STEEL - 525 in its "scrubbed" and purified form, as a clean and convenient fuel for cooking and minor heating purposes in communities where natural gas is not available. Recent consumption of gas in this country, manufactured for such "utility" purposes, has run about 350,000,000,000 cubic feet a year. Coke.—It is one of the fortunate provisions of nature that the same process which produces gas from coal also produces coke. From a ton of good "gas coal" may be obtained 10,000 cubic feet of the former and 1,200 pounds of the latter, with other valuable by-products. Almost from the first, therefore, the gas and coke industries have been operated together, although pioneers were inclined to waste one or the other. Coke—a hard, brittle carbon compound about midway between coal and graphite—is said to have been discovered as an industrial product and material about the year 1750. It was found to bear somewhat the same relation to bituminous coal that charcoal does to wood, and to be useful for the same purposes. It was smokeless, light and clean to handle. It had more concentrated fuel value than a similar bulk of charcoal, just as raw coal had more fuel value than raw wood. It naturally came to replace charcoal almost wholly in iron reduction, as the timber supply diminished and new coal resources were opened up. An unlimited supply of good coke. supplementing a plentiful supply of good iron ore, has made possible our vast steel production. Yet the mating of coke and ore, whose offspring is the age of steel, was curiously slow. Charcoal and raw coal of the less smoky and volatile grades sufficed for another century. It was not until the end of the Civil war that coke came to be used regularly for fuel in the American iron industry. In making pig iron, coke is fed into the furnaces along with the ore and fluxing limestone, in slightly greater weight than the ore, providing the heat for melting the other materials and, by taking up the oxygen, reducing the iron oxide to iron. Its hardness enables it to bear the weight of furnace charges. Its porosity makes it burn readily at the bottom of a furnace. The excess carbon absorbed from it by the iron 526 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS can be readily burned out to whatever degree is desired, in the subsequent process of converting the pig iron into steel or wrought iron. The best American coals for coking are those of the Connellsville district in Pennsylvania, where H. C. Frick developed his famous coke industry, the district of Flat Top and Tug River and adjacent mines in West Virginia, the Virginia part of the Pocahontas district and the Warrior basin coal beds of Alabama. There is growing use, however, of the leaner grades. In the evolution of coke-making there have been three general methods followed. The first, primitive and wasteful, was adopted from the equally primitive charcoal process of open-air burning. The coal was piled on the ground in an elongated heap covered with earth, with flues running through it lengthwise and across, in which enough wood was placed to ignite the whole mass. When the fuel stopped flaming, the pile was partly covered with fine dust or ashes, then sprinkled with water, which turning into steam quickly penetrated the whole mass and completed the coking process. This "coking in heaps" was slow, taking five to eight days. The next method, generally used until recently, employed the "beehive oven," shaped like an old-fashioned, round beehive, with a hemispherical roof and a circular hole in the top. An arched doorway in the ring-wall was bricked up during the coking, then opened for drawing the finished charge. The largest of these ovens held about five tons. They were arranged often in double rows, twenty or more to a row, like primitive dwellings on little streets, their doors opening outward, with underground flues running lengthwise between them, connected by uptakes with the separate ovens. One of the sights of the country in the heyday of this process was the beehive coke city around Connellsville and Uniontown, Pennsylvania. These ovens were faster, requiring only two to three days to make a superior grade of coke. Though efficient as far as the coke was concerned, they usually lost the gas and other by-products of partial combustion, which went up into the outside atmosphere in STEEL - 527 flame and smoke. In later years the spent flame from the it ovens, before being allowed to escape, was usually passed to a range of steam boilers for the production of heat, power and light. Forty years ago there were about 44,000 coke ovens of this type in the United States. The last stage of development is the retort oven, which treats coal frankly as raw material for distillation, of which coke is merely the primary product. The thrifty Germans had been experimenting with the problem of saving the wasted products of combustion as early as 1766. The pioneer efforts of Lord Dundonald and William Murdoch in this field, near the end of the eighteenth century, have already been noted. But it was not until the end of the nineteenth that scientific salvaging of the by-products made real headway, and not until after the World war that the by-product retort process was generally adopted in America. In such ovens the gases, instead of being allowed to burn as they escape from the hot coal, are drawn through a series of air- and water-cooled condensers and scrubbers, which obtain from them tar, ammonia, benzene or benzol and numerous other materials. The tar, most plentiful and valuable of these constituents, makes about three and one-half per cent of the coal by weight, ammonium sulphate one per cent, and benzol a trifle less. There remains a surplus of cleansed gas which may be used for light, heat or power. A ton of good coal so treated yields about 1,400 pounds of coke, 10,500 cubic feet of gas, 7 gallons of tar, 2.4 gallons of crude light oil and 19 pounds of sulphate of ammonia. The ammonia is used for refrigeration, explosives and fertilizer. The tar is in itself a raw material of almost infinite potentialties. The light oil obtained by "washing" the gas yields the benzol, which in turn yields other important products, especially dyestuffs and high explosives. The new industrial thrift is strikingly shown by the fact that from 1919 to 1930 the volume of the American coke made in by-product ovens increased from 56 per cent of