Great Combinations Create New Opportunities.
In these latter days new doors are opened to ingenuity by the comprehensiveness of great industries, by the huge scale on which they conduct their business. A country blacksmith is served well enough by a hand-blown bellows; at the Homestead Steel Works the blowing machinery has been designed by the best engineering talent in America. When the output of a trust, or even of a single company, rises to scores of millions of dollars every year, it is worth while to measure how far moisture in a blast may do harm, and adopt the elaborate plans of Mr. James Gayley for drying air before sending it into a furnace. Take an example of how the United States Steel Company has planned every detail betwixt mine and mill. Each lake carrier, of immense size, has its hold so curved that automatic clam-shells lift ten tons of ore at each descent, shoveler and shovel being dismissed. Vessels and docks dovetail into one another. The car-lengths, as a freight train stands on its track, correspond to the distance between one steamer-hoist and the next. In like fashion every link in the chain is devised to save every possible foot-pound of energy, every dispensable moment of time. Capital, always cheaper than labor, is expended with both hands, and in no direction more liberally than in setting at work the inventor of economical devices, and his twin brother, the organizer, who deals with the whole industry as a single mechanism to be reduced to the lowest working cost and the highest ultimate efficiency.