Growth of the steel trade and the fall of prices. railway wheel tires were selling at £90 per ton. The first steel rails, made in 1861, sold at £23 per ton, and in 1870 steel railway bars were sold at £11 to £12 per ton, while steel plates which formerly sold at £50 to £60 per ton were sold in that year at £18. In 1888 the total production of Bessemer steel ingots in Great Britain was 2,012,794 gross tons, of open hearth steel ingots 1,292,742 tons, and of basic steel 408,594 tons, or a total of 3,714,130 tons; while the production of Bessemer steel rails was 979,083 tons, which sold at prices ranging about £4 per ton, or £3 per ton less than the average selling price of iron during the forty years preceding Neilson's invention of the hot air blast.* The Siemens and Siemens-Martin open hearth processes, which stand next in point of success to the Bessemer, are equally deserving of mention with itf; but the facts already presented amply justify the conclusion that the great progress made in the iron industry of the world during the last hundred years has been due in very large part, if not wholly, to the service of invention. Without the contributions of skill and science the state of that industry in Europe and America might still be what it is in the heart of Africa. * In the United States 1,552,631 net tons of Bessemer and 5,261 tons of open hearth steel rails were produced in 1888, while the total quantity of iron rails was only 14,252 tons. In the previous year the total quantity of steel rails made in that country was 2,373,335 tons, against 23,062 tons of iron rails. Prices in 1888 at the Pennsylvania mills ranged from $27.50 to $31.50 per gross ton. In 1867 the average price was $170, in 1872 $112, in 1877 $45.50, in 1882 $18.50; in 1884 it fell to $31.75. + In the opinion of some authorities the open hearth process is believed to produce a material more perfectly uniform in its character than the Bessemer process, and for this reason open hearth steel was selected for the construction of the great bridge crossing the frith of Forth. Professor Leone Levi's testimony of the service of invention to iron-making is very emphatic. He says: "In 1788 the iron make of Great Britain was only 68,000 tons per annuin. But immense improvements have been introduced since then. By opening new localities, by reducing the expense of fuel, by employing the cheapest material, by utilising the gases and waste heat of the blast and puddling furnaces, by modifying the character of the furnaces, by economising the wasteful processes of refining, and above all by substituting mechanical for human labor, the production of iron increased enormously, and in 1878 it reached 6,381,000 tons per annum of pig iron, representing a value of £16,155,000, whilst if we take the manufactured iron in bar, sheet and rails the value would be double or treble that amount. (History of British Commerce, 2nd ed., p. 532). The consequence of the inventions introduced by Mushet, Krupp, Bessemer, Siemens, Whitworth and many others, Professor Levi adds, has been a large reduction in the price of steel. "Twenty-five years ago the price of cast steel tires was 120s. per cwt., it is now (1880) from 18s. to 25s. per cwt. The price of forged steel cranked axles was, when first introduced, £15 per cwt., it is now 658. to 70s. per cwt. The price of straight axles and shafts was from 40s. to 50s. per cwt., it is now from 198. 6d. to 23s. per cwt." (p. 533). James M. Swank, secretary of the American Iron and Steel Association, also says: "During the latter part of the eighteenth century and the whole of the nineteenth century down to the present time no other country has occupied so conspicuous a position in the manufacture of iron and steel as Great Britain. Spain and Germany had in turn been more prominent in the production of these essentials of civilisation, but Great Britain spurned all rivalry when she began to make pig iron with the aid of mineral fuel and her powertul blowing engines. She had abundance of iron ores and mineral coal, and her people had applied to the utilisation of these products their invincible energy and their newly-developed inventive genius. France, Germany and other continental countries might have substitute mineral coal for charcoal, invented the puddling furnace or perfected the rolling mill and the steam engine, but none of them did. To England and Scotland is the world indebted for the inven tions that gave a fresh impetus to the manufacture of iron in the eighteenth century; Huntsman, Darby, Smeaton and Cort were Englishmen, and Watt was a Scotchman; and it is also indebted to the same countries for most of the inventions of the present century, which have further developed the manufacture of iron and increased the demand for it, and which have almost created the manufacture of steel. Stephenson, the Englishman, improved the locomotive in 1815, and in 1825 the first passenger railroad in the world was opened in England, Stephenson's locomotive hauling the trains. Neilson, the Scotchman, invented the hot blast in 1828; Crane, the Englishman, applied it to the manufacture of pig iron with anthracite coal in 1837; Nasmyth, the Scotchman, invented the steam hammer in 1838 and the pile driver in 1843; and Bessemer, the Englishman, invented in 1855 the process which bears his name and is the flower of all metallurgical achievements,-a share in the honor of this invention FUTURE OF THE IRON INDUSTRY. aid of invention. In the century and a half following the discovery of Abraham Darby's process of preparing mineral coal for furnace fuel, during which the annual production of pig iron in Great Britain rose from 17,350 tons to very nearly 8,000,000 tons, the growth of the industry