Non-technical chats on iron and steel, and their application to modern industry

by La Verne W. Spring

CHAPTER		PAGE
I	The Early History of Iron	[1]
II	The Raw Materials	[17]
III	Raw Materials (Continued)	[37]
IV	The Blast Furnace	[52]
V	A General Glimpse Ahead	[69]
VI	Wrought Iron	[91]
VII	Cementation and Crucible Steels	[106]
VIII	Bessemer Steel	[123]
IX	The Open-Hearth Process	[142]
X	Cast Iron	[160]
XI	Cast Iron (Continued)	[178]
XII	Malleable Cast Iron	[195]
XIII	Cast Steel	[214]
XIV	The Alloy Steels	[233]
XV	The High-Speed Steels	[240]
XVI	The Mechanical Treatment of Steel	[245]
XVII	The Rolling Process	[259]
XVIII	The Rolling of Rods	[277]
XIX	Wire and Wire Drawing	[284]
XX	The Manufacture of Pipe and Tubes	[292]
XXI	The Manufacture of Seamless Steel Tubes	[302]
XXII	Transformations and Structures of the Steels	[310]
XXIII	The Equilibrium Diagram of the Iron-Carbon Alloys	[335]
	References	[350]
	Index	[355]

NON-TECHNICAL CHATS ON IRON AND STEEL

CHAPTER I
THE EARLY HISTORY OF IRON

Prehistoric Man

When in imagination we see the iron maker of early days sitting cross-legged on his platform between two crude bellows formed from goat skins with slits for air intakes and nozzles of bamboo, working them alternately to deliver their pitifully small streams of air into the hole in the side of a bank of clay which served as a furnace, we wonder at his patience; and after long hours of such effort his reward was only a few pounds of iron!

Contrast with this, if you please, the modern blast furnace with its towering height of 100 feet, its four huge heating stoves, the big blowing engines which each minute deliver to the furnace 50,000 cubic feet of blast, and the whole array of dust arresters, gas washers, and automatic ore and coke handling machinery which are essentials of this king of modern metallurgical devices. How insignificant seems the output of the ancient furnace when compared with the daily yield of 500 tons from this giant of to-day!

How has this come about?

The First Razor