The age-herald., 1898-07-31
ALIVE TOALL IMPROVEMENTS
Pig Iron Is Turned Into Plates, Bars, Rods, Angles, Rails, and All Other Shapes.
A WILDERNESS OF FURNACES
The Course of Manufacture Traced From Crude Material to Merchantable Forms, Ready for the Consum-
 CTS Use in Many States.


 The railway traveller or visitor never fails to observe near the heart of Birmingham wilderness of smokestacks and steam jets, coming from acres of buildings, the whole forming a picture of industrial activity scarcely equaled elsewhere in the country. This establishment is widely known as"The' Rolling Mill" It belongs to the Birming- ham Rolling Mill company, of which MT. James G. Caldwell is president. The com pany has been in successful operation since 1880, the year in which the first furnace was built in this district, manufacturing daily 250 tons or thereabouts of merchant iron and steel, heavy and light sheet-iron and steel Trails, angles, channels, splice bars, and various forms of plates into boil CT f1ange and fire-box steel, tank steel and tank iron. Special attention is given to boiler plate The company employs about 200 men, and the great routine of turning raw material into manufactured goods, and selling them widely and collecting the pro- ceeds, and paying this army of men regu- larly goes on year after year without hitch or hindrance. It is a great responsibility and a great task.
 The mills work really consists in the re- finement of iron. In refining pig iron and turning it into mercantile shapes a great deal of heat is needed, and this heat must be intense, and therefore much of the coal is first resolved in numerous retorts into gas, and this gas is fed into the furnace fires which are found in almost every part of the works. Gas makes a hotter fire than coal or coke, and it is utilized on a large scale in the rolling mill.
 
 Great quantities of pig iron-plain pig iron-are carried into this mill. It is first changed into wrought iroa. It is rat into pudding furnacess of which there are 22 in. one great building and Il of double ca .pacity and two single ones in another building. Five hundred pounds of iron are put into each furnace and then subjected to heat until it is melted, and chemical changes take place in it until it becomes wrought iron It is no longer pig iron. It becomes, under the manipulations of the ex- pert workmen, big dripping ball, and Is carried to a machine called "the squeeZer," a powerful machine that turns the ball into a bloom, and the bloom is next pushed through great rolls, when it assumes the form of muck bars. The muck bars are cut into convenient lengths by pair of shears near by, and then the material is ready for the finishing department. There are many shears in the mills, and the sight of one illustrates at once the ma gnitude of the work done in these mills. One of these cba oh DoIInds and the great cutting machine will snip off a solid cold bar four inches square, or a plate ten inches wide and three inches thick, or any other 6sser size.
 In the finishing department the muck bars are put in convenient piles. They are only two feet long and three to eight inches wide Small piles of muck bars are again placed in furnaces in the finishing depart ment and heated to a welding heat, and then they are ready for the final squeezings of the irresistible rolls. Here await them one 16-inch, 3-high bar mill; two S-inch guide mills; one 26-inch, 3-high plate mill; one 26-inch, 3-high fiiebed raill; and two 4- inch, 2-high light sheet mills. Every one of these mills is busy center of activity, each having its own furnace, and each set of great rolls turning out some form or goods. The bar mill makes the larger sizes of merchants shapes, Trails and bridge and car material; the guide mills produce round, fiat, oval and half-oval bars of small sizes and angles, channels and other odd shapes; the light sheet mills make material for stovepipes and roofing and siding for corrugating purposes; the firebed mills turn out sheets that go into tanks, smokestacks and like erections, and in the plate mills are rolled sheets strong enough toserve Tn standpipes and in boilers. Much steel is put through the plate mills, and not little IL bac of 1at n inc hands Of the government, where it has never failed to bass the closest inspection. The company recently had a boiler constructed for its own use from its own plates, the whole process from ore to completed boiler hav- ing been completed in the district. In this department, as in all the other departments of the mill, are to be found variety of cranes, both stationary and travelling; shears punches, straighteEing machines and the like, all grim and gigantic. Here, too are annealing furnaces for heating and softening sheet-iron, and also furnaces for blue annealing steel sheets. The finished goods are as a rule shipped as soon as they are made, sometimes going into the car hot, and any balance is placed in warehouses alongside railroad tracks. Not much is found in the warehouses in the busy sea- son of the year.
 Besides the pig turned into wrought iron, DOOQ deal IS now turned Dy the company into steel In the steel department are two basic open-hearth furnaces. Fires were first lit In these furnaces on July 22 of last year, and they have been in successful op- eration a full year, turning out an excel lent quality of open-hearth steel from the pig of the district. The lighting of the fires in these two furnaces was an event in Alabama. These furnaces demonstrated the hope of the district. They showed that the iron of this district could be turned into excellent open-hearth steel. It had perhaps beeen done elsewhere, but never perhaps without mixture with other iron. When Birmingham becomes, as 1t surely will. center of steel production these two furnaces, built under President Caldwell's direction, will stand at the head of the procession. They turn out each day about fifty tons apiece of soft steel, cast into slabs and ingots suitable for the finishing mills. These slabs and ingots are rolled into various sizes of plates, either for bofl- CTS, or for fre-box, shell or other forms of plate. tank or sheets; also into the various