the whole to 94.2 per cent. The coke produced in 1929, the peak year, amounted to 59,883,000 tons. Three-fourths of the 528 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS coke is used in manufacturing pig iron and ferro-alloys. The rest is used mainly in foundries, in smelting the non-ferrous metals, in making "water gas" and as a clean fuel for domestic heating. The coke itself is by no means a final product. From the water gas, which is produced by passing steam over heated coke, many complex carbon compounds are obtained, with various uses. One such product is synthol, which can be used as a motor fuel. A great deal of water gas, enriched with oil gas to make its flame more luminous, is used for illuminating gas. Excellent examples of this modern efficiency in the industrial use of coal are found in Cleveland. The coke works of the American Steel and Wire Company at Newburgh have 180 Koppers by-product ovens with an annual capacity of 818,000 tons of coke and 2,800,000 gallons of light oil. The Corrigan-McKinney Steel Company, now controlled by the Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Company, has 204 Koppers ovens and a Koppers benzol plant, with a capacity of 1,200,000 tons of coke and 475,000 gallons of light oil, connected with its River Blast Furnaces. The Otis Steel Company's coke plant has 100 Semet-Solvay ovens. The Hannas operate large batteries of by-product coke ovens in connection with their furnaces in Detroit and Buffalo. The Trumbull-Cliffs Furnace Company of Warren, a Mather enterprise, operates about 50 Koppers ovens. These plants do not go far in the use of their coke and gas by-products, but produce them in bulk as raw material for further reduction by other establishments. The most notable Cleveland example of this sort is found in the Interlake Iron Corporation, a recent consolidation of the By-Products Coke Corporation with various other coke and iron properties in which Pickands, Mather & Company were interested. This Cleveland-controlled organization, the largest merchant-iron producer in the world, applying the most modern methods to the fuel end of the business, has a capacity of 2,000,000 net tons of coke a year, with 21,490,000,000 cubic feet of gas and corresponding quantities of STEEL - 529 ammonia, coal tar, creosote and the light oil from which benzol and its many derivatives are made. Coal Tar.—The coal tar or gas tar produced in manufacturing coke and illuminating gas from soft coal is a thick, oily, black liquid which condenses in cooling the hot gases from the ovens. It is a little heavier than water and has an unpleasant smell. It is an extremely complex mixture which, when distilled, broken up and recombined by modern industrial chemistry, reveals more wonders and creates more wealth than ancient magic ever dreamed of. It requires an expert chemist to understand the processes used and the qualities and names of the materials handled. A layman's mind may only touch the high spots. The general process is called "fractional distillation," with new and more varied products appearing at every jump in temperature. The "first runnings" are boiled out of the tar at the low temperatures up to 105 degrees Centigrade. They contain water and ammonium salts, often called "ammoniacal water," together with the most volatile oils. Then, in the range of rising heat from 105 to 210 degrees Centigrade, comes the "light oil" about one-third of the tar in quantity, the crude material from which are derived the most varied and valuable of the final products. This material, distilled again, gives off a fraction up to 170 degrees as crude naphtha, the remainder being carbolic oil. These two substances form new main branches of the chemical tree. The naphtha, being redistilled, yields high-grade benzol up to 110 degrees, low-grade benzol up to 140 degrees, and solvent naphtha from that point up to 170 degrees. The high-grade benzol yields 70 per cent pure benzene, the remainder being mostly toluene and xylene. The low-grade benzol is about half benzene. The benzene is important for the manufacture of many compounds, particularly aniline and its train of derivatives. The "solvent naphtha" is used as a solvent for rubber and resin and is therefore vital to the rubber, paint and varnish industries. It is also used to enrich illuminating gas. The carbolic oil remaining as the naphtha is distilled off 530 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS is collected up to a temperature of 240 degrees. It is separated into two main substances, phenols and naphthalene. The former yield carbolic acid, which is not only a powerful antiseptic but the source of numerous dyes, explosives and medicines. The naphthalene is isolated from the carbolic oil as a crystalline solid. From it we get our moth-ball camphor and many dyes and medicines. The next major offspring of the tar is creosote oil, which is the residue after the distillation of small quantities of naphthalene, cresol, naphthol and liquid paraffin, from 240 to 270 degrees. This creosote deserves more than a passing word. The term is Greek and means "flesh-saving." It is obtained from the distillation of wood as well as coal, though the two are a little different chemically. The ancient Egyptians used the wood creosote to preserve the bodies of their kings and nobles. American farmers have used it for ages, in the mild form of wood smoke, to preserve their hams and bacon. The Pharaohs, who doubtless got their creosote from the tarry pools which gather at the bottom of charcoal heaps, would have been interested in the production of this substance by the modern wood retort plant of the Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Company near Escanaba, Michigan. This plant, the largest wood carbonization works in the world, operated primarily to furnish fuel for its Marquette charcoal iron furnaces, produces, as one of the numerous by-products of nearly 4,000,000 bushels of charcoal a year, enough flesh-preservative to mummify all the royalty that ever lived. It is a curious thing that this product of wood should have power to preserve wood itself from decay. It is said that only creosote derived from wood really deserves the name. But the coal creosote answers most of its purposes very well. Being plentiful and cheap, it finds its greatest usefulness in preserving from decay railroad ties, fence posts, telephone