Millions from Waste

by Frederick Arthur Ambrose Talbot

Waste is precarious to handle. The very nature of the material demands that it shall be worked up in the most economical manner. Under the fickle influences normally prevailing upon the market, the margin between profit and loss may suffer such attenuation from inefficient exploitation as to submerge the factor of profit, thus endangering the very practice of utilizing the residue. It is immaterial whether time or labour be the adverse circumstance. The one influence can be quite as ruinous as the other. Should the cumulative effect of the two forces be experienced simultaneously, then the results are almost certain to be devastating and prompt in their action. Consequently, to secure the uttermost benefits attainable it is imperative that the most economical and efficient methods should be employed.

This is particularly the case in the iron and steel trades. The competition between the various nations in this manufacturing field is excitingly keen. It must not be forgotten that, in this industry, waste plays a very prominent part as a raw material. It may be tins rescued from the domestic dust-bin, turnings from the lathe, a worn-out locomotive boiler, or the battered hulk of a steamship snatched from the jaws of the hungry seas through the ingenuity of the salvage engineer.

In the handling of scrap and junk the designing engineer has been strikingly ingenious, resourceful, and free with his expressions of resource. The cranes and other mechanical handling devices, which he has evolved, compel attention for the simple reason that they have been introduced to secure a reduction in the cost of moving the material. In this direction finality is impossible of attainment; the necessity to reduce the cost factor is so urgent and continuous. Creative effort, thus fostered, has achieved a distinct triumph during the past few years. It has evolved a new system of dealing with iron and steel, especially the waste, which is rapidly displacing all other methods which hitherto have held undisputed sway. I refer to the lifting-magnet.

It was a British mind which first conceived the idea of harnessing the magnet to the wheels of the iron industry. Sir William Sturgeon saw no reason why the toy of our childhood days, the pin-attracting properties of which extended us infinite delight and provoked indescribable wonder, should not be devoted to the movement of ponderous masses of steel. So he made the experiment. But his noteworthy effort proved only partially successful. It did not fulfil expectations, not because the designer was wrong in his deductions, but because he conducted the evolution along fallacious lines. But his failure set men thinking. They followed up his reasonings and discovered why he did not record success. The British pioneer had been content to accept the magnet’s familiar form and to reproduce it upon a larger scale to fulfil his objective. This was why he failed. For such as application as he had in his mind’s eye a modification in design was imperative. The German and American experimentors, who followed in his footsteps, quickly realized this circumstance and accordingly abandoned the traditional horse-shoe form for a magnet of flat drum-like shape.

In this modernized and materially changed form the lifting-magnet met with instant success. The Germans were the first to recognize its possibilities, and accordingly developed and popularized its utilization in accordance with their characteristic organized methods, with the result that it was not long before all the leading iron- and steel-works of the country were equipped therewith to their distinct commercial advantage.

So far as America and Britain, the home of the lifting-magnet, have been concerned, progress has been slow and uneventful. The Germans set out to reap advantage from our manufacturing apathy, and to a certain degree succeeded. It remained for the war, with its drain upon cheap labour on the one hand and the necessity to speed up and to increase output on the other, which compelled us to regard the lifting-magnet with enhanced favour. This tendency was accentuated by the urgent requests circulated far and wide to save all waste metal and to turn it over to the country for the production of munitions. In this manner vast quantities of waste metal of every conceivable description were released, which, in turn, led to a demand for handling appliances. Under the conditions which obtained it was imperative that this potential raw material should be handled with the utmost economy, both of time and labour, but native ingenuity had nothing at its command to compare with the lifting-magnet in this connection. Those firms which had been sufficiently enterprising to equip themselves with the German appliance found themselves in an overwhelming superior position, while their lifting-magnets paid for themselves over and over again in the course of a single year.

The national deficiency in supply and its far-reaching adverse effects were remedied through the combined enterprise and initiative of a young electrical engineer and a British manufacturer. The former had followed the German developments very closely and had discovered that, notwithstanding their extravagant claims, these appliances really fell somewhat short of the mark in point of efficiency and economy in operation. Fortified with this knowledge he had promptly designed an appliance of this character, in which the obvious Teuton defects were eliminated, thereby giving a lifting-magnet which represented a decided advance upon the best which Germany could offer.

The Pickett-West lifting-magnet, so named after its designer and manufacturer respectively, is one fully complying with traditional British standards of production, while it also possesses many novel features which have already emphasized their value. It is built along robust lines, so that it completely fulfils the conditions peculiar to its field of application. Moreover, its design can be modified within wide limits to meet the individual requirements of the service for which it is intended, one distinctly ingenious feature being the model fitted with moving fingers, each of which constitutes a magnet in itself, and wherewith the magnet is able to exercise the maximum magnetic gripping power upon the article for the movement of which it is being used.

Without entering into a technical description of this apparatus it may be said to comprise, in its simplest form, an inverted dish with a central pole-piece. Round this pole-piece is built a coil composed of alternate layers of copper of substantial dimensions and insulating material. The coil is enclosed within the inverted dish and a face-plate is bolted in position. Thus the coil which occupies the whole of the case, with a special insulating compound run in under pressure to occupy all the vacant space such as corners and interstices, is completely encased and safe from tampering. Suitable terminals are fitted and are coupled up to a flexible electric cable through which the current is led to energize the coil and to impart the requisite magnetic energy to the lifting face-plate. When the coil is active, naturally the magnet will readily attract any ferrous metal which it may chance to approach, or with which it may come into contact, and this will continue to cling to the face of the magnet until the current is switched off. The magnet is slung upon the hook of the crane either by chains, or bars forming a tripod terminating in a link. It is applicable to any type of crane, whether it be of the locomotive, jib or derrick type or overhead travelling system, and with equal facility.

The foregoing description is merely a bald description of the lifting-magnet in its simplest form. To secure the highest efficiency many perplexing technical issues had to be resolved. The magnet is necessarily of impressive dimensions and weight, circular or rectangular in regard to the form of the face-plate according to the nature of the work to be fulfilled, and ranging from 24 to 62 inches in diameter. The most popular size is that measuring 52 inches across the face. Massive construction is inevitable to enable the appliance to withstand the rough wear and tear, as well as unceremonious handling, to which it is exposed in the average iron-works by indifferently skilled labour, or to meet the conditions of piece-work when operations are necessarily conducted at relatively high pressure by the men who are bent upon the consummation of one end—the maximum return in the form of wages for the work accomplished.