Steel: The Diary of a Furnace Worker

by Charles R. Walker

"Bar," he called.

The bar came in through the little round door in three or four minutes. He held it for me, and I sledged. It needed a little work like this to make you yearn for real air. The heat weakened you quickly. We worked about forty minutes, and then lay on our bellies and wriggled out. The means of entrance and egress is a small door, about fourteen inches in diameter, which means absorbing a good deal of cinder when you caterpillar through.

We finished the whole job in three hours, and then went to the other side of the stove and cleared out half a carload of flue-dust from the brick arches that compose the groundwork of that side of the stove. The dust lay a foot or two thick, and one man worked with a shovel in each archway. Here it was hardly hot at all, but merely thick with the red iron-dust. As you bent over inside the archways, knee-deep in the stuff, it would rise and settle on your arms and shoulders; you kept up a blowing with your nose to keep it out. Some of it was hard and soggy, and pleasanter shoveling. Five or six of us could work inside the stove at once, in the different archways, each with a teapot lamp near by, and a large, light shovel. Men at the entrances hoed the stuff out as we threw back.

But it was the next day's cleaning that I remember most strongly. The word went about that we were to "poke her out," to-morrow. That night the gang, and especially John, the Italian, instructed me very seriously to bring a selected list of clothing the next morning: a jacket, a cap with flaps for the ears, two pairs of gloves, and two bandanna handkerchiefs.

We went on top of Number 15, and started to dress for the job of poking her out. Over our faces we tied the handkerchiefs, leaving only our eyes exposed. Our necks and ears were covered with the winter caps, our hands with two pairs of gloves.

The stove, as I said, looked like a very tall boiler: half was a long brick-lined flue, where the gas burned; half, a mass of brick checkerwork for retaining the heat. Masses of flue-dust had clogged the holes in the checkerwork and reduced its power for holding heat. It was our job to poke out that dust.

John and Mike and I unscrewed the trap at the top very deliberately, and dropped a ladder down. There was a space left at the top of the checkerwork for cleaning purposes. We worked on top of that.

Jimmy, I think, went in first, taking a teapot lamp with him and a rod. In three minutes he was out again, and Mike down. I began to wonder what the devil they faced for three minutes in the chamber. Tony looked at me and said, "I teach you, now."

I tied the handkerchiefs around my face, sticking the end of one in my collar, and followed Tony.

My first sensation, as I stepped off the ladder to the checkerwork inside the stove, was relief. It was hot, but quite bearable. I picked my way slowly to Tony, and tried to study in the dull light his motions with the rod. The dust was too thick and the lamp guttered too violently for me to follow his hand. I bent over to watch the end of his rod, and recoiled. I felt as I had when the ladle got under me on the manganese platform—flame seemed to go in with breath. It was the hot blast that continued to rise from the checkerwork, and made it impossible to work beyond three minutes in the stove.