poles and other timbers in contact with wet ground. Next in line of distillation from the basic coal tar is anthracene or green oil, obtained above 270 degrees Centigrade. This anthracene is called the most valuable constitu- STEEL - 531 ent of the tar. Crystallized out from the oil and purified, it is used in manufacturing the alizarin dyes formerly obtained from the madder root, for "Turkey red" and allied colors. By treating the anthracene with other chemicals, the chemists produce alizarin black, blue, orange, violet and other artificial hues purer and better in many cases than those formerly obtained direct from natural sources. Coal tar colors are in themselves one of the most fascinating stories of modern industrial romance, but one not within the purview of this history. The colors obtainable from black tar seem to be as limitless as those latent in white light. Starting with the alizarin obtained from tar by Graebe and Liebermann in 1869, the chemists have multiplied their chromatic extracts and compounds until the public is dazed and poets are baffled by novel hues, and the dye-makers and textile people are driven to desperation in their effort to substitute practical names for the outlandish terminology of the chemists. The anilin dyes made from benzene, one of the simplest and most plentiful of the coal tar derivatives, have in themselves given rise to a great and profitable industry. This substance, chemically known as amido-benzene, is a colorless oily fluid, readily soluble in alcohol, and a powerful narcotic poison. Treated with various chemical agents, it is transformed into bases which themselves are quite colorless, yet by laboratory magic develop into hundreds of colors. Anilin was discovered in 1826, but has only become important industrially in the last half-century. The industry was almost monopolized by the Germans until the World war. Deprived of German supplies by the blockade, American manufacturers set about to develop their own anilin industry. They made much progress, but were handicapped by a lack of formulas. Great Britain obtained many secret formulas through Switzerland. After we entered the war, German dye patents, copyrights and trademarks were seized by the alien property custodian of the United States government. The patents of F. Bayer and Company, the famous German dye makers, were sold to the Grasselli Chemical 532 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS Company, thereby giving great impetus to the Cleveland chemical industry. Other patents, copyrights and trademarks were sold to the Chemical Foundation, Inc., and thus the anilin industry was enabled to make rapid progress in this country. Suits were brought to invalidate this action after the war, but the rights were sustained. A post-bellum effort to control the world's dye markets by means of a German-British cartel failed. By 1929 the United States had become the largest chemical producer and consumer in the world. Its production of coal tar dyes had grown in eleven years from 58,464,000 pounds to 111,421,000 pounds, and its output of related chemicals used for medicinal and industrial purposes had developed correspondingly. Returning to our destructive distillation of coal tar, we find that the last basic substance remaining in the stills after the products mentioned have been boiled out is pitch. This is used in making paints and varnishes, asphalt for our roads and roofs, and combustible cement for shaping coal dust into fuel briquettes. Coal tar, too, in its crude original form, is utilized for some of these purposes. A large part of the total production still passes uselessly into the air from mills, factories and heating furnaces, for destructive inhalation by city dwellers. CHAPTER V MANUFACTURING "Pure iron is as white as silver. Expose it to the air or water, and it tans with rust, as the oxygen burns it up. There is iron in plants, in animals, in human beings. In every hundred people there is, on an average, a pound of iron. It is the iron in the blood that imparts strength to a man's arm and the blush to a maiden's cheek. With too little iron we sicken, and without any we die. Iron is as much of a necessity to man's brain and body as steel is to his civilization." —Herbert N. Casson in "The Romance of Steel." One would think, said the author of the sentimental paragraph above quoted, writing a quarter of a century ago, that Cleveland and Pittsburgh had entered into a formal agreement with one another to divide the steel trade—Pittsburgh to make the steel and Cleveland to manufacture it into the various articles of commerce. Since that time Cleveland has made much progress in steel production, but has never forgotten the advice of its pioneer steel-maker, Henry Chisholm : "Make up as much of your steel as possible. Do not sell it as raw material." In this industry Cleveland started a century behind her Pennsylvania neighbor. And Pittsburgh herself had come late into the field. In 1619 John Berkeley, "a gentleman of honorable family," had come from England with twenty-two skilled iron workers and built a furnace on the James River in Virginia, in the forest sixty-six miles above Jamestown, making bog iron. An Indian massacre checked that pioneer enterprise. The industry was long hindered by Indians, and iron workers wrought with guns by their sides. Virginia and other states are strewn with the wreckage of rude furnaces. Queen Anne financed iron works in Virginia. Lynn, Massachusetts, now famous for its shoes, is cred- - 533 - 534 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS ited with the first important colonial iron works, established in 1642. It prospered for twenty-one years, by a monopoly obtained through a "pull" from Governor Winthrop's son, a member of the company, with exemption from taxes and military service and other privileges. The early iron men were an aristocracy, and prestige still clings to their trade. In 1750 Baron Stiegel came from Germany to Pennsylvania, married the daughter of an iron maker and bought her father's furnace at Mannheim, making artistic stove-plates and other iron work. He joined the craftsmanship of the Middle Ages to the American iron trade. Ten years later another German baron, Hasenclever, brought two hundred workmen from England, bought 50,000 acres in northern New Jersey and built four furnaces and seven forges, along with a sort of model industrial