To Pittsburgh, centre of the steel industry, comes a large portion of the ore shipped from the Great Lakes. Ore destined for the Pittsburgh furnaces is brought from the Lake ports by the Bessemer Lake Erie, another Corporation subsidiary, with its two hundred and five miles of main line, the third longest and perhaps the best known of the Steel Corporation roads. The Duluth, Missabe & Northern holds first place among these roads in respect to mileage, two hundred and forty-seven miles, with the Elgin, Joliet & Eastern second, two hundred and eleven miles, and the Duluth & Iron Range fourth, one hundred and ninety-seven miles. The total trackage of the U. S. Steel roads, including sidings, branches, switches, and yard track, is 3,774 miles, every yard of it maintained in prime condition and absolutely modern.
A line drawn from New Orleans to St. Louis, thence to Kewanee, Ill., through Minneapolis and north to the Canadian border would about form the western boundary of the big Corporation’s manufacturing and mining activities. The northern boundary would be the Canadian border (except for one plant at Hamilton, Ont.) with the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico forming the east and south boundaries. Half the United States! And another plant is started in Canada.
All over this vast area are scattered the Corporation’s plants, but nowhere are they so thickly clustered as around Pittsburgh, the steel city of the world. Here the biggest of the subsidiary companies, Carnegie Steel, has its headquarters, and here, too, is the home of the National Tube, American Sheet and Tin Plate, and American Bridge companies. All the Carnegie plants are in or near Pittsburgh, as are the major part of the plants of the National Tube Co., but the Tin Plate and Bridge companies reach out in many directions. The Chicago territory provides a home and a market for the Illinois Steel Co. with its “South Works” plant at South Chicago and the Indiana Steel Co., which operates the great Gary plant at Gary. The American Steel & Wire Co. has its head office at Cleveland, but its plants are scattered over a great many states from Illinois to Massachusetts and down to Alabama, and it has a plant at Hamilton, Ont.
All over Pittsburgh and its environs are to be seen the stacks of the blast furnaces of the Corporation and other steel companies in which the ore is transformed into pig iron, the first step in the manufacture of steel. These furnaces, usually built in “batteries” several together, are immense ovens of steel and firebrick in which a temperature of more than 3,000 degrees is generated and in this terrific heat the ore, fluxed with limestone, is melted and converted into iron. From the ground to the tops of the furnaces run “skips” or buckets on inclined tracks, which carry the ore to their mouths, where, with a mixture of coke and limestone, it is dumped.
Soon the ore, coke, and limestone become one liquid mass of fire and the oven, after a sufficient time, is “tapped” by breaking open a small mud-sealed cavity at the bottom and letting the molten contents run out through gutters into receiving ladles. The iron, being heavy, runs out first. The rest, following, is diverted into other gutters and cooled, when it is used for making cement, ballasting railroad tracks, and other purposes. This material is known as slag.
Meanwhile, the iron is carried in the ladles to the mixers, huge cradles holding 250 tons or more each of molten metal, and rocking slowly but continuously to and fro. Into these mixers different heats of iron are poured, and the constant motion of the mixer gradually brings them to a homogeneous mixture, insuring uniformity in the metal.
William R. Jones, or Captain Bill as he was generally and affectionately known in the steel trade, was for many years in charge of the Braddock plant of the old Carnegie company and was one of the most picturesque figures that ever flitted across the pages of the history of the industry. Big, with a temper as hot as the metal with which he worked, but with a heart of gold, he was an ideal leader for a steel mill army. Gifted with unquenchable energy and enthusiasm, he acquired a habit of breaking world’s steel-making records, and in the earlier days of his management of the Braddock works he time and time again set the steel world agog by his feats in the matter of production. He continued to do so until the steel makers of Europe and America became so used to “Jones breaking another record” that his feats went unheeded. And the mixer, which still bears his name, was one of his many inventions.
In a letter to the writer, Andrew Carnegie said of Jones:
“Jones volunteered in the Civil War as a private and returned at its close a Captain. You can’t keep a good man down. I wished to make Jones a partner along with many of our pioneers, and informed him of this one morning. His reply was: ‘I don’t want to be troubled with business matters. You just give me a —— of a salary.’
“‘All right Captain,’ I said, ‘hereafter the salary of the President of the United States is yours.’ And so it was.”