American iron rails has already been witnessed in Gib’s mill yard.
Man is the only animal that whistles in the dark. Being so long in a dogged minority, so much discouraged, so sore in their hope, the protagonists of steel were boastful. ”

“ They all had nice houses and plenty to live on. The business was profitable. But they were withered and rickety, older than old Enoch in the midst of their years, and had a baffled look in their eyes.
The town became rich and famous. The mill was the source of its greatness. There the first American rails were rolled. For twenty years they were the best iron rails in the world. There iron nails were first cut from a sheet, like cookies out of dough. Then the Civil War came and iron that cost ten dollars a ton to make could be sold for fifty and sixty. ”

“ Certain mixtures of pig iron are used in making spring steel and if these mixtures are varied from in any particular or if the steel has a surplus of carbon, or is deficient in that element, it will not take a proper temper and consequently is of no value. A proper manipulation in the rolling mill is also necessary, or the steel may be entirely ruined in rolling. ”

“ The great beam and structural mills, the Bessemer department and the bloom and billet mills are also magnificently equipped and are conducted on a mammoth scale, in comparison with which the operations of other American steel mills are almost insignificant. ”