s not, perhaps, impressive, but to look at such a row of
furnaces, to see their fodder of ore, dolomite, and coke brought in by
train loads; to see it fed to them by the "skip"; to hear them roar
continually for more; to feel the savage heat generated within their
bodies; to be told in shouts, above the din, something of what is going
on inside these vast, voracious, savage monsters, and to see them
dripping their white-hot blood when they are picked by a long steel bar
in the hands of an atom of a man--this is to witness an almost
terrifying 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, at very high pressure, is
admitted to the furnaces themselves, and is also used to develop steam
for the blowing engines 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 glittering
rivulets (which, at a distance of twenty or thirty feet, burn the face
and the eyes), into ladle cars which are like a string of devils' soup
bowls, mounted on railroad trucks ready to be hauled away by a
locomotive and served at a banquet in hell.

That is not what happens to them, however. The locomotive takes them to
another part of the plant, and their contents, 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 being tilted. But a million teakettles
could be lost in one converter, and the boiling water from a million
teakettles, 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 a flaming heat which, by means of high air
pressure, is brought to a temperature of about 3400 degrees. It is the
blowing of