Again it is passed on, and from some subterranean blackness you see it rushed out and up to a sort of guillotine that first cuts off the flawy ends, where the impurities accumulated in its ingot state, and sends them to the “scrap” heap, then lops the bloom as a man saws firewood, but a great deal faster, into billets varying from one to four hundred pounds in weight. They are “billets” now, and at last are counted the raw material of wire, even after such an inferno of cooking.
A steel loader gathers them up, carries them away in bunches and, by a trick of wire pulling, deposits them on other cars in rows as regular as the pickets on an old fashioned fence.
THROUGH THE ROLLING MILL
Along with the copper billets they are stacked in thousands and thousands of tons in the stockyard outside the doors of the rolling mill, each in its group according to physical and chemical character, waiting the next purgatory of change. One pile is marked for one mission, one for another, ranging through all the uses wire can be put to. These piles are forever vanishing, forever being replaced, as the wide world calls for wire. They disappear into the darkness of the mill and they are never billets again.
Marshaled on cars and jammed by hydraulic force into big reheating furnaces like a Brobdignagian bakery, fired with fuel gas, they come out glowing again and start on the next stage of reduction. The passage through the rolling mill is a short life and a merry one. If they were kneaded in the blooming mill it was a mild experience. Here they are mauled and manhandled and masticated by swift, continuous and looping mills that are born with a huge appetite for the largest billets, and make rods of great length. Down they go, under the gripping of relentless fingers that squeeze them first square, then oval, then square again, and pass them on, always smaller, toward the journey’s end. Sometimes it’s half an inch, sometimes more, according to the needs of trade.
THE MILE A MINUTE JOURNEY INTO WIRE
Wire goes the whole distance, whisking along through the murky, half dark mill, up and down at a mile a minute, like flaming serpents flirting fiery tails, as the men, armed with tongs, seize and whip them from one pair of rolls to another. In they go, around the grooved repeater and out again to be grabbed with a motion swift as the dash of a pickerel, and thrust once more into the next set of rolls. Always the lightning speed and always the long tail, red hot and smaller than before, and longer, playing “snap the whip” down the steel grooves to the bottom of the “pit,” then straight away up the incline, a flash of fire in the darkness, and on from roll to roll. The men who handle these rods hold their ticklish posts only twenty or thirty minutes at a time. A straight eight hour day, if a man came through it alive, would send him to an asylum with a conviction that he was great grandson to Medusa. At the finishing pass where the man stands, a stream of four rods is going by him continually at lightning speed, about a mile a minute; hundreds of tons in twenty-four hours looping the loops through the rolls and finishing in red coils of quarter inch, lying innocent and rosy and round on the metal floor.
To the novice they look like wire; to the cognoscenti they are only rods, and in order to be wire some day are hustled off to the cleaning house and in bunches plunged into a bath of acid. This takes off the scale the rolling left on them. But acid in wire steel is like heresy in the church. It has to be purged away. This is done by immersion and then by a coating of lime to neutralize by chemical action whatever taint may remain. The steel is then baked from twenty-four to forty-eight hours to remove the hydrogen.
Wire making has just begun. From this time on it is a wonder-work to the novice, a mechanical sleight of hand performance by which hundreds of shadowy men and other hundreds of whirling wheels spin the rod down ever smaller and smaller till what was once a stodgy four foot billet is perhaps a thousandth of an inch thick, fifteen odd thousand miles long, weighs less than a quarter of an ounce to the mile, and has to be looked for with your best reading glasses. It is just three times as fine as the hair on your head.
THE WORK OF THE WIRE DOCTORS