economic sepa I believe the only way magnetic separation can be tested," he writes, "is to work out the problem for each individual mine, and that takes time and money. Not having had an opportunity to work the machines for any length of time we hesitate to advise which is best, for we do not know ourselves. But we have made up our minds to one thing, and that is that you cannot Conditions of afford to separate any ores running below say 45 or 50 per cent. and pay the ration. cost of mining unless you have to mine them in order to reach ores running above 60 per cent." In this opinion, it will be observed, Mr. Witherbee differs from Mr. Edison, who has had the experience of a mill running several months upon the low grade ore of a Pennsylvania mine. As regards the smelting properties of pulverised ore, it is the testimony of Port Henry furnace men that iron ground to the fineness of sand and mixed in the charge with coarser ore in equal parts does not affect the furnace, but smelts freely. electrical treat The electrical treatment of iron ores is of so recent origin, and the means of applying it are already so varied, that many improvements in mechanism Possibilities of may be looked for with confidence.* The results obtained from several of ment. the machines appear to have demonstrated to practical iron men that in the application of the principle of magnetic separation a most valuable gain has been made to our knowledge of the metallurgy of iron. To be able to save the iron in lean and clean ores, which usually are thrown into the waste heap, is itself a great attainment in the economy of iron production, for in all mines much lean ore is raised.. But if, in addition, the smelting properties of rich ores containing a low percentage of impurities may be improved, and if ores valueless in the state of nature by reason of the high percentage of their impurities may be made valuable by the process of magnetic separation, the utility of the method can hardly be over-estimated. ECONOMIC TRANSPORTATION. The iron industry as now carried on in most countries demands the employment of every possible means for cheapening the cost of production. tramways for To move the ore from the mine to the furnace or the nearest point of shipment Use of wire-rope is often expensive, especially in a rugged and broken country, or in the back- moving ore. woods, where good roads cannot be built, or if built cannot be kept through all seasons in a proper state for the traffic over them; while the cost of constructing a railway can only be afforded by mines of large production. As a means of transportation for short distances wire-rope tramways have been in use for some time, but until recently in America these have consisted of a single, moving, endless rope, from which the loads are suspended. These lines, while very efficient for certain purposes, are not available for general single-rope lines. use as a means of transportation, as in no case does their carrying capacity exceed 300 lb., and in practice it is much less. At Capelton, Quebec, one has been put up by Cooper, Hewitt & Co. of New York, and although designed to carry 300 lb. this burden was found to strain the rope too much and had to be reduced. The single-rope line has been almost entirely sup- The Bleichert planted in Europe by the Bleichert double-rope system,† which has already system. *It is understood that Mr. Edison has constructed a new machine which is in several respects a very marked improvement upon the first one. +It is constructed under what is known as the Bleichert patent, and consists of a stationary rope to support the load and a moving one to carry it. double-rope Advantages which it presents. Cost of operating the tramway. established itself as a means of transportation hardly yet dreamt of on this side of the Atlantic. Railroad companies have adopted the lines of this system as regular feeders to their main roads, and laws have been enacted regulating their construction and traffic the same as for ordinary railroads. Amongst the advantages which the Bleichert system presents over any of the single line systems are the following: (1) While the loads carried by single lines are seldom over 100 lb. the Bleichert lines are adaptable to individual loads up to 2,000 lb. (2) In the single rope systems, where the moving rope carries the load, there is great danger in rapid movement that the rope may jump out of the carrying sheaves, which are made very shallow so as to permit passage of the saddle over them. In the Bleichert system the stationary rope has no tendency to get out of place, and there is no difficulty in moving the cars over it at a speed of four or five miles per hour. (3) With single-rope tramways a grade of 1 in 4 is about the limit, as on steeper grades the load is liable to slip on the rope, unless a clip is used which fastens the bucket; but in the latter case the buckets must be loaded and unloaded while in motion, since they cannot be stopped without stopping the whole line. In the Bleichert system any grade up to 1 in 1 is overcome, and when the car reaches either terminus or any switch on the line it can be automatically disconnected and run off to any point required for loading and discharging. The cars may be run down into a mine, loaded at the face of the working and delivered to any point on the line without handling of the material. (4) The carrying-rope, being stationary, can be locally graduated to the strain it bears; but of course the one for empty cars does not require to be as strong as the rope for loaded ones. So, also, where short spans occur it is not necessary that the rope should be as strong as the sections suspending long spans ; it is sufficient to strengthen only the portions exposed to extra strain. In this way great economy in the total weight of the ropes is effected, whereas in the case of the single-line system the rope must be of uniform weight and strength throughout. The ordinary spans used in the construction of the Bleichert tramways are 150 to 200 feet, but they may be much longer, spanning valleys and rivers 1,000 to 1,500 feet across. The Weilburg tramway in Germany, which has a total length of seven miles and a daily carrying capacity of 250 