town, turning out the best iron yet produced in America. There were many great names in the iron nobility of that early period. Capt. Augustine Washington, father of George Washington, operated a furnace on the Maryland shore across the Potomac from Mount Vernon. Mordecai Lincoln, an ancestor of Abraham Lincoln, was master of a forge in Bound Brook, New Jersey, in 1703; it was from there that his son John moved to Kentucky. Among the ironmasters who fought with Washington in the Revolution were Col. Ethan Allen, Gen. Nathanael Greene, Gen. Rufus Putnam, Col. Paul Revere and many another hero. Washington seems to have kept himself surrounded with iron men as a matter of policy, valuing their courage, honesty and forthrightness. It may almost be said that iron men caused the Revolution as well as fought it. The growth of iron production in America had become intolerable to the British ironmasters. They demanded protection, and their government outlawed and confiscated the property of every English-born iron worker in the American colonies. This naturally enraged the American iron men. Lord Chatham—who by a curious irony of fate was the William Pitt for whom Pittsburgh was named—announced that he "would not allow the colonists even to make a hobnail for themselves." There were to be no STEEL - 535 more rolling mills, slitting mills, tilt-hammer forges or steel furnaces built in America. The proscribed industry thereupon fanned the flames of revolt and continued its industrial progress. When the Revolution came, the colonial iron men were ready to forge the most massive chain ever made in human history, a mile long and weighing two hundred tons, stretched across the Hudson at West Point to keep the British Fleet from passing up the river. The industry, however, was absurdly small and primitive at that period. Dr. Samuel Johnson, just about the time when the American Declaration of Independence was signed, expressed his admiration for the mechanical ingenuity shown in an English factory where round iron bars were "formed by a notched hammer on an anvil." Ethan Allen is said to have broken the American record for iron production when he made a ton in one day of less than ten hours. George Anshutz, the first iron-maker in Pittsburgh, considered forty tons a week a remarkable output for one plant. Steel was a precious metal. A Philadelphia dealer in 1750 said it took him ten years to sell ten tons of it. Casson remarks that when Adam Smith was writing his "Wealth of Nations" an English workman made a dozen pins and called it a day's work. Pittsburgh, in her vague wilderness on the western slope of the Alleghanies, had never suspected her ideal location for what was to be the nation's basic industry. Celoron de Bienville, insolently taking possession of the site in 1749 in the name of his French sovereign, said "It is the most beautiful village I have seen." The only smoke was from Indian campfires. The native community seems to have been a matriarchy, ruled by a virile old squaw named Aliquippa. When young George Washington, in the King's service, came in '53 to see what the French were up to at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela, he made friends with her by the tactful gift of a bottle of whisky. It was there that General Braddock suffered his famous defeat two years later. And it was on that very battlefield that a bright-eyed little Scottish American, a century and a half later, started quantity production of steel. 536 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS Meanwhile whisky long remained the dominant note at Pittsburgh. Traders swapped liquor for furs. Outcroppings of iron were found not far off, and an occasional iron-smith with a small hand forge made "edge-tools"—scalping knives, tomahawks, dirks, and eventually scythes and sickles. It was a wicked frontier town, even after the Revolution. It became, naturally enough, the center of the famous "whisky rebellion," the first great American liquor revolt. President Washington promptly stopped that nonsense. But it remained for some time a tough town, half white and half red, distinguished for its drinking, fighting, gambling and horse-racing. Yet for all that, as an eloquent lawyer-citizen declared, it was "like the Vale of Cashmere—the Garden of Eden—or Paradise itself. Here there is the prospect of extensive hills and dales, where the fragrant air brings odors of a thousand flowers and plants upon its balmy wings." But the balmy breezes were doomed. A surveyor named William Crawford, later burned at the stake by Indians in Sandusky, had discovered iron ore near by in 1780. In 1784 coal was found on the cliff opposite the old blockhouse, by the owner of the property. He mined the fuel, rolled it down the cliff, gathered it up in rawhide containers, paddled it across the river in his canoe, and Pittsburgh's destiny was fixed. When Washington became President the total investment in the American iron business was about $17,000,000 and the yearly output was worth half a million. Pennsylvania already led the states in production, with fourteen furnaces and thirty-four forges. Mines were discovered for the most part accidentally, except for such scientific aid as was rendered by peach rods. It was easy to produce enough iron for the market. The big problem was transportation. The average freight charge was ten dollars per hundred miles. Toll roads limited traffic. Iron could seldom be sold more than 150 miles from the furnace. Manufactured iron was long carried on horseback, the bars being bent U-shaped to fit the horses' backs, and the beasts moving in trains of fifteen to one hundred, tied head and tail. STEEL - 537 A tariff placed on iron imports in Washington's administration had little effect. But by 1808, when the nation learned that it had paid $138,000,000 in a year to foreign manufacturers and merchants, economics took a sudden nationalistic turn. Hundred per cent Americans began asking what would become of a nation that could not even make its own socks, and why the cutlery should all come from Sheffield. There were parades of protest and speeches in Congress. It was the first big movement to "buy American" and "live at home," though these slogans were yet unborn. And the iron business benefited thereby. The inception of iron-making in the Pittsburgh district was characteristically picturesque. Peter Marmie, a French