is from first to last the story of the triumphs of man over matter. Without the aid of invention iron-mak- Progress by the ing in that country could hardly have survived the middle of the eighteenth century, while with its aid she has been enabled, until very recently, to produce four times more iron every year than all the world besides. Yet the use of those inventions has been as free and open to iron-workers in all other countries as to the citizens of Great Britain, and not even there have they been more promptly seized upon than by the iron masters and manufacturers of the United States. And if the industry is ever to be built up in Canada our greatest reliance must be upon an intimate knowledge of methods and processes. "Let us develop our appliances and improve our processes with care, prudence and wisdom," Sir James Kitson counsels the British iron men, "then will our progress be sound and secure." This is more necessary in Canada's reCanada even than in Great Britain, seeing that one of our great lacks is in the necessity of men of skill and experience to engage in and carry on the work. In one particular we have an advantage; it will not be necessary to replace one set of costly appliances by another, as iron-workers in Great Britain and the United States have been obliged to do very extensively during the last thirty years, to the great loss of capital employed in the business. We may begin with the best appliances, and with skill and capital we can start upon even however being fairly due to the co-operating genius of Robert F. Mushet, also an Englishman but of Scotch parentage. The Siemens' regenerative gas furnace, which has been so extensively used in the manufacture of iron and steel, is also an English invention, although the inventors, Sir William and Frederick Siemens, while citizens of England, were natives of Hanover in Germany."-Iron in all Ages, p. 46. "I must ask you to transport yourselves in imagination to England as it was a century and a quarter ago. We are accustomed to think that, however the life of man may alter, the earth on which he moves must remain the same. But here the revolutions in man's life have stamped themselves upon the face of nature. The great landmarks, the mountain ranges, the river channels, the inlets and estuaries, are for the most part unaltered; nothing else remains the same. For desolate moors and fens, for vast tracts of unenclosed pasturage and masses of woodland, we have now corn-fields and orchards, and crowded cities with their canopies of smoke, Only a few years before the time of which I speak, men complained that half the country was waste. Today we have a struggle to preserve any open land at all. It is to a revolution in three industries, agriculture, cotton and iron, that this transformation is principally due. . . The iron industry, with which the material greatness of England has during the present century been so conspicuously associated, was gradually dying out. Much of the ore was still smelted by charcoal in small furnaces blown by leather bellows worked by oxen. And it was not a trade upon which the nation looked with complacency or pride. On the contrary, it had long been denounced by patriots as the voracious ravager of the woods which furnished timber for our warships, and pamphleteers demanded that we should import all our iron from America where vast forests still remained to be cleared in the interests of agriculture. Not cotton and iron, but wool was considered in those days the great pillar of national prosperity."-Toynbee's Industrial Revolution, pp. 179-81. "Not only has nearly every important machine and process employed in manufactures been either invented or perfected in this country in the past, but it is not too much to say that most of the prominent new industrial departures of modern times are due to the invenitive power and skill of our countrymen. Amongst these are the great invention of Bessemer for the production of steel in enormous quantities, by which alone, or with its modification by Thomas and Gilchrist, enabling the commonest description of iron to be used for the purpose, steel is now obtained at one-tenth the price of twenty years ago. In the manu facture of iron and steel we stand preeminent, and we are practically the naval architects of the world. Our technical journals, such as those of the Institutes of Civil and Mechanical Engineers and of the Iron and Steel Institute, are industriously searched and their contents assimilated abroad."-Second Report of the Royal Commissioners on Technical Instruction (1884) vol. 1, pp. 506-7. quirements, and beginning right. The world's requirements as contemplated by terms with the iron men of the United States and Great Britain. But we must begin right-with skilled management, the best and most economic appliances, a sufficiency of capital, and not unmindful of the wants of the home market or our trade relations with other countries. The future of the industry is hardly in doubt; the world is yet far from having reached the limits of its requirements, and for many years to come in Percy and Jeans. Canada, the United States, South America, Australia and Asia the demand for iron products will continue to increase in volume. Writing on this feature of the subject in 1864 Dr. Percy said: "Notwithstanding the marvellous development of the iron trade in this and other countries since the introduction of railways, yet it may be safely affirmed that the uses of iron will be vastly more extended than at present, and that there is no just ground for apprehension lest there should be over-production of this precious metal. Even the railway system is in a state of rapid growth, and the time will come when every habitable part of the earth's surface will be reticulated with iron or steel roads. The day of steel has arrived-but not to the exclusion either of wrought or cast iron; and steel is destined to exercise an important influence on the destinies of the human race."