, were too light to haul the freight offered the
roads; they were also too heavy for the rails, which split at the ends
and frayed at the edges.

[Illustration: IRON AND STEEL]

The Bessemer process of making steel was the result of the demand for a
better and a cheaper method. By this process, the iron is put into a
"converter" along with certain Swedish or Cuban ores to give the product
hardness. A hot blast is then forced into the converter which not only
melts the mass but burns out the excess of carbon as well. The color of
the flame indicates the moment when the conversion to steel is
accomplished.

In 1860, before the establishment of the Bessemer process, steel
commanded a price of about one hundred and twenty-five dollars per ton;
at the beginning of the twentieth century steel billets were about
eighteen dollars per ton. In western Europe and the United States there
are used about three hundred pounds of iron and steel per capita; in
South America the rate of consumption is about fifteen pounds; in Asia
(Japan excepted) it is probably less than three pounds.

The economic results of low-priced steel are very far-reaching. Steam
boilers of steel carry a pressure of more than two hundred and fifty
pounds to each square inch of surface--about four times as great as in
the iron boilers formerly used. Locomotives of eighty tons draw the fast
passenger trains at a speed of sixty miles an hour. Ponderous
compounding engines weighing one hundred and twenty tons haul ninety or
more steel freight cars that carry each a load of 100,000 pounds. The
iron rails formerly in use weighed about forty pounds per yard; now
steel rails of one hundred pounds per yard are employed on most trunk
lines.

In the large commercial buildings steel girders have entirely supplanted
timber, while in nearly all modern buildings of more than six stories in
height, the frame is constructed of Bessemer steel. Indeed, a
steel-framed building of twenty-five stories has greater stability than
a brick or stone building of six. Such a structure as the "Flatiron
Building" in New York or the Masonic Temple in Chicago would have been
impossible without Bessemer steel.

In ocean commerce cheap steel has worked even a greater revolution. In
1860, a vessel of 4,000 tons displacement was thought to be almost up to
the limit. The Oceanic of the White Star Line has a displacement of
about twenty-eight thousand five hundred tons. This is nearly equalled