tons iron ore, crosses the Weimbach river with a span of 1,000 feet in the clear. The cost of operating depends on the quantity carried. A line at Lintorf, Germany, two-thirds of a mile in length, carries 60 tons per day at a cost of 4 cents per ton, counting labor, interest on capital, wear and tear, etc., and by increasing the capacity to 100 tons the cost is reduced to a little over 3 cents per ton. These figures, the manager of the Lintorf mines and smelting works says, are inclusive not only of actual transportation, but of the delivery of the coal and ore exactly at the spots where they are to be used, so that no further handling is required. A line constructed at the mines of the Bi-Metallic Mining company in Montana, and put into operation on May 8, 1889, was reported upon by the superintendent of the works under date of August 12 as follows: "Since starting we have transported about 85 tons of ore per day from the mine at Granite to the mill at Clark, a distance 9,750 feet, and have also carried up to the mine United States. the greater portion of the supplies used there, running tramway about six Lines in the hours per day, at an average cost of 22 cents per ton. By running tramway for twelve hours per day to its full capacity we could carry 240 tons with practically the same force as is now employed, thus reducing the average cost to from 10 to 12 cents per ton. When the line is carrying its load it develops sufficient power to run a 9 by 15 Blake crusher, and crushes all the ore raised at the mine."* A line constructed for the Granite Mountain Mining company at Rumsey, Montana, for the transport of the silver ore has a length of 8,750 feet and a carrying capacity of 300 tons daily. It has one span of 600 feet and in one section of 1,800 feet it has a fall of 800 feet, being a grade of nearly 1 in 2. One erected at the gold mine of the Nowell company at Juneau, Alaska, has a length of 11,600 feet, with difference in level between terminals of 2,135 feet and a daily carrying capacity of 200 tons. But the longest line in operation in America is one constructed for the Split Rock Cable Co. of Syracuse, N. Y., the length of which is 16,500 feet and the daily capacity 750 tons. It was built for the transportation of lime rock, and at the discharge terminal the loaded cars are run upon a suspended rail cver a series of kilns, into any one of which by an arrangement of switches they may be unloaded without delay and immediately started upon the return trip. Quarry cable hoists are also constructed on the same plan, one of which is in operation at Rockland, Maine; it has a span of 865 feet, and the carrying capacity is 6 tons per load. There seems to be no doubt that the adoption of this system of transportation would greatly simplify and cheapen the cost of mining operations in Ontario, especially in such districts as northern Hastings, Haliburton and Sudbury, where high rocky ridges and intervening valleys are a feature of the country. ROLLING MILLS, STEEL WORKS AND MANUFACTURES. An industry in its infancy. A beginning has been made in Ontario in the manufacture of rolled iron, but the most that can be said of the industry here is that it is still in its infancy. It is perhaps too much to expect rolling mills to flourish until we have succeeded with the production of pig iron, and the same remark applies to steel works. The industry however is of first class importance, and if established and conducted under skilful direction and by the most approved systems, using pig iron produced from our own ores, it should give a profitable employment to labor and safe investment to capital. But the plants The best moders required for rolling mills and steel works are expensive, the best modern methods and methods require to be adopted, and careful, intelligent management is necessity. The cost of producing rolled iron and steel has been greatly lessened within the past ten years by the substitution of mechanical for hand labor, just as the cost of converting iron into steel has been lessened by the invention of Bessemer. At the present time new processes are being tested in the United States, and the hope is entertained that steel may be made New processes direct from the ore at little more than the cost of pig iron. These processes are being watched with great interest, and to no people should they possess more value than to those who in a country like Canada may have the erection a *Letter to Cooper, Hewitt & Co., who hold the American agency for the Bleichert wire tramway system. Their works are at Trenton, N. J. 23 (M. C.) intelligent management a necessity. being tested. of raw material and manufactared product. of steel works in contemplation. It is not by the adoption of ancient and effete methods that an industry can be established in the face of present day competition, but by the employment of the latest, most perfect and most economical means, having regard for the qualities of the iron to be treated and the market to be supplied.* A word may here be said of manufactures of iron and steel goods, and Relative prices especially of their value to a country in the employment which they give to skilled labor. In some lines of manufactures, such as cast metal pipes and railway chairs, the share of labor in the finished article is relatively small; but even in pipes the price of the pig iron is doubled. Stove grates and kitchen ranges are worth from three to five times the price of the iron, while a locomotive and its tender are worth about nine times and vessel machinery about ten times that of the raw material used in their construction. Common needles, such as Britain exports to China, made from Bessemer steel wire which costs the manufacturer £60 per ton, sell for £260 per ton, while the needles for home use sell at £5,600 per ton. The wire used in the manufac ture of the finest fish-hooks costs £336 per ton, and the hooks themselves sell for £14,000 to £15,000 per ton. The main springs of watches sell for about £6,000 per ton, while the retail value of hair-springs is about £400,000 per ton, or three times the price of gold.