could sell the stuff at a good price. I put up a
small plant, but just as I got it started a tremendous storm came
up, and every bit of that black sand went out to sea. During the
twenty-eight years that have intervened it has never come back." This
incident was really the prelude to the development set forth in this
chapter.

In the early eighties Edison became familiar with the fact that the
Eastern steel trade was suffering a disastrous change, and that business
was slowly drifting westward, chiefly by reason of the discovery and
opening up of enormous deposits of high-grade iron ore in the upper
peninsula of Michigan. This ore could be excavated very cheaply by
means of improved mining facilities, and transported at low cost to lake
ports. Hence the iron and steel mills east of the Alleghanies--compelled
to rely on limited local deposits of Bessemer ore, and upon foreign
ores which were constantly rising in value--began to sustain a serious
competition with Western mills, even in Eastern markets.

Long before this situation arose, it had been recognized by Eastern
iron-masters that sooner or later the deposits of high-grade ore would
be exhausted, and, in consequence, there would ensue a compelling
necessity to fall back on the low-grade magnetic ores. For many years it
had been a much-discussed question how to make these ores available
for transportation to distant furnaces. To pay railroad charges on
ores carrying perhaps 80 to 90 per cent. of useless material would
be prohibitive. Hence the elimination of the worthless "gangue" by
concentration of the iron particles associated with it, seemed to be the
only solution of the problem.

Many attempts had been made in by-gone days to concentrate the iron in
such ores by water processes, but with only a partial degree of success.
The impossibility of obtaining a uniform concentrate was a most serious
objection, had there not indeed been other difficulties which rendered
this method commercially impracticable. It is quite natural, therefore,
that the idea of magnetic separation should have occurred to many
inventors. Thus we find numerous instances throughout the last century
of experiments along this line; and particularly in the last forty or
fifty years, during which various attempts have been made by others than
Edison to perfect magnetic separation and bring it up to something like
commercial practice. At the time he took up the matter, however, no
one seems to