* But Dr. Percy saw only through a glass darkly, as evidenced by his reference to the coming time of iron rails headed with steel. Rails of this class were hardly more than introduced when they gave place to the all-steel rail; and even now steel ships are beginning to take the place of iron and wooden ones on the waters of our great lakes. Jeans in concluding his History of Steel says: "The more the subject of the applications of steel is inquired into, the more does it seem incapable of exhaustion. Great things have been accomplished in the past, but much yet remains in the future. The manufacture of steel is far from finality. Even now some of the leading steel works in France are assaying the production of ingots 100 tons weight. Steel indeed may be compared in reference to its multifarious uses with the elephant's trunk, the adaptability of which enables it with ease to pick up a needle or to pull up a tree. High authorities have expressed the opinion that steel will have the future nearly altogether to itself, displacing copper for fire boxes, etc, silver for articles of ornament and lead for purposes of softness, as much as it is superseding iron in respect of utility, economy and endurance. And as it is difficult to set bounds to the ultimate applications of steel, so is it impossible to limit the means of its production. Recent metallurgical progress has indefinitely increased the resources available for the latter purpose. Science has at last found a method of ridding of their deleterious contents the ores of iron heretofore unsuited for the manufacture of steel, and henceforth if metallurgists of experience are not greatly deceiving themselves the cheapest and the most plentiful ores will, by one of the greatest chemical triumphs of the age, be raised to the same rank as the richer and comparatively limited ores that have alone been deemed fit for the manufacture of steel until now.‡ *Metallurgy of Iron and Steel, p. 890. +To James Riley, manager of the Glasgow steel works, is due the credit of first using mild steel in the construction of ships, he having built two steel vessels in 1875. This was written in 1880. The horizon of the future therefore is not bounded by any limitation of the of coal is therefore another important corollary of the advance of steel, and 78 lb. and in 1887 it was reckoned to be 300 lb. In the United States it and future. increased from about 95 lb. in 1860 to 270 lb. in 1880 and probably to 300 lb. in 1888. The consumption of Canada in 1888 did not exceed 100 lb. per capita; yet that is nearly as large as the average for Europe and the United States, and more than double the consumption of the South American states. It is a safe prediction that in less than fifty years the present per capita consumption of iron in the world will be 50 lb., and that the requirements of the United States and Canada alone will be 20,000,000 tons yearly. Iron ore does not grow like forests or grain crops, and every year the world's supply is being reduced by the quantity raised and smelted. Here in Ontario our deposits are for the most part as they came from the hand of nature, and they are believed to be of enormous extent. If we have skill and enterprise and capital we may develop them; we may build up an industry of immense value; we may even take rank as iron manufacturers with our kinsmen across the lakes and beyond the sea.‡ * Few puddlers are able to continue the work after the age of 45 or 50 years. + In speaking before the Iron and Steel Institute in May, 1887, Sir Lowthian Bell said: "The United Kingdom consumed, after deducting the iron exported, about 299 lb. per annum per head of its population. The United States followed with 270 lb. But the 319 millions of inhabitants of all Europe and the United States of America only consumed 107 lb., some countries only requiring about 24 lb. ; and the average consumption of the 1,425 millions of people who inhabited the globe was only about 32 lb., or about one-ninth of what was used in the United Kingdom and the United States together. Still more striking was the fact that there were 1,014 millions who used less than 2 lb. of iron per annum, and of these there were 517 millions who managed to exist with a consumption of less than a lb. per individual per annum."-Journal of the Institute, No. 1, 1887, p. 120. As evidence of the importance of the iron and steel industry in giving employment to workingmen, the following extract is taken from the Pittsburg Dispatch of December, 1888, showing the aggregates of semi-monthly pay-rolls in the iron and steel mills of that city and its suburbs: Commencing with Carnegie Brothers & Co. and Carnegie, Phipps & Co.: They employ about 6,000 men, and pay out every two weeks as follows: At the two Lucy blast furnaces, $8,000; at the Union Mill, Thirty-third street, $30,000; at the Union Iron and Forge Mill, Twenty-ninth street, $25,000; at the Bessemer Steel Mill, Homestead, 24 (M.C.) COPPER AND NICKEL SMELTING. The discoveries of extensive ranges of copper and nickel ore in the district lying northward of Georgian bay, and especially the mining and smelting operations carried on in the vicinity of Sudbury, demand notice in this Section of the report. The combination of metals in the ore of those compounds of ranges however is so peculiar that it is yet too early to speak with confi Treatment of ores carrying copper and nickel. dence of the success of works erected to reduce it upon an extensive scale. |