MECHANICAL HANDLING OF ORE
Of course machinery plays a large part in the modern iron industry. It would be an endless task even to load one of the big blast furnaces by hand and then the enormous output of molten metal—40 tons for every pound produced by the old Catalan furnaces—could not be handled without ponderous machines whose huge arms and fingers are not scorched and blistered by the intense heat. Along the Great Lakes vast loading machines fill the holds of ore vessels and at the plant there are enormous unloading machines that travel on rails. These have long bridgelike arms that reach out over the ore boat and drop huge clam-shell buckets into their holds. The buckets quickly unload the boats and dump the ore on shore where other buckets pick up the ore, carry it back and pile it up in big heaps that look like mounds of reddish earth.