† The industry built up by skill and invention. SERVICE OF INVENTION TO THE METALLURGY OF IRON. Any report on the iron industry would be very imperfect which did not attempt to show how much it owes to invention. It could have had no existence without the raw materials of ore and fuel; it could have had no beginning without labor; it could have made no progress without the support of capital; but without the aid of invention the industry would be still in puling infancy. In every step and stage of the business, from raising the ore out of the earth to the finishing touch upon the manufactured metal, the ingenuity of man is found overcoming the forces of nature, lightening labor, cheapening production, improving the qualities of the material itself, finding out new uses for it in the arts and adapting it in a thousand ways to the wants of an advancing civilisation. Mining of any kind would have been difficult and costly, and deep mining would have been all but impossible, but for the service of the air compressors, the drills, the explosives and the hoisting apparatus now employed at every well-equipped mine; while means of cheap and rapid transit of ores and methods of treating them in preparation for the smelting furnace have made properties workable and valuable which otherwise might have remained unused and idle to the end of time. It would be unfair to those who were engaged in the manufacture of iron during even the first half of the present century, an eminent authority on the subject has recently said, to deny the services which they succeeded in rendering to their art without much thought being given to those laws of nature upon which *The Henderson process is described in the Appendix as tested at Birmingham, Alabama. Another process of direct conversion is soon to be tested upon magnetic ore from the Bristol mine, near Ottawa, at Findlay, Ohio, where extensive works have been erected under the management of a gentleman trained for twenty years under Sir William Siemens. The fuel to be used at the Findlay works is natural gas, which is found there in great abundance. + See Sir Lowthian Bell in the Reign of Queen Victoria, vol. II, pp. 234-5. their processes depended; but, on the other hand, it is not to be denied that since the iron masters have allied themselves with the chemist "they have made more progress in thirty years than their predecessors did in three centuries."* In what ways, then, has the prosperity of the industry been served by skill and invention? and is any other agency or policy likely to be of equal or greater utility? Primitive ironmaking as wit nessed by Mungo Park and Captain Grant in Africa. Nearly a hundred years ago Mungo Park found a smelting furnace or forge in the interior of Africa built of clay, about ten feet high and three feet in diameter, in which iron ore was smelted with charcoal fuel. The charge was built up with alternate layers of ore and coal, fire was applied through openings at the base of the stack and blown with bellows made of goats' skins, and at the end of three days it was allowed to cool off. Part of the furnace was then taken down, when the iron was found in the form of a large irregular mass, with pieces of charcoal adhering to it. "It was sonorous," Park says in his account, "and when any portion was broken off the fracture exhib. ited a granulated appearance like broken steel. The owner informed me that many parts of this cake were useless, but still there was good iron enough to pay him for his trouble."+ A quarter of a century ago Captain Grant published a journal of his walk across Africa from the south-east coast to the head waters of the Nile, and he too describes a forge which if possible was more primitive than the one described by Mungo Park. It was found in the territory of the Walinga, who are spoken of by way of distinction as workers in iron. "Their furnaces are in the heart of the forest; charcoal and lumps of iron cinder (like a coarse sponge and of a 'blue-bottle' color) usually mark the spot, and four lads squatting under a grass roof, with a doublehandled bellows each, blow at a live mass of charcoal which has the nodules of metal intermixed with it. In this calcining nothing else seems to be used, and the metal melts, decending into a recess much in the same way as I have seen at the Cumberland lead works." The natives of Africa have made no progress in the metallurgy of iron from the first discovery of the process of reducing the ore to metal; but the means they employ is the principle of the Catalan forge, used in Europe and America down to the present time in the forge. production of blooms or malleable iron, and consisting essentially of a furnace, a blowing machine and a heavy hammer.§ It is the direct process, and Sir Lowthian Bell at the British Association's meeting, 1889. +The Life and Travels of Mungo Park, p. 230-1, Nimmo's ed. "This iron, or rather steel, is formed into various instruments by being repeatedly heated in a forge, the heat of which is urged by a pair of double bellows of a very simple construction, being made of two goat's skins, the tubes of which unite before they enter the forge and supply a constant and very regular blast. The hammer, forceps and anvil are all very simple, and the workmanship (particularly in the formation of knives and spears) is not destitute of merit. The iron indeed is hard and brittle and requires much labor before it can be made to answer the purpose."-p. 231. Captain James A. Grant's Walk across Africa, p. 130. (Blackwood, 1864.) § Dr. Percy in his valuable work on the Metallurgy of Iron and Steel says: "The Hindoos appear to have carried on the direct process from time immemorial, as we may certainly infer from the large accumulations of clay which occur in various localities in India; and as it is scarcely possible to imagine anything more rude than their appliances, or anything more diminutive than their scale of operation, it would seem that they have not made any substantial progress in their art, at least in many districts. Their furnaces are frequently not larger than a chimney-pot, and hours of incessant toil are required to produce a few pounds weight of iron; and yet the price at which they sell the metal is surprisingly low." (p. 254). The furnace is built and the blast is produced much the same in India as in Africa; The Catalan |