sportsman who had been Lafayette's secretary, with an English partner, built the first furnace west of the mountains. The business suffered from his fox-hunting, horse-racing and gambling. When he found himself bankrupt, he called his hounds, threw them one after another into the blazing furnace and leaped in after them. George Anshutz's little furnace, built within the Pittsburgh limits, might have succeeded if a fuel supply consisting of a thousand cords of wood had not been burned by "Whisky Boys." Other pioneers had better fortune, and Joseph McClurg, the most successful of them, became the first "Pittsburgh millionaire." Besides its local manufacturing and trading advantages, Pittsburgh was favored by its key position on the main route to the West. Through it the transmontane flood of pioneers poured into the Ohio Valley. It was long the most important point on the eastern route to Cleveland. The War of 1812 strengthened the demand for iron. Pittsburgh by that time had its first rolling mill, producing sheet iron, with a seventy-horsepower steam engine operating rolls, tilt-hammer and slitting machinery. It was the foremost plant in America. Bar iron was rolled there four years later. Pocket knives were made at last to match Sheffield's. There were dreams of the day when no more iron need be imported from England at $200 a ton. Barges were built to float heavy freight on the big river. There were sailing craft, too. One vessel sailed 538 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS down the Mississippi and across the sea to Italy, astonishing the waterfront at Genoa by the revelation of its home port. Canals opened new routes. Pittsburgh flourished. The smoke thickened. Mrs. Ann Royal, visiting the city in 1828, admired the spirit of the workers. "The workingmen of Pittsburgh," she recorded, "are sober, polite and gentlemanly. They are, as a body, the only gentlemen in the city. Their faces are as black as coal, but this disguise cannot conceal their noble mien and manly deportment." Iron production grew steadily, except during the great depression which began in 1837. Not until the Civil war was there any steel worth mentioning. Pennsylvania iron ore, like the ore of the other eastern states, was destined to exhaustion, but the supremacy of Pittsburgh as an iron capital was assured indefinitely by conveniently accessible coal deposits estimated at nearly 30,000,000,000 tons, along with vast quantities of natural gas, plenty of limestone, and good transportation facilities for bringing in Superior ore, and other ores if that source should be exhausted. Iron manufacture until the middle of the last century remained rather primitive, in spite of improvements. Iron-masters for ages had made iron simply in a fireplace or hearth by mixing ore and charcoal and applying an air blast, usually from a bellows, to obtain the necessary heat for shaping the metal and burning out most of the impurities. The first iron made in the Superior region, as has been related, was produced in a forge much like an old-fashioned blacksmith's, with hand bellows. From such forges, melting the ore with difficulty, could be produced small blooms of wrought iron, capable of being hardened into steel. The first real smelting was done in charcoal furnaces, of which the most primitive were built in hillsides. It was natural to use charcoal as fuel long after the discovery of coke, in regions where there was no coal and plenty of hard wood. All of the early American furnaces had been of this type. When the Marquette ore range was opened, charcoal furnaces soon sprang up in large numbers. The first com- STEEL - 539 plete furnace there, with a capacity of ten to twelve tons a day, was blown in by the Pioneer Iron Company, later a subsidiary of the Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Company, in 1847. Altogether there were scores of "stone stacks" built around those northern Michigan mines. Their ruins, standing like pioneer monuments, are still a conspicuous feature of the scenery inland from Marquette. They had meager blowing capacity and their iron pipe stoves were not entirely satisfactory, but they served their purpose, and there are two or three of their type—improved, of course—still in operation. "Charcoal iron" has always been highly valued. It was formerly used only in making high-priced castings. It used to be very costly in its consumption of wood. The first small blast furnaces required twenty to thirty cords a day, later ones 200 to 250 cords. The production of the charcoal itself was extremely wasteful. Today, in such modern plants as the Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Company has at Marquette and Gladstone, in upper Michigan, there is no wasted smoke from the charcoal kilns. The wood is carbonized in retorts connected with the furnaces, with distilling apparatus which produces alcohol, sulphuric acid, formaldehyde, acetates, tar oils and derivatives and numerous other valuable chemical products. Thus in spite of the limited timber supply, the charcoal furnaces themselves are operated so economically that their iron can be sold almost as cheaply as ordinary coke irons. From such metal are made dense castings of great strength and close grain, which can be machined to a fine and durable finish. Cleveland, born late, started soon in the iron business. It is significant that the first manufacturing corporation established in Cleveland under a state charter was the Cuyahoga Steam Furnace Company. It was organized in 1834 by Charles Hoyt, Luke Risley, Richard Lord and Josiah Barber, and its plant was on the west side of the river, in the flats, at the corner of Detroit and Center streets. It was a pioneer in the use of steam power instead of horsepower for blowing furnaces. It carried on a general foundry business and made cannon for the government, turning to the manufacture of 540 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS machinery for use in railroad construction, in the 'forties, and then building locomotives. The first locomotive west of the Alleghanies was produced in this factory, for use on the Detroit & Pontiac Railway. From it also came the first locomotives for the pioneer Cleveland, Columbus & Cincinnati Railway and the Cleveland & Painesville. It made the machinery for the Emigrant, the first propeller steamship on the lake. It had no monopoly, either. According to