Norwich bulletin., 1919-10-09
IN THE DAYS NEWS
What Steel Workers Do.

Because of the wide interest in the strike of steel workers the National Geographic society has issued two bull letins on the steel industry. The first dealt with BesSemer steel and the second one. based on a communication to the society, describes other pro duction methods as follows:
 An open hearth furnace looks a good deal like an ordinary bake-oven;
 but when. one looks in through the water cooled door vast difference ap-
 pears. Instead of pans of fragrant. fat loaves of bread. there is an imposing
 pool of fiery liquid as bright as the filament of a high power tungsten lamp, dazzling that it can be ex- amined, with safety to the eyes only by those using colored glasses. Tinted here and there with streaks of soft blue and dainty pink. it looks like melted stick candy.
 Tn preparing a battery of open i hearth furnaces for a charge. finely ground doIomite is shoveled in first. This melts like glass and fills up all cracks and crannies caused by the powerful heat of the preceding charge. Then a little train rolls up before the | battery, and an electric crane dumps box after box of scrap metal from the cars into the furnaces. Off some dis tance is a great steel tank lined with frebrick and full of liquid pig metal. | When the scrap has melted and the l contents of the cauldroD are cook ed enough when the i'm puritieS have been driven out and tolled away, the fiery broth is sea soned. as it were with the l proper amount Of carbon. spiegel fey romanganese. tungsten. ferrosilico". vanadium. or whatever is necessary t9 give the desired character to the re- suIting steel.
 Then comes the tapping of the fur mace. An electric crane lifts a great | ladfe into position. d workman jams a crowbar through a clay plugged hole at the base. and out flows the frenzicd stream into the iadle. The sia grises Ito the top like oil on water and over 1 flows. congealing' on the outside e the 1adle. Then the big crane picks up the Iadle, swings it over to the pcuriu 2 i platform; where it in it's turn is tapped and it's purified liquid run off into mclds.
 Great care has to be taken in han l ding these ladies, for the presence Of q few drops of moisture when the ho. metal is poured into one might cause 1 explosion and loss of life. Just be- fore they receive the molten metal the ] ladies are heated nearly white hot in ! order that the steel or iron may not chill in them.
 As fast as they are filled the ladies 1 are swung out over the ingot molds l a nd the liquid steel is run into them and allowed to cool and take it's solid form. IL is as if water were poured into molds and set in a refrigeratinc machine to freeze into blocks of ice. The only difference is that the 1freeZ- | ing point of steel is away above the boiling point of water.
 There are two other important type sof steel furnaces-the crucible furnace and the electric furnace In both of them the idea is to keep all hurtful gases and other impurities out and to regulate the addition of alloys and oxygen destroyers to a nicety. Tn 2. crucible furnace the metal is placed in gra phite clay pots, covers are put over them. and the pots subjected to great heat. Silica Is gradually ab- sorbed out of the clay in the pots and transformed into silicon by coming into contact with the carbon in the steel The silicon in it's turn absorbs the oxygen and thus quiets the froth- ing foaming contents of the kettle "The electric fur11a ce acts in much the same way, it's heat being so pure