The Topeka state journal. [volume] (Topeka, Kansas) 1892-1980, 1918-02-06
TOPEKA STATE JOURNAL
INFORMATION BUREAU
FREDERIC J. HASKIN, Director,
Washington, D. c.
A WORLD WITHOUT IRON.
1t Is a Long Way in the Future, but
Great Changes Will Come Soon


ing worked to the limit of their pro-
ducing capacity. Turnout our own
west mining regions that have long
been dull or deserted are booming
with business. That red stream of
molten metal which is the life blood
of industry and as necessary to war
as the blood of men, is pouring from
the furnaces in such volume as the
world has never seen before. Millions
of tons of steel are being hurled away
on the battlefront, and they are de-
stroying millions of other tons in
structures and carriers that must be
replaced after the war; it is a double
waste.
This is all obvious. But where
does it lead? Has the world such re-
sources of metals that it can afford
to throw them Away? For while men
and crops and herds will spring up to
take the place of those destroyed, the
metals that we take out of the earth,
and also the coal and the oil, are
limited in amount and do not repro
duce themselves; when they are used
there will be no more.
So long ago as 1902 Andrew Car
negie prophesied that we would ex-
haust our store of iron in sixty or
seventy years, and a great Swedish
scientist visiting this country made a
forecast little more hopeful. Since
then our geological survey has made
a careful study of American resources
IN iron, and has shown that in real
lty the supply will last much longer
than Mr.. Carnegie thought. Never
theless, great changes are due in the
comparatively near future. For this
age of the world is built upon and
out of steel; the blast furnaces are
its industrial vitaIs. They are doomed
to slow decay, which will usher in
a n nxI- Cafa Kse.k-
it will be the age of cement.
How will men work without steel?
And how will they fight? Will the
new age change characters and oc-
equations and the face of the earth
as much as did the coming of this
steel age? This is an interesting field
for speculation; but there is reason to
believe that many of us will live to
see very great changes due to the de-
old sources of production will be ex-
hausted and new ones opened. This
will result in great shifting of lines
of transportation and centers of pro-
duction. Great cities will dwindIe
and disappear, and cities that are now
unthought of will spring into being.
1t is even probable that the Industrial
center of the world will shift many
degrees of latitude, that the tropics
will become the forge of the world
Ic lenQenCy III iron
production has been toward the use
of poorer and poorer grades of ore.
When our ancestors in colonial days
began making American iron with
trip hammers and charcoal FORCES,
they used ores that were sixty-fiye
per cent iron, or more. The supply of
such ore seemed to them inexhausti-
BILE, as did the forests which they con-
verified into charcoal. Yet it was only
a few decades until they had to turn
to stone coal" for fuel, and began to
use the lower grades of ore. Now
most of the ore used is only fifty-odd
per cent iron, and the supply of that
grade will be exhausted in a few more
decades That is the fact that alarmed
Mr.. Carnegie. But we are learning
ore. If we use ore that is only thirty
five per cent iron the supply will last
several centuries at least. But iron
produced from such ores will be much
more expensive than our present sup
ply. Cement will come more and
more into use by reason of being
cheaper, and more and better ways of
using it will be found. Then, too, it
may well become cheaper to ship the
coke to the place where the iron is
found than to carry these very bulky
ores to the coal supply. The unused
iron supplies are in the far North and
in the tropics. Swedish Lapland
yields large supplies of ore, some of
W AlCIl nave Deen carried TO our 1OTReS,
and the Bethlehem Steel Co. in 1914
was importing ore largely from Chile
and has great holdings in Cuba. AS
our own better grades of ore are ex-
hausted, we will draw more and more
upon these sources for our supply
and it is certainly within the proba-
bilities that we will go to some of
these countries with our mills
The estimate of the geological sur
;T1I III
ply of ore, such as We are now using.
at $500 millions of tons Using this
at the rate of sixty millions of tons
year-an amount which we had near
ly reached before the European war
broke out-this supply would last
causing a much larger
use of iron, and the replacement of
what is destroyed during the war will
also make great demands upon iron
production. 1t is therefore probable
rhat we have less than an eighty-year
supply of first class iron ore in sight,
and perhaps much less.
OF the poorer ores. on the other
hand, we have an immense supply.
The geological survey estimates it at
Z 1000 millions of tons. OF course,
more of this ore would have to be Ned
to keep up the iron supply-probably
at least 100 million tons a year. At
that rate, we have a supply of very lew
grades ores (down to 35 per cent iron)
for about $50 years. OF grades lower
than this the supply is described by
scientists as inexhaustible. Prof
James E. Kemp of Columbia univer-
sity says that it will be possible for
man to make iron as long as the race
is on the planet. But the making of
it will become increasingly expensivef
and difficultg-and other materials will
have to be used more and more, while
the furnaces of the great civilized
countries in the temperate zone will
become always more dependent upon
mines in the tropics and the far north
These are the factors that will bring
about great and sweeping changes in
the industrial life of the world. When
you consider how the shortage of va
rious metals has handicapped the Ia
TORS in this war-how the German