the Directory of 1837 there were in that year "four extensive iron foundries and steam engine manufactories" in this city. In 1839 Whittaker & Wells built a furnace near the waterfront. The directory for 1845 shows an imposing wood cut of the Cleveland Steam Boiler Shop, in which H. C. Morris "respectfully informs the public that he is prepared to build High and Low Pressure Propeller & Locomotive Steam Boilers." In 1849 the Cleveland Iron Company obtained a Michigan charter to make iron alongside of its mines near Marquette, before any had been shipped to Cleveland. In this decade appeared the founders of two famous dynasties of Cleveland ironmasters, William A. Otis and Henry Chisholm. Otis had walked from Massachusetts to Pittsburgh in 1818, looking for a job. He found employment in a little iron furnace company and learned to make household pots and kettles and blacksmiths' bar iron. At a time when a dollar a day was good pay for an iron worker, he saved money, invested it in the business and lost it. Thereupon he resumed walking and eventually reached Cleveland. When he had a little money saved again, he went into the hardware business. In twenty years he was prosperous enough to build an iron furnace and make his own hardware supplies. Then came the railroad era, demanding iron in greater quantities than had ever been needed before. Coal was coming in now from the Mahoning Valley. The ironmaster's son, Charles A. Otis, a young man capable of putting two and two together and getting the correct answer, saw an industrial opportunity. He formed a partnership with J. M. Ford, a coal operator, and established a steam STEEL - 541 forge, making wrought iron for railroad purposes. The chief shaping tool of that period was the primitive "tilting hammer," ancestor of the modern drop forge, a sort of heavy blacksmith's hammer raised and dropped by steam power as it had formerly been by a water wheel. This was in 1852. Prosperity led to enlargement. In 1859 a rolling mill for bar iron was added, the first rolling mill in the city. When the war started, they built the Union Rolling Mills. Meanwhile Chisholm had come into the picture. He was a Scotsman and a carpenter. Migrating to Canada in 1842, at the age of twenty, he followed his trade in Montreal for several years, then came to Cleveland to build railroad breakwaters. He liked the city and remained to lay the foundations for one of the world's great steel plants. This industrial episode began in 1856 with the arrival of the Jones Brothers, John and David, competent Welsh iron men from Phoenixville, Pennsylvania. They had $5,000, with which they undertook to establish an iron business in the neighboring village of Newburgh, six miles up the river, still regarded as a rival of Cleveland. The Welsh have always been good ironworkers, and Jones, too, is a famous name in the industry. The brothers bought a site, erected buildings and began making T rails. They ran into the depression of '57 and their money ran out. They appealed to Chisholm, who knew nothing of iron production except that it was in the stream of industrial development. He bought an interest, followed by A. B. Stone. The firm became Stone, Chisholm and Jones, survived the hard times, flourished on war orders, continued and grew into the Cleveland Rolling Mill Company, expanding eventually into the American Steel and Wire Company, one of the foundation stones of the United States Steel Corporation. James F. Rhodes, in the Magazine of Western History, has paid a notable tribute to Henry Chisholm, and by implication a tribute to the city which has so faithfully lived up to this ironmaster's policies : "He was among the early ones to see that steel rails would entirely take the place of iron, and one of the first to make a commercial success of the Bessemer process in this country. 542 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS But where his signal ability displayed itself was in recognizing the fact that, for the highest prosperity, a steel mill should have more than one string to its bow, and that to run at all times and in all circumstances, Bessemer steel must be adapted to other uses than the making of rails. Holding tenaciously to this idea, he was the first to branch out into the manufacture of wire, screws, agricultural and merchant shapes, from steel. To the progress in this direction must be imputed a large share of the success of his company, and it further entitles Mr. Chisholm to be regarded as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, man who has engaged in the Bessemer steel manufacture in this country. It is rare, indeed, that mechanical skill and business ability are united in one and the same individual, and it was to this exceptional combination of talents that Mr. Chisholm owed his splendid success." The year of 1856 was an industrial turning point. The fact was signalized in Cleveland by a public movement expressing a determination to make the city a great iron center. There was a mass meeting held, and a committee was appointed to boom the city. It declared that Cleveland's fortune lay in the iron industry, because it was here that ore and fuel could meet cheaply and abundantly. Only the year before, the Soo Canal had tapped the Superior Region. Cheap ore was now coming down the Lakes, with limitless quantities available. The country was feverishly building railroads. Soft iron rails wore out quickly. The first war that was to need iron in quantity was approaching. Steel was coming in, and the big need was cheap steel. So in this year was born the Age of Steel. Its natal sign was the granting of a patent to Sir Henry Bessemer for the steel production process which bears his name, though by right it should be called the Kelly process—at least, in America. Bessemer and William Kelly, an Irish-American, seem to have worked out the discovery independently, but Kelly did it first. It is a story worth preserving. Kelly was an inventive commission man from Pittsburgh, where his father, a real estate operator, built the first brick STEEL - 543 houses. He married a girl in Eddyville, Kentucky, and settled there. His first invention was the "Kelly kettle" for sugar boiling. He went into the iron business in order to utilize his own process of manufacture, and was financed by his wealthy father-in-law. His kettles became famous, and he prospered for a while in spite of his