Steel

“ 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 steel-mill is, indeed, the most colossal combination of Steam and Steel. There are tireless arms, moved by steam, insensible alike to monstrous strains and white heat, which seize the vast ingots and carry them to and fro, handling with incredible celerity the masses that were unknown to man before the invention of the Bessemer process. ”

“ Hundreds of lathes of every conceivable pattern are planing the solid steel and the solid iron as if it were wood, cutting off with each revolution a more or less thick slice of the hard metal, which curls up like a shaving of deal. ”

“ From the mixer the iron is taken to the converter to be turned into steel. And now we come to the most spectacular, the most impressive sight that is to be witnessed in the steel industry, the theme for the poet who may one day be born to sing the Song of Steel.
A Bessemer blow, a converter in action, is a small-sized Vesuvius in eruption, a volcano tamed and chained by man. From its great steel crater shoot forth flames to the height of perhaps 100 feet, showering sparks in every direction and creating a pyrotechnic display of unequalled splendor. ”

“ Steel ore-boats bring the loads clawed from the earth by steel, lifted and lugged by arms of steel, sung on its way by the clanking clam-shells.
The runners now, the handlers now, are steel; they dig and clutch and haul; they hoist their automatic knuckles from job to job; they are steel making steel. ”

“ The ladlefuls ceased as steel, becoming thirty minutes' sledging through stoppage for four men, the weight of manganese in my shovel, and the clatter of the pieces that hit the rail, sparks on my neck burning through a blue handkerchief, and the cup of tea I had with Jock, cooked over hot slag at 4.00 A.M.
A battle certainly, to make an ingot—trench work in a quiet sector, perhaps, but a year-after-year affair. ”

“ To serve but one of these cities,—to bring its food and take away its manufactures,—I see a thousand railroad trains,—trains of steel running on rails of steel. Compared with these the iron shod trains we know and think so marvellous are merely toys. I see ships of steel so vast in size that on the side of one the little vessel in which Columbus found a new world would swing like a silly skiff. I see steel in all its power—towers, tunnels, aqueducts, fantastic structures I cannot sense the meaning of. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Age of Bronze and all other ages that have preceded ours lacked the great essentials that insure perpetuity. The Age of Steel, that came last, that is ours now; a degenerate time by all ancient standards; has for its crowning triumph a single machine which is alone enough to satisfy the union of two names that are to us what Caster and Pollux were to the bronze-armed Roman legions of the heroic time--the modern power printing-press. ”

“ For centuries the secret art of making tool steel was handed down from father to son. The manufacture of tool steel is still an art which, by the aid of science, has lost much of its secrecy; yet tool steel is today made by practical men skilled as melters, hammer-men, and rollers, each knowing his art. ”

“ There may be miles of underground pipes bringing gas for fuel. Amid these scenes flit strong men, naked to the waist, unharmed in the red pandemonium, guiding every process, superintending every result; like other men, yet leading a life so strange that it is apparently impossible. The glowing rivers they escape; corruscating showers of flying white-hot metal do not fall upon them; the leaping, roaring, hungry, annihilating flames do not touch them; the gurgling streams of melted steel are their familiar playthings; yet they are but men. ”

“ THE GREAT STEEL STRIKE During the World War, there began to gather on the industrial horizon a cloud no bigger at first than a man’s hand, but one that grew fast in size until it broke in a storm the effects of which made themselves felt in every corner of the globe. ”

“ Born and raised in a city of mills, he had, from the age of fourteen, played his little part in the making of steel. For three summers and at every other available hour he had toiled at steel. Bare to the waist, brown, heat-burned, perspiring, he had dragged at long bars, raking away at steel bars, but recently formed by rushing, crashing rollers, that were still smoking hot. Other hours he had spent on the gridiron. The one helped the other. Struggling with steel, he had become like steel himself, hard, elastic, resisting. ”

“ The old varieties of wrought iron, steel and cast iron preserve their old names; the new class is called steel by main force. As a result, certain varieties, such as blister steel, are called “steel” solely because they have the hardening power, and others, such as low-carbon steel, solely because they are free from slag. But the former lack the essential quality, slaglessness, which makes the latter steel, and the latter lack the essential quality, the hardening power, which makes the former steel. “Steel” has come gradually to stand rather for excellence than for any specific quality. ”

“ Steel is a product, or, perhaps, more accurately, a species of iron, refined of some of its grosser elements, intermediate in the amount of its carbon between wrought and cast-iron, and tempered to a hardness which enables it to take a cutting edge, a toughness sufficient to bear a heavy strain, an elasticity which adapts it for springs and other articles requiring resiliency, as well as a susceptibility to polish, which makes it useful for ornamental and artistic purposes. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The multiform steel prop which civilization hung upon came to me for a moment—rails, skyscrapers, the locomotive just passed, machinery that was making the ornament and substance of the environment of men. ”

