Steam, Steel and Electricity

by James W. Steele

[THE AGE OF STEEL]

In very recent times the processes of civilization have had a strong and almost unnoted tendency toward the increased use of the best. Thus, most that iron once was, in use and practice, steel now is. This use, growing daily, widens the scope that must be taken in discussing the features of an Age of Steel. One name has largely supplanted the other. In effect iron has become steel. Had this chapter been written twenty, or perhaps ten, years earlier, it should have been more appropriately entitled the Age of Iron. A separation of the two great metals in general description would be merely technical, and I shall treat the subject very much as though, in accordance with the practical facts of the case, the two metals constituted one general subject, one of them gradually supplanting the other in most of the fields of industry where iron only was formerly used.

The greatest progresses of the race are almost always unappreciated at the time, and are certainly undervalued, except by contrast and comparison. We must continually turn backward to see how far we have gone. An individual who is born into a certain condition thinks it as hard as any other until by experience and comparison he discovers what his times might have been. As for us, in the year 1894, we are not compelled to look backward very far to observe a striking contrast.

All the wealth of today is built upon the forests and prairies and swamps of yesterday, and we must take a wider and more comprehensive glance backward if we should wish to institute those comparisons which make contrasts startling.

We are accustomed to read and to hear of the "Age" of this or that. There was a "Stone" Age, beginning with the tribes to whom it came before the beginnings of their history, or even of tradition, and if we look far backward we may contrast our own time with the times of men who knew no metals. They were men. They lived and hoped and died as we do, even in what is now our own country. Often they were not even barbarians. They builded houses and forts, and dug drains and built aqueducts, and tilled the soil. They knew the value of those things we most value now, home and country; and they organized armies, and fought battles, and died for an idea, as we do. Yet all the time, a time ages long, the utmost help they had found for the bare and unaided hand was the serrated edge of a splintered flint, or the chance-found fragment beside a stream that nature, in a thousand or a million years of polishing, had shaped into the rude semblance of a hammer or a pestle. All men have in their time burned and scraped and fashioned all they needed with an astonishing faculty of making it answer their needs. They once almost occupied the world. Such were those who, so far as we know, were once the exclusive owners of this continent. They were an agricultural, industrious and home-loving people. [[5]]

[5.] The Mound Builders and Cave Dwellers. They knew only lead and copper.

Then came, with a strange leaving out of the plentiful and easily worked metals which are the subject of this chapter, the great Age of Bronze. This next stage of progress after stone was marked by a skillful alloy, requiring even now some scientific knowledge in its compounding of copper and tin. A thousand theories have been brought forward to account for this hiatus in the natural stages of human progress, the truth probably being that both tin and copper are more fusible than iron-ores, and that both are found as natural metals. Some accident such as accounts for the first glass, [[6]] some camp-fire unintended fusion, produced the alloy that became the metal of all the arms and arts, and so remained for uncounted centuries. In this connection it is declared that the Age of Bronze knew something that we cannot discover; the art of tempering the alloy so that it would bear an edge like fine steel. If this be true and we could do it, we should by choice supplant the subject of this chapter for a thousand uses. As the matter stands, and in our ignorance of a supposed ancient secret, the tempering of bronze has an effect precisely opposite to that which the process has upon steel.

[6.] The story is told by Pliny. Some sailors, landing on the eastern coast of Spain, supported their cooking utensils on the sand with stones, and built a fire under them. When they had finished their meal, glass was found to have been made from the niter and sea-sand by the heat of their fire. The same thing has been done, by accident, in more recent times, and may have been done before the incident recounted. It is also done by the lightning striking into sand and making those peculiar glass tubes known as Fulmenites, found in museums and not very uncommon.

Nevertheless, the old Age of Bronze had its vicissitudes. Those men knew nothing that we consider knowledge now. It was a time when some of the most splendid temples, palaces and pyramids were constructed, and these now lie ruined yet indestructible in the nooks and corners of a desert world. Perhaps the hard rock was chiselled with tools of tempered copper. The fact is of little importance now since the object of the art is almost unknown, and the scattered capitals and columns of Baalbeck are like monuments without inscriptions; the commemorating memorials of a memory unknown. The Age of Bronze and all other ages that have preceded ours lacked the great essentials that insure perpetuity. The Age of Steel, that came last, that is ours now; a degenerate time by all ancient standards; has for its crowning triumph a single machine which is alone enough to satisfy the union of two names that are to us what Caster and Pollux were to the bronze-armed Roman legions of the heroic time--the modern power printing-press.