What happened to the lava?
The water shivered it to atoms and cast it high upon the wind as dust and ashes.
In that free and irresponsible condition iron travelled far, made his bed in many places, took up with new and strange affinities,—the flapper sisters Chlorine, the Sulphur Gerties, the lazy Nitrate Susans, the harmless Silicates, a score of others known and unknown, and most of all with a comfortable, indispensable element called Oxygen. The extent and variety of his embracings may be imagined from the fact that he is never found in a state of unattached purity save now and then when he falls from the heavens as a meteorite. In these haphazard, bigamous earthly alliances he is of no avail to man. The problem is how to disentangle him,—how to divorce him from his undesirable affinities and wed him durably and in a lawful manner to those elements which supplement his power.
It becomes extremely complicated when you begin seriously to consider it. How shall one be divorced from many miscellaneous affinities? You have to have been regularly wedded in order to get divorced. Well, the only way is the long, pragmatic way. You wed him to the affinities that are to be legally got rid of and then divorce him from them.
Now take it: The iron ore is in the ore bed, embracing those other elements at random, particularly Oxygen. First you oxidize him by roasting. That is, you wed him to Oxygen; you give him Oxygen until he is sick of it. Then you melt him down with coal in a furnace to deoxidize him—to divorce him, that is to say, from his affinity Oxygen. It is the first fiery ordeal. But at the same time you wed him to Carbon. Thus deoxidized and carbonized, divorced and wedded by one stroke, he becomes pig iron.
The wedding with Carbon, however, is not permanent. It has been contracted so to speak under duress, a miserable makeshift, because his earthly nature is such that he must be wedded to something all the time. Besides, there is now too much Carbon for his own good. So you melt him again and divorce him from Carbon, by the unexpected method of blowing Oxygen through him. At the end of this second ordeal he is free of both Carbon and Oxygen, many other elements have disappeared also, and you have wrought iron, practically pure, limp and malleable.
Now suppose you want to make him hard. You want to convert him into steel. In that case you melt him a third time and wed him permanently to a small amount of Carbon, more or less, the amount to be governed by the degree of hardness required. That makes steel. But to make it has required one roasting and three meltings.
The dream of the iron masters, beginning with the 19th century, was to make it all one continuous, fluid process, and bring the complete result to pass at one melting. If that could be done the cost of production would be enormously reduced.
The discovery of such a method now seemed imminent in either England or Germany. Many experts were pressing on the door. Suddenly it would fly open and whoever was there at the moment would be able to seize the secret. Rumors of success had been heard, disbelieved, denied, scoffed at and repeated. Aaron believed them, or believed at least that if the secret had not already been captured it was about to be. That was his quest in Europe.
After a year he returned with a steel making patent, enormous quantities of queer looking material, a crew of expert English erectors, and proceeded to build what the curious Damascenes called a concern. That word was in lieu of a proper name for an object which, without being supernatural, was unique on earth. In shape it somewhat resembled a gigantic snail shell, in a vertical position, open end up, thirty feet high, made of iron plates bolted together, lined with fire clay and so mounted at its axis that it could be tipped to spill its contents. On the same foundation was mounted a blowing engine to force air at high pressure through perforations in the bottom of the shell; and there was also a great ladle in chains for hoisting molten metal to its mouth.