THE AGE OF STEEL
The iron industry has of late years become more and more merged into the steel industry, as steel has been gradually replacing the parent metal in nearly every field of its former usefulness. Steel is so much superior to iron for almost every purpose and the process of making it has been so simplified by Bessemer's discovery that it may justly be said that civilization has emerged from the Iron Age, and entered the Age of Steel. While iron is mined more extensively now than at any time in the history of the world, the ultimate object of most of this mining is to produce material for manufacturing steel. We still speak of boiler iron, railroad iron, iron ships, etc., but these names are reminiscent, for in the construction of modern boilers and modern ships, steel is used exclusively. In the past decade it is probable that no railroad rails even for the smallest and cheapest of tracks have been made of anything but steel.
The last half of the nineteenth century has been one of triumph of steel manufacture and production in America, and at the present time the United States stands head and shoulders above any other nation in this industry. In the middle of the century both Germany and England were greater producers than America; but by the close of the century the annual output in the United States was above fifteen million tons as against England's ten and Germany's seven; and since 1900 this lead has been greatly increased. The steel industry has become so great, in fact, that it is "a sort of barometer of trade and national progress."
The great advances in the quantity of steel produced have been made possible by corresponding advances in methods of winning the iron ore from the earth. Mining machinery has been revolutionized at least twice during the last half century, first by improved machines driven by steam, and again by electricity and compressed air. Ore is still mined to a limited extent by men with picks and shovels, but these implements now play so insignificant a part in the process that they cannot be considered as important factors. Steam shovels, automatic loaders and unloaders, dynamite and blasting powder, have taken the place of brawn and muscle, which is now mostly expended in directing and guiding mining machinery rather than in actually handling the ore.