wing English trains on English railways, and American steel bridges
were spanning the Ganges and the Nile. Indeed, the United States soon
surpassed England. In the year before the World War the United Kingdom
produced 7,500,000 tons of steel a year, while the United States
produced 32,000,000 tons. Since the outbreak of the Great War, the
United States has probably made more steel than all the rest of the
world put together. "The nation that makes the cheapest steel," says Mr.
Carnegie, "has the other nations at its feet." When some future Buckle
analyzes the fundamental facts in the World War, he may possibly find
that steel precipitated it and that steel determined its outcome.

Three circumstances contributed to the rise of this greatest of American
industries: a new process for cheaply converting molten pig iron into
steel, the discovery of enormous deposits of ore in several sections
of the United States, and the entrance into the business of a hardy and
adventurous group of manufacturers and business men. Our steel industry
is thus another triumph of American inventive skill, made possible
by the richness of our mineral resources and the racial energy of our
people. An elementary scientific discovery introduced the great steel
age. Steel, of course, is merely iron which has been refined--freed from
certain impurities, such as carbon, sulphur, and phosphorus. We refine
our iron and turn it into steel precisely as we refine our sugar and
petroleum. From the days of Tubal Cain the iron worker had known that
heat would accomplish this purification; but heat, up to almost 1865,
was an exceedingly expensive commodity. For ages iron workers had
obtained the finer metal by applying this heat in the form of charcoal,
never once realizing that unlimited quantities of another fuel existed
on every hand. The man who first suggested that so commonplace a
substance as air, blown upon molten pig iron, would produce the
intensest heat and destroy its impurities, made possible our steel
railroads, our steel ships, and our steel cities. When William Kelly, an
owner of iron works near Eddyville, Kentucky, first proposed this method
in 1847, he met with the ridicule which usually greets the pioneer
inventor. When Henry Bessemer, several years afterward, read a paper
before the British Association for the Advancement of Science, in
which he advocated the same principle, he was roared down as "a crazy
Frenchman," and the savants were so