United States Steel: A Corporation with a Soul

by Arundel Cotter

One example of economical methods, interesting because of the fact that is was possible only to a company engaged in operations on a tremendous scale, is concerned with distribution of iron ore to its furnaces.

Steel, although much alike to the uninitiated, differs greatly in quality and suitability for different uses. The difference lies not alone in treatment during manufacture but in the kind and character of ore used. And a plant that has large orders for a particular kind, or analysis, of the metal, would find itself handicapped greatly if its receipts of ore included a mixture of the many grades often found deposited in the earth in close juxtaposition. The right ore for the right use at the right time means better and cheaper steel.

Hence the Corporation maintains in the regions from which it receives its ores well-equipped chemical laboratories for testing and sorting the several varieties of ore. Probably the most important of these is at Hibbing, Minnesota, on the line of the Duluth, Missabe & Northern.

As the long ore trains run through Hibbing small samples of the ore are taken out of the cars and subjected to careful analysis. The trains go on their way to Proctor where the extensive yards of the railroad are located, but before they reach that centre the chemical analysis of the ore in different cars has been ascertained and wired ahead, so that the cars composing the train can be sorted and distributed in sidings in accordance with the classification of the ores they contain. At Proctor new trains are then made up and proceed to the ore docks at Duluth where vessels are waiting to convey the ore to Gary, Chicago, or, by further trans-shipment, by rail to Pittsburgh. And each ship gets the kind of ore needed at the furnace to which it is destined.

This means not only better and more uniform quality in the finished product; it means a saving of several hundreds of thousands of dollars annually to the Corporation.

The Proctor yards themselves are interesting. Stretching two miles with seventy-five miles of track and capable of accommodating 5,400 cars at one time, as many as 469,555 fifty-ton cars of ore have passed through them in one season destined for the Corporation’s hungry furnaces all over the country.

Not least among the economies following in the wake of the Corporation’s organization were the conservation effected and additional profits earned by manufacturing into merchantable products what had formerly been waste. The manufacture of the so-called by-products of the steel industry had been practised in Germany for many years, and to a limited extent in this country as well. But to get the best results not only was a considerable outlay for new plant equipment required, but the services of a corps of trained and experienced chemists had to be engaged. And this meant such an expense that, especially as the whole by-product idea was in a somewhat experimental stage, companies even of a moderate size as steel companies go hesitated to undertake it. With the Corporation’s vast resources, many subsidiaries, and large output the expense of experimenting and investigating was spread out so as to be hardly felt, a careful study of the subject was made, and necessary plants were erected. This has borne fruit not alone in increasing profits for the Corporation and its stockholders but in blazing a path for the steel trade of the United States as a whole (all the larger steel companies have by-product plants to-day), and finally in effecting an important conservation of the natural resources of the country.

Nor, as events of the last few years have shown, have the benefits of the developments of by-product manufacture been confined to the Corporation, the steel trade, or even the United States. Chemicals derived from coke by-products are necessary in modern warfare. They form the basis of high explosives, gases, etc., and when the European war broke out the world at large realized that Germany, in protecting and fostering her by-product industry, had really been preparing for war. The benzol, toluol, and other chemicals manufactured at the coke by-product plants of the Steel Corporation and other companies in this country played an important part in stopping the German hordes and in saving civilization.

Coke, the fuel used to make steel, is obtained, as is probably universally known, from coal. In the old days of the trade, and to a great extent still, the coal was burned in brick ovens with open tops, known as bee-hive ovens, which produced about sixty tons of coke from each 100 tons of coal and blew out in smoke into the air the oils and gas contained in the coal. Even to-day, in the great coal fields that lie near Pittsburgh, may still be seen the dense smudge that arises in the air from thousands of these ovens. But their day is surely, if slowly, passing. In the modern by-product coke ovens sixty-five to eighty tons of coke are obtained from 100 tons of coal, a gain of nearly 25 per cent. in the case of low volatile and about 8 per cent. with high volatile coals. Nor is this saving all. The gases with their oil content instead of being blown out into the air and burned are conducted through pipes to an intricate apparatus where coal tar, ammonium sulphate, a valuable fertilizing agent, ammonia, and benzol, an important base for high explosives and dyes and also usable as fuel for motor cars, as well as other products are extracted, and the gas itself is made available for use in motor engines or in illuminating. More than one city to-day lights its street with the gas from by-product coke plants.

As it requires more than one ton of coke to make a ton of steel it is plain that the 25 per cent. saving in the amount of coke obtained from coal by use of the modern by-product ovens means an enormous economy to the Corporation which produces from seventeen to twenty millions of tons of steel a year, and the saving of four to five millions of tons of coal to the country. Nor are the profits derived from the sale of the by-products themselves immaterial.