The Birmingham age-herald., 1917-04-10
MANUFACTURER OF STEEL


 industry which, for sheer pictorial magnficence. rivals the modern manu- featuring of steel In the first place, the scale of everything is inevpressiolY stupendous. To speak of a row or SIX blast furnaces, with mouths hundred feet above the ground, and chlmneys rising perhaps ano.Aer hundred feet above these mouths is not, perhaps, impressive. but to look at such row of furnaces. to see their fodder Of ore, dolomite and coke brought in by tram loads: to see it fed to them by the skip" to hear them roar continually for more; to feel the savage heat gen erated within their bodies: to be told m shouts, above the din. something of what is going on inside these vast. voracious. violent monsters, and to see them dripping their white-hot blood when they are pricked by long steel bar in the hands of an atom of man this is to witness an almost terrifv- ing allegory of mankind's achievement
 The gas generated by blast furnaces is used in part in the hot-blast stoves gigantic tanks from which hot air, az very high pressure, is admitted to the furnaces themselves and is also used to develop steam for the blowing en- zines and other auxiliaries. In the furnaces the molten iron, because of its greater specific gravity, settles to the bottom. while the slag floats to the top The slag by the way, is not, as I had supposed, altogether worthless, but is used for railroad ballast and
 in the manufacture of cement.
 The molten iron drawn from the blast furnaces runs in gllttering rlVu- let's (which. at a distance of 20 or 3O feet burn the face and the eyes), into 1ad1e cars which are like string of devils soup bowls, mounted on rail- d. 11 InJt lad n ' by locomotive and served at ban quet in hell.
 That is not what happens to them, however. The locomotive takes them to another part of the plant, and their content, still molten, is poured into the mixers These are gigantic caldrons as high as houses. which stand in rows in an open-sided steel shed, and the chief purpose of them is to keep the soup hot until it is required for the converters--when it is again poured off into ladle cars and drawn away.
 The converters are in still another part of the grounds. They are huge, pear-shaped retorts, resembling in their action those teakettles which hang on stands and are poured by be- ing tilted. But a million teakettles could be lost in one converter and the boiling water from a million teaket- ties, poured into a converter, would be as one single drop of ice water let fall into a red-hot stove.
 In the converters the metalloids- silicon, manganese. and carbon-are burned out of the iron under flaming heat which. by means of high air pres sure, Is brought to temperature Of about 3400 degrees It is the blowing of these converters, and the occa sional pouring of them, which throws the Vesuvian glow upon the skies of Birmingham at night. The heat given off by the converters is beyond de- scription. Several hundred feet away you feel it smiting viciously upon your face, and the heat from the concrete flooring of the huge shed in which | they stand penertates the soles of your shoes and burns your feet.
 The most elaborate display of fire works ever devised by MT Pain would be but a poor thing compared with the spectacle presented when a converter l is noured.
 l On work calculated to prevent acci- ! de~.s in mines. not only the Tennessee 1 Coal. Iron and Railroad company, but all the leading mining companies in the state join for conference As a result 1 creases. Nine years ago one man was ! killed on an average, for every 100,00f I tons of iron ore raised. The record al ! the time of our visit was one man te l 450, coo In the coal mines. where nine | years ago one man was killed for every 1 5000 tons raised, the recent record is
 one man for 65o,000 tons. REAT WELFARE WORK