unbusinesslike disposition. He had his materials near by, good ore and hardwood for charcoal, and slave labor. He disliked slavery, and set a quaint precedent by importing Chinese ironworkers. He succeeded with them, too, until race complications developed. He refined his iron in what was called a "finery fire." This was a small furnace in which half a ton or more of pig iron was placed between two layers of charcoal, the blast turned on and more charcoal added as it was required, slowly burning out the impurities. After he had used up all the woods in the vicinity, Kelly began dreaming of ways to save fuel. He was threatened with bankruptcy and became depressed. Watching his furnace blowing one day, Kelly had an illumination. He had learned something of chemistry and metallurgy. There was an incandescent white spot on the surface of the molten metal, where the air blast came through. The iron was obviously hotter there than anywhere else. It was as if the iron itself were burning. What made it burn? Instantly he knew. It was the air! The oxygen of the air was burning the carbon out of the pig iron. The air itself was fuel ! He would cut no more timber and make no more charcoal. He would refine his iron with air alone, turning pig iron magically into steel, by carrying the process just far enough to leave the requisite small percentage of carbon. As usual, Kelly had to tell the world about it—his immediate world. And naturally everybody laughed at him. Cold air would chill the molten metal, not burn it. As Casson puts it, "every iron-maker since Tubal Cain had believed that cold air would chill hot iron." Did Kelly know more than all of them together? Kelly thought he did. He raved poetically and scientifically, and boasted that he would give public proof. He invited iron-makers from all over western Kentucky for a 544 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS demonstration. He blew cold air through melted pig iron, and it rose to a white heat. A blacksmith, at his signal, took some of the iron, cooled it, laid it on a forge and produced a horseshoe for the assembled iron experts to wonder at. Mere pig iron could not be shaped like that! Taking some glowing iron scraps, he forged them into nails and nailed the shoe to the hoof of one of the doubters' horses. It was evident that here was either malleable iron or soft steel, made by air. The iron men could not believe the evidence of their eyes, but were silenced. This was in 1847, the year that the first standard charcoal furnace smelted Superior ore in Michigan. The "pneumatic process" Kelly called it. His neighbors dubbed it "Kelly's air-boiling process." He applied it practically, succeeding oftener than he failed, and soon there were steamboats on the Ohio River with boilers made of his air-boiled iron. But most of his customers objected. In Cincinnati, his principal market, they wanted "regular iron" without any new-fangled notions. His conservative father-in-law refused him further funds. His ore failed, too. Kelly had to give up. He dismantled his little furnace. But he moved it back into the woods at night, set it up again in a secluded spot, and there continued his experiments. In 1851 he built his first real converter, a brick structure with a cylindrical chamber, but had trouble with his blast. If the blast was too strong, it blew all his metal into the air. If too weak, the air holes at the bottom clogged up with hardened iron. He built, one after another, seven converters in that forest hide-out, until he could do a three-hour refining job in ten minutes without fuel. Then came a blow in 1856. Kelly learned that an Englishman, Henry Bessemer, had obtained a patent at Washington for a "pneumatic process" apparently just like his own. It had never occurred to Kelly to seek a patent. Now he filed at once, presented his proof, and, though not ousting Bessemer's patent, obtained one for himself on priority. The next year he built his first tilting converter, a pot-bellied vessel about as high as a man, made of riveted iron plates, turning STEEL - 545 easily on an axle, with a wide spout at the top for pouring off the white metal. Such a vessel, in its final form usually made ten to twelve feet high, holding about fifteen tons of metal, has been called the "fiercest and most strenuous of all the inventions of man," and can be handled by a boy. It is filled with molten pig iron direct from the ore-smelting furnace. As the strong air blast through scores of little holes in the bottom rushes up through the hot metal, it roars like a volcano, sending into the air a tremendous shower of sparks, first red, then yellow and finally white, as the impurities, particularly carbon and silicon, are burned out. When the white stage is reached, the contents are poured into big clay pots and taken off to cool. The operation takes only about fiften minutes. Crude iron can thus be refined at the rate of a ton a minute. In the midst of Kelly's triumph came the panic of 1857 and bankrupted him. He went to the Cambria works in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and continued his experiments. After many years of penury and labor, he won deserved recognition and reward, although the Bessemer name clung to his process. When the two rival patents expired in 1871, Bessemer's was refused renewal, but Kelly's was extended for seven years, on the ground that he had not received adequate remuneration. He was belittled by manufacturers who objected to paying the royalties. But there was never any bitterness in Kelly. He knew what he had done. When his patent ran out finally in 1878, he had received half a million dollars in royalties. Bessemer made ten millions. Manufacturers made billions. Kelly's and Bessemer's process was not really complete in itself. If, when the air blast was turned on, nature was allowed to take its course, all the carbon would be burned out of the iron, leaving merely a neutral, useless product. The demand now was for steel, and to make ordinary steel there must be one to two per cent of carbon left in the molten iron to insure the requisite hardness. It was roughly practical to check the blowing at a point just short of complete combustion, but this method was not accurate enough. A difference 546 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS of one-half of one per cent of carbon might spoil the steel for the purpose intended, or