THE EPIC OF STEEL
It was the boast of a Roman Emperor that he had found the Eternal City brick and left it marble.Similarly the present generation of Americans inherited a country which was wood and have transformed it into steel.That which chiefly distinguishes the physical America of today from that of forty years ago is the extensive use of this metal.Our fathers used steel very little in railway transportation; rails and locomotives were usually made of iron, and wood was the prevailing material for railroad bridges.Steel cars, both for passengers and for freight, are now everywhere taking the place of the more flimsy substance.We travel today in steel subways, transact our business in steel buildings, and live in apartments and private houses which are made largely of steel.The steel automobile has long since supplanted the wooden carriage; the steel ship has displaced the iron and wooden vessel.The American farmer now encloses his lands with steel wire, the Southern planter binds his cotton with steel ties, and modern America could never gather her abundant harvests without her mighty agricultural implements, all of which are made of steel.Thus it is steel that shelters us, that transports us, that feeds us, and that even clothes us.
This substance is such a commonplace element in our lives that we take it for granted, like air and water and the soil itself; yet the generation that fought the Civil War knew practically nothing of steel.They were familiar with this metal only as a curiosity or as a material used for the finer kinds of cutlery.How many Americans realize that steel was used even less in 1865 than aluminum is used today? Nearly all the men who have made the American Steel Age--such as Carnegie, Phipps, Frick, and Schwab--are still living and some of them are even now extremely active.
Thirty-five years ago steel manufacture was regarded, even in this country, as an almost exclusively British industry.In 1870the American steel maker was the parvenu of the trade.American railroads purchased their first steel rails in England, and the early American steel makers went to Sheffield for their expert workmen.Yet, in little more than ten years, American mills were selling agricultural machinery in that same English town, American rails were displacing the English product in all parts of the world, American locomotives were drawing English trains on English railways, and American steel bridges were spanning the Ganges and the Nile.Indeed, the United States soon surpassed England.In the year before the World War the United Kingdom produced 7,500,000 tons of steel a year, while the United States produced 32,000,000 tons.Since the outbreak of the Great War, the United States has probably made more steel than all the rest of the world put together."The nation that makes the cheapest steel," says Mr.Carnegie, "has the other nations at its feet."When some future Buckle analyzes the fundamental facts in the World War, he may possibly find that steel precipitated it and that steel determined its outcome.
Three circumstances contributed to the rise of this greatest of American industries: a new process for cheaply converting molten pig iron into steel, the discovery of enormous deposits of ore in several sections of the United States, and the entrance into the business of a hardy and adventurous group of manufacturers and business men.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.From the days of Tubal Cain the iron worker had known that heat would accomplish this purification;but heat, up to almost 1865, was an exceedingly expensive commodity.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.When Henry Bessemer, several years afterward, read a paper before the British Association for the Advancement of Science, in which he advocated the same principle, he was roared down as "a crazy Frenchman," and the savants were so humiliated by the suggestion that they voted to make no record of his "silly paper" in their official minutes.Yet these two men, the American Kelly and the Englishman Bessemer, were the creators of modern steel.The records of the American Patent Office clearly show that Kelly made "Bessemer" steel many years before Bessemer.In 1870 the American Government refused to extend Bessemer's patent in this country on the ground that William Kelly had a prior claim; in spite of this, Bessemer was undoubtedly the man who developed the mechanical details and gave the process a universal standing.
