Pittsburg dispatch. [volume] (Pittsburg [Pa.]) 1880-1923, 1889-03-08

furnace proprietors is to get as great results
as possible, and in consequence the carbon
in pig is in the graphite form and very
high in silicon. Under the cold blast pro-
cess carbon, as rule, in forge iron was in
a combined form and the silicon in it was
low, making it easier to convert into wrought
iron, and the change is mostly due to the
modern manner of running furnaces for all
that is in them-getting the most iron pos
slble out OF the ore. In the olden time mill
tap cinder was not used for fux, limestone
being used exclusively. The hot blast ex-
tracts almost everything possible from the
ore.
RAIL WONDERS.
But great as has been the increase in out
put In iron making generally IN SO odd
years, it is dwarfed in comparison with that
of railway rail making. The Brady's Bend
rail mill was the first erected west OF the
Allegheny Mountains, and Colonel w. u
Slack, superintendent of the Homeopathic
Hospital, could doubtless tell much OF In
terest concerning it. 1t had the held all to
itself until the Cambria Iron Works at
Johnstown were established in the SOS.
At the Brady's Bend mill an output of 200
tons of rails a week was considered some
thing worth boasting Of Now the Edgar
Thomson, from Sunday evening at o'clock
until Saturday following at o'clock P. NJ,
shoves out a rail a minute. Averaging
heavy and light sections at go pou nds, this
is an output of 600 pounds a minute, Is
tons an hour, 1856 tons in two hours less
than week, and enough rail to lay some
"a miles of track.
Notwithstanding the immense saving in
human labor, there is no falling off in the
amount of labor employed, but on the con-
trary it has increased in greater ratio.
THE GRAND RESULTS.
The mill man talked with said: "Thirty
years ago l knew every man I worked with
in a mill; now 1 do not know by name one
third of the men in the mill where I am
employed. Labor has not only not been
hurt by machinery, but has received benefit
from it.
This has been general experience. The
descendants of the English laborers who
burned the ricks and barns of farmers, who
employed threshing machines and other
labor-saving machinery. are to-day getting
80 per cent more wages than did their an
cestral incendiaries when nearly everything
was done by hand. Not many years after
the whisky rebellion in this State the peo-
pie west Of the Chestnut Ridge prophesied
ruin on the completion of the Pennsylvania
canal. They said there would be no sale for
either horses or grain and sighed even
for the return of the time when salt and
iron were packed on the backs of mules and
thus transported from Philadelphia to Pitts
burg. The result, however, was that good
horses, instead of selling at $50 to SIS
apiece, brought S1OO to $3.50, and oats rose
to % cents bushel, whereas they had ruled
at 10 to 121I cents previously. The price of
almost everything advanced in proportion,
and vet people, as soon as the transition
period was past. were able to buy more at
the advanced than they had been at pre-
vious prices.
1t might be pertinent to add that one of
the steamers of Gray's Iron Line can trans
port at one load the enormous output of the
Edgar Thomson Mill for nine days.