“ 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 ”

“ The steel is made from ore or from a combination of different kinds of iron, and, by peculiar devices for economizing the heat of the furnace, the process may be continued so long and regulated so carefully that a product of high quality may be turned out at a moderate cost. The result of all these processes has been to change steel from a luxury to a necessity of modern life. Modern mild steel is 40 per cent stronger than iron, and is tough enough to be tied in a knot or punched in the shape of a bowl when cold. ”

“ But steel of cementation, however carefully made, is never quite equable in its texture. Steel possessing this latter quality is made, by fusing bars of blistered steel, in a crucible placed in a wind furnace. When the fusion has been completed, the liquid metal is cast into small bars or ingots, which are known in commerce by the name of cast steel. Cast steel is harder, more elastic, closer in texture, and capable of receiving a higher polish than common steel.
7. Steel is also made directly from cast iron, or at once from the ore. ”

“ No one who has seen a steel-mill in operation, can go away and really write a description of it; no artist or camera has ever made its portrait, yet it is the most impressive scene of the modern, the industrial, world. There is a "fervent heat," surpassing in its impressions all the descriptions of the Bible, and which destroys all doubt of fire with capacity to burn a world and "roll the heavens together as a scroll." There is a clang and clatter accompanying a marvelous order. There are clouds of steam. There are displays of sparks and glow surpassing all the pyrotechnics of art. ”

“ Steel, like wrought iron, is made by burning out from cast iron a part of the carbon, silicon, phosphorus, and sulphur which it contains; but the process is carried out in a very different way, and usually, though not always, more carbon is found in steel than in wrought iron. ”

“ The iron people of course could make a steel in their own way from wrought iron, melted again and carbonized,—fine, cutlery steel, very hard and trustworthy,—but you could not dream of making rails by the [118] millions of tons from that kind of steel. ”

“ The grand distinguishing trait of steel, to which it owes all the qualities that make it valuable for the uses to which no other metal can be put, is homogeneity due to fusion. Wrought iron, while having similar chemical qualities, and often as much carbon, is laminated in structure. ”

“ I wish to call the attention of the meeting to some of the peculiarities which distinguish cast steel from all other forms of iron, viz., the perfectly homogeneous character of the metal, the entire absence of sand-cracks or flaws, and its greater cohesive force and elasticity, as compared with the blister steel from which it is made,—qualities which it derives solely from its fusion and formation into ingots, all of which properties malleable iron acquires in like manner by its fusion and formation into ingots in the new process ”

“ For the production of natural steel, a white cast iron is preferred, which contains little carbon, which does not flow thin, and which being cemented over or above the wind, falls down at once through the blast to the bottom of the hearth in the state of steel. With this view, a very flat fire is used; and should the metal run too fluid, some malleable lumps are introduced to give the mass a thicker pasty consistence. ”

“ When the carbon has been put in, the retort is closed. The molten metal absorbs the alloy, and the product is Bessemer steel. In fifteen minutes pig iron can be transformed into ingot steel. The invention made possible the use of steel in the construction of bridges, high buildings, and ships. It made this age of the world the Age of Steel. ”

“ The manufacture of high-speed steel represents the highest art in the making of steel by tool-steel practice. Some may say, on account of our increased knowledge of chemistry and metallurgy, that the making of such steel has ceased to be an art, but has become a science. It is, in fact an art; aided by science. The human element in its manufacture is a decided factor, as will be brought in the following remarks:
The heat treatment of steel in its broad aspect may be said to commence with the melting furnace and end with the hardening and tempering of the finished product. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The engineer responsible for any steel structure to forward to the Board of Trade a certificate to the effect that the steel employed is either cast-steel, or steel made by some process of fusion, subsequently rolled or hammered, and of a quality possessing considerable toughness and ductility, together with a statement of all the tests to which it has been subjected. ”

“ Some of the various steel-making plants are equipped for the manufacture of building or "structural" steel, others for rails and railway equipments, still others for tin-plate, or for wire, or for tool steel. ”

“ The steel, after having been forged, is soft, like iron, and to give it the requisite degree of strength under the uses to which the tools or instruments are to be exposed, it is hardened. The process by which this is effected is called tempering, and the degree of hardness or strength to which the steel is brought is called its temper, which is required to be higher or lower, according to the use which is to be made of the particular instrument. ”

“ 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. The first, obtained by the decarburation of the metal, gives natural or puddled steel; the second, produced by the carburation of the iron, gives steel of cementation.
It was the last which Cyrus Harding intended to forge, as he possessed iron in a pure state. ”