CHAPTER VIII
THE CORPORATION’S IMPLEMENTS
We live to-day in the “Age of Steel.” The metal probably plays a more important part in our civilization than any other product made by the hands of man. Our big buildings, our navies (both war and merchant), our trains and the rails they run on, machinery of all kinds, tools for every trade—all steel. Furniture, watch springs, even wire hair for stuffing mattresses and other uses—steel again. And new uses for the metal are being discovered almost every day.
It is difficult to realize that the age of steel is hardly more than half a century old. But fifty years ago steel, commercially, was still something of an experiment, struggling against iron for its place in the sun. At that time the head of one of the greatest railroad systems of America dismissed a persistent salesman who had been trying to secure his order for steel rails, with the exclamation: “Steel rails? Bosh! Stuff! Nonsense!” To-day that line has many thousand miles of track and every rail in it is steel. Not two generations ago engineers viewed askance the plans of the designer of the first skyscraper. They regarded as absurd the proposal to build “a steel bridge up into the air.” To-day the Woolworth Building towers nearly eight hundred feet above the pavement of Broadway.
From the day when steel was made “by the spoonful” to the present, when the great “Steel Trust,” with its thirty-eight Bessemer converters and 334 open-hearth furnaces, is capable of producing some 65,000 tons every twenty-four hours, is a far cry reckoned in terms of industrial development short as the reckoning may be in years. The pioneers of steel never dreamed of the enormous proportions to which the industry would grow, the innumerable uses to which the metal would be put.
What is steel? Iron that has been refined and hardened by processes in which heat plays the most important part.
Iron ore is found in large quantities in many parts of the world. Sometimes it is loose, like earth, and again it is a rocky formation. Its color also varies, some ores being red, others yellow, and so on through various shades and tints. But the pure metal is white and, strange as it may seem, quite soft. Cleansed of its impurities, and hardened by a mixture of carbon and other ingredients, it becomes one of the hardest of metals.
Iron, apparently, is common to all the planets. Meteorites usually contain a large percentage of it. So general is its distribution on this planet that a theory has been advanced that the globe on which we live is nothing but a vast mass of iron thinly incrusted with rock and earth, and that the deposits found near the surface are merely the outcropping of this inexhaustible mine.
The Western Hemisphere is particularly favored in regard to deposits of iron. Immense ore bodies exist in the United States and Canada, Chile, Brazil, Cuba, and other parts. Of the known ore beds in this country, the most important lie around Lake Superior. Near this great inland sea there are no less than six different ore ranges, the Mesaba, Vermilion, Marquette, Gogebic, Menominee, and Cuyuna. Of these the Mesaba is the largest, richest, and most easily worked and from it is taken a material portion of all the ore mined in the United States. There are ore bodies of considerable size in Alabama, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, and Utah, and another large deposit is now reported to have been discovered in Oregon.
Some American steel makers import part of the ore they use from Sweden, Cuba, Spain, and Chile. But the Steel Corporation’s subsidiaries have depended so far upon the Lake regions for their ore supplies, except the Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co., which uses Alabama ores.
Although iron had been made in America long before the War of Independence nothing was known of the immense deposits in the region of the Great Lakes until 1845, in which year Philo M. Everett was guided by Indians to “a mountain of solid iron,” to which he gave the name of the great missionary explorer, Marquette. Shortly afterward a surveyor named Stunz set out to seek gold in the wild region north of Superior, and came back to civilization with a tale of vast iron deposits in what is now known as the Vermilion range. But so far and hard to reach were these deposits that it was not until the early seventies that capital, as represented by the late Charlemagne Tower, could be interested in the exploitation of these deposits.