make the product unequal in quality. The perfection of the process came from a third inventor, a Scot named Robert F. Mushet. He simply burned out all the carbon, then put back into the converter the precise quantity required, in an iron compound known as spiegeleisen. Some minor improvements were made by others, especially Alexander L. Holley and William R. Jones. The question was asked from the first, of this Bessemer product, "Is it steel?" The question is sometimes heard today, "Was it steel?" Obviously the process was not perfect. Even when adequate control of carbon was attained, it did not eliminate all of the sulphur and phosphorus, so that there were "Bessemer ores" and "non-Bessemer ores." Fortunately the greatest Superior deposits were found to include much "Bessemer." And this chemical difficulty was largely remedied in time by lining converters with a "basic" material, containing lime and magnesia. Even so, the Bessemer-Kelly converter could not serve all purposes. For particularly fine steel, or many grades for many uses, more laborious methods had to be adopted. But for rapid production of a low carbon or mild cast-steel of fairly uniform quality, in a time that called for quantity production, it served the purpose wonderfully. It could be produced at one-tenth the cost of crucible steel, made in small vessels closed from the air and flame. Thus the Age of Steel rode in on that converter. During the Civil war the industry in America expanded mainly along the old lines. There could not be much experimentation with war orders. Pittsburgh steel makers stood pat. But in 1864 Capt. Eber B. Ward of Detroit, the "steamship king of the Lakes," saw the new opportunity, dropped shipping and went into iron. He bought the Kelly and Mushet patents, starting production immediately, but lacked the best machinery, because Holley in Pittsburgh held the Bessemer rights. He became involved in a disastrous patent war. Even so, he made a fortune in a few years, becoming the first Steel King. Contemporaneously with Ward, a Pittsburgh telegrapher STEEL - 547 named Carnegie turned industrialist in a small way, buying an interest in a forge company that made axles. At this point entered Cleveland, in the person of Chisholm, who blew the first Bessemer steel in his Newburgh plant in 1868, seven years before Bessemer was produced in Pittsburgh. He was obliged to import workmen from Sheffield, where they had been trained in the process. Bessemer had made more rapid progress than Kelly in England, as he did later in America, because of the mechanical superiority of his equipment, perfected by Galloway & Company of Sheffield. Chisholm had the advantage of both the Bessemer and Kelly patents. At the same strategic time William Chisholm and Orrin W. Potter introduced the process in Chicago. Just as the Chisholms pioneered in using the Bessemer process, the Otis family pioneered with its great rival, the "open hearth" process. This was the creation of Charles William Siemens, a German-Englishman who in many respects rivaled Thomas A. Edison and was one of the greatest scientists and inventors connected with modern industry. This many-sided man invented, along with his "regenerative furnace," a pioneer process of electroplating, a differential governor and regenerative condenser for steam engines, improved methods for producing coal gas, a house grate to burn gas along with coke and reduce city smoke, an electric furnace, an arc lamp, a water meter, an electric thermometer and a bathometer to measure sea depths without sounding. He had much to do with the development of land and submarine telegraphs, laying the Anglo-American Company's Atlantic Cable in 1874 and designing the special steamship Faraday required to lay it. He experimented with gas engines before motor cars were even dreamed of. He invented an electric armature and helped to perfect the dynamo. He pioneered with hydro-electric power and electric tramways. As a pure scientist and philosopher, with his flair for mechanical "regeneration," he carried the principle so far as to suggest that the energy of the universe was sustained by the regenerative action of solar radiation, in a way comparable to the action of his own furnace. Here is evidently a foreshadowing of the bold 548 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS theory of Prof. Robert A. Millikan, the American physicist of "cosmic rays" fame, who makes the Universe a going concern by transformation of the light from burnt-out suns back into matter, through re-creation of atoms in the depths of space. What concerns us here, however, is not the universe but the steel industry and the utilization of Siemens' reduction process on the Cleveland lake front. In 1856, the same year that the Bessemer process was patented, Siemens had introduced the "regenerative and reverberatory furnace," with extra chambers which alternately absorbed waste heat on its way up the flue, and returned it to reinforce the flames and hot gases playing downward upon the metal pool in the shallow hearth. That was half the battle. After long experimentation, which involved building his own sample steel works, in 1867 he succeeded not only in making steel in his open furnace by melting wrought-iron scrap with his pig-iron, but in making steel directly from the ore by varying his process. This method almost takes hours where the Bessemer method takes minutes. But it is better because it can be more fully controlled and can make more and finer grades of steel  with greater precision. After an age when the demand was for quantity rather than quality, the open hearth is steadily gaining in favor, as the uses of steel become more varied and exacting. Charles A. Otis, who had confined his production to wrought iron, sold his forge and rolling mill to the Cleveland Forge Company at the close of the Civil war and went to England. John D. Rockefeller tried to interest him in oil investment, but he wanted to make steel, and wanted the most modern process. He investigated the Siemens method, obtained a license to use it, returned and organized the Otis Steel Company, with Samuel T. Wellman as engineer. In 1874 he completed the first plant in America for making open hearth steel, with two seven-ton acid furnaces, on the site of the present Lakeside plant. Its success resulted soon in open hearth plants all over the country. Before long Well-