Still orange-hot, the blooms find their way to the rolling mill, where they go dashing back and forth upon rollers and between rollers—the latter working in pairs like the rollers of large wringers, squeezing the blooms, in their successive passages, to greater length and greater thinness, until at last they take the form of long, red, glowing rails; after which they are sawed off, to the accompaniment of a spray of white sparks, into rail lengths, and run outside to cool. And I may add that, while there is more brilliant heat to be seen in many other departments of the plant, there is no department in which the color is more beautiful than in the piles of rails on the cooling beds—some of them still red as they come from the rollers, others shading off to rose and pink, and finally to their normal cold steel-gray.
Presently along comes a great electromagnet; from somewhere in the sky it drops down and touches the rails; when it rises bunches of them rise with it, and, after sailing through the air, are gently deposited upon flat cars. Here, even after the current is shut off, some of them may try to stick to the magnet, as though fearing to go forth into the world. If so, it gives them a little shake, whereupon they let go, and it travels back to get more rails and load them on the cars.
Iron ore, coal, and limestone, the three chief materials used in the making of steel, are all found in the hills in the immediate vicinity of Birmingham. I am told that there is no other place in the world where the three exist so close together. That is an impressive fact, but one grows so accustomed to impressive facts, while passing through this plant, that one ceases to be impressed, becoming merely dazed.
If I were asked to mention one especially striking item out of all that welter, I should think of many things—things having to do with vastness, with gigantic movements and mutations, with Niagara-like noises, with great bursts of flame suggesting fallen fragments from the sun itself—but above all I think that I should speak of the apparent absence of men.
Gigantic movements and mutations, Niagara-like noises, great bursts of flame like fallen fragments from the sun
There were some four thousand men in the plant, I believe, at the time we were there, but excepting when a shift changed, and a great army passed out through the gates, we never saw a crowd; indeed I hardly think we saw a group of any size. Here and there two or three men would be doing something—something which, probably, we did not understand; in the window of a locomotive cab, or that of a traveling crane, we would see a man; we kept passing men as we went along; and sometimes as we looked from a high perch over the interior of one of the great sheds, we would be vaguely conscious of men scattered about the place. But they were very small and gray and inconspicuous dots upon the surface of great things going on—going on, seemingly by themselves, with a sort of mad, mechanical, majestic, molten sweep.
At this time, when the great efficient organization started by Bismarck is being devoted entirely to destruction, it is interesting to recall that the idea of industrial welfare work originated in Germany during the period of Bismarckian reorganization. So, paradoxically, the very forces which, on one hand, were building towards the new records for the extinction of life established in the present war, were, upon the other hand, developing plans for the safeguarding of life and for making it worth living—plans which have enormously affected the industrial existence of the civilized world.