The Kinkora or Roebling establishment, carrying the production of the subsidiary New Jersey Wire Cloth Company, making wire netting, window screens and other forms of wire cloth, is given over most largely to the making of steel wire and the fundamental work of wire and steel production. With the company’s large acreage at this location, its townsite and the facility of river transportation as well as rail, with unlimited water, of which this plant uses more than is pumped by the city of Trenton itself, the situation offers large opportunity for expansion and profitable centralization of operation. At the present time, while shipments of wire are made direct from Roebling to manufacturers who use it in production of their own commodities, by far the greater part of the output goes to the other plants to be finished into rope and specialties.
MAKING A CROSSING BY CABLEWAY
Inside the tall palings that enclose the great mill buildings at Roebling, there is an open space, broad and long as a drill ground, threaded by spur tracks and heaped endlessly with stacks of pig iron and steel-making materials. It seems as though some giant had dumped there the salvage of a hundred battlefields. It lies there sadly rusting under the weather, waiting the moment when the mills shall stretch forth hands and hurry it in, rush it like a neophyte through the fierce initiation of heat and chemistry, and having changed the very fibre of it by strange processes, send it singing forth, shining in great coils, twisted into cords and cables small and great, bare or insulated, bronzed or coppered, galvanized or enameled, huge and bulky or spun to hair-like tenuousness, to do its work in a busy world.
MAKING WIRE STEEL
Of course, the making of steel is no new story, but this is wire steel—the high carbon, the tough, the sinewy, the resilient, that must carry in itself as it moves along through these interminable buildings the analytically measured proportions of this or that, which fit it to bear up the traffic of a giant bridge or convey a whisper of telephonic sound or register split seconds in an Elgin timepiece. It is “pig,” and ore and “scrap,” but just what kind and just how much of “scrap” and ore and “pig,” these are subtle questions. It costs a lot of time and money sometimes to answer them.
When the thirty-five hundred and odd degrees of heat in the long rows of open hearth furnaces have brought this stubborn mixture to bubbling and seething like a busy kettle of soup—a workman adding a little manganese or other ingredient to the broth now and then, grimy men with long handled steel dippers take out a few thimblefuls from time to time and hurry the sample away to the chemist, who, like a chef, tests the quality and prescribes the seasoning. By and by it is run off, from an opening in the bottom of the furnace into a huge caldron they call a “ladle.” A fifty-ton crane conveys it down the long, shadowy building, to halt above a group of tall moulds. A wizard up in the gloom under the roof moves it from mould to mould, a few inches at a time, while the liquid steel is drawn from the bottom into one after another. The moulds are left to cool.
BLOOMS
Its history is now begun. It is an ingot—many ingots—and when removed from the mould is loaded on steel cars and borne away on its journey. When in due course the ingot comes to the “blooming mill” it is fourteen inches thick each way and five feet long. Heated again, it is marched up on a steel rollway, also controlled by a “man higher up,” and into the hungry jaws of a machine that, after a series of swallowings, disgorges it at last, shrunken in sheer humility to a diameter of four inches and with a very long face—some forty-eight feet to be exact. And no wonder. In the process it has been kneaded into a dozen different phases of flatness and squareness, and put in a way to profit by the everlasting squeezing and stretching it is to undergo. Now it is a bloom.
BILLETS