these converters, and the occasional pouring of them, which
throws the Vesuvian glow upon the skies of Birmingham at night. The heat
they give off is beyond description. Several hundred feet away you feel
it smiting viciously upon your face, and the concrete flooring of the
huge shed in which they stand is so hot as to burn your feet through the
soles of your shoes.

The most elaborate display of fireworks ever devised by Mr. Pain would
be but a poor thing compared with the spectacle presented when a
converter is poured. The whole world glows with golden heat, and is
filled with an explosion of brilliant sparks, and as the molten metal
passes out into the sunlight that light is by contrast so feeble that it
seems almost to cast a shadow over the white-hot vats of iron.

Next come the tilting open-hearth furnaces, where the iron is subjected
to the action of lime at a very high temperature. This removes the
phosphorus and leaves a bath of commercially pure iron which is then
"teemed" into a hundred-ton ladle, wherein it is treated in such a way
as to give it the properties required in the finished steel. What these
properties may be, depends, of course, upon the purpose to which the
steel is to be put. Rails, for example, must, above all, resist
abrasion, and consequently have a higher carbon content than, say,
reinforcing bars for concrete work. To obtain various qualities in steel
are added carbon, ferro-manganese, or ferro-silicon in proportions
differing according to requirements.

In the next process steel ingots are made. I lost track of the exact
detail of this, but I remember seeing the ingots riding about in their
own steel cars, turning to an orange color as they cooled, and I
remember seeing them pounded by a hammer that stood up in the air like
an elevated railroad station, and I know that pretty soon they got into
the blooming mill and were rolled out into "blooms," after which they
were handled by a huge contrivance like a thumb and forefinger of steel
which--though the blooms weigh five tons apiece--picked them up much as
you might pick up a stick of red candy.

Still orange-hot, the blooms find their way to the rolling mill, where
they go dashing back and forth upon rollers and between rollers--the
latter working in pairs like the rollers of large wringers, squeezing
the blooms, in their successive passages, to greater length and greater
thinness, until at last they take the form of long, red, glowing