Two thousand of the four thousand acres purchased were set apart for manufacturing purposes. Most of the land sloped gradually, and the surface-water naturally drained into the river. George Ingram's plans for an enormous steel-plant had been most carefully worked out in detail. Night and day the construction went forward. In eight months the plant was in full operation. He had obtained the latest important labor-saving devices and improved facilities in use throughout America and Europe. The whole was supplemented by the inventions already perfected by his father and himself.
The Harris-Ingram Steel Co. was provided with every modern device that could in any manner contribute economy and rapidity from the time the ores left the ship, till the finished product was loaded for market. All ores and limestone were delivered on a tableland of the same height, and adjacent to a series of several enormous blast-furnaces. The melted iron from the blast-furnaces was tapped into ladles mounted on iron cars, and provided with mechanism for tipping the ladles. The molten iron of the cars was next transferred to improved converters in an adjoining building, constructed entirely of iron. Nearby were the spiegel cupolas. The greatest possible accuracy was thus attainable in delivering definite quantities of molten iron into the converter for a given blow, also of spiegeleisen. This was easily accomplished by standing the ladle cars upon scales.
The metal was cast into ingot moulds, standing upon cars, and then transferred to the mould stripper; afterwards the ingots were weighed and sent to the soaking-pit furnaces. After a "wash heat" the ingots, or blooms, entered the rolls, and were drawn and sized in shape to fill orders from every part of the world.
The marvel at the Harris-Ingram Steel Co.'s mills was that electricity, developed in vast quantities at the coal mines and conveyed on patented copper tubes, furnished all the power, heat, and light used in the entire plant. Electricity hoisted and melted all the ores; it worked Sturtevant fans and blowing engines, which supplied necessary air for cupolas and converters. Electricity furnished all the power requisite to handle innumerable cranes and cars. As easily as a magnet picks up tacks, electricity also handled ingots or finished steel. Five thousand tons of finished steel per day were made and the labor and fuel account had been reduced over one-half.
While the huge steel plant at Harrisville was being constructed, a large force of men were building a conduit to protect copper tubes, from the steel plant to the coal fields. At the mines hundreds of miners were set at work, several shafts were sunk, and tunnels, levels, and winzes were developed.
George Ingram believed that all the force in the world available for man's use was derived from the sun; so he heroically resolved to hitch his wagon, if not to a star, to the mighty sun. With this purpose in view, he had bought the 20,000 acres of coal land. Half of this area was located in Jefferson, Harrison, and Belmont counties on the Ohio River, and thus title was secured to vast quantities of fossil power in the upper coal measures, which ignites quickly and burns with a hot fire. The other 10,000 acres were valuable because nearer to Harrisville. This coal came from lower measures or seams.
George Ingram had made a thorough study of coal, or fossil fuel, its formation and value. The coal of the carboniferous age is derived almost entirely from the family of plants called Lycopods, or club mosses, and the ferns, which back in high antiquity attained gigantic size. The microscope has clearly developed this vegetable origin of coal. The great Appalachian and other coal fields are without doubt, the long continued and vigorous forest growths, and subsequent fossilization of the same in the marginal swamps of ancient gulfs or seas.
The agency of transfer for solar energy is the vegetable kingdom. The vegetable cell has the surprising property through the sun's agency of being able to live and multiply itself on air alone. The carbon of carbonic acid, a constituent of the atmosphere, is so liberated and appropriated, as to become fixed in the forming tissues of plants. Thus the plant is a storer of light and heat, a reservoir of force. It mediates between the sun's energy and the animal life of the world. Thus coal seams are the accumulations of the sun's energy for thousands of centuries, requiring the patient growth and slow decay of hundreds of immense forests. One secret of the unprecedented late growth of cities is discovered in the steam engine, or the coal which feeds it.
A pound of good coal, used in a good engine, stands for the work of six horses for an hour; a ton of coal for the work of thirteen hundred horses for a day of ten hours; ten thousand tons of coal, used in a day by single lines of railways, stand for the work of thirteen million horses, working ten hours a day. In 1894 the English mines produced 188,277,525 tons of coal. In Great Britain alone, coal does the work of more than a hundred millions of men, and adds proportionately to the fabulously increasing wealth of those fortunate islands.
The Ingrams had solved two important problems, and on their practicable application depended the success of the great Harris-Ingram experiment. The more important of the two was the unlocking of the sun's stored energy, electricity, at the coal mines. The second was a device for conveying this energy from the mines to the steel plant, and it had been patented to protect it.