CHAPTER VIII

THE CORPORATION’S IMPLEMENTS We live to-day in the “Age of Steel.” The metal probably plays a more important part in our civilization than any other product made by the hands of man. Our big buildings, our navies (both war and merchant), our trains and the rails they run on, machinery of all kinds, tools for every trade--all steel. Furniture, watch springs, even wire hair for stuffing mattresses and other uses--steel again. And new uses for the metal are being discovered almost every day. It is difficult to realize that the age of steel is hardly more than half a century old. But fifty years ago steel, commercially, was still something of an experiment, struggling against iron for its place in the sun. At that time the head of one of the greatest railroad systems of America dismissed a persistent salesman who had been trying to secure his order for steel rails, with the exclamation: “Steel rails? Bosh! Stuff! Nonsense!” To-day that line has many thousand miles of track and every rail in it is steel. Not two generations ago engineers viewed askance the plans of the designer of the first skyscraper. They regarded as absurd the proposal to build “a steel bridge up into the air.” To-day the Woolworth Building towers nearly eight hundred feet above the pavement of Broadway. From the day when steel was made “by the spoonful” to the present, when the great “Steel Trust,” with its thirty-eight Bessemer converters and 334 open-hearth furnaces, is capable of producing some 65,000 tons every twenty-four hours, is a far cry reckoned in terms of industrial development short as the reckoning may be in years. The pioneers of steel never dreamed of the enormous proportions to which the industry would grow, the innumerable uses to which the metal would be put. What is steel? Iron that has been refined and hardened by processes in which heat plays the most important part. Iron ore is found in large quantities in many parts of the world. Sometimes it is loose, like earth, and again it is a rocky formation. Its color also varies, some ores being red, others yellow, and so on through various shades and tints. But the pure metal is white and, strange as it may seem, quite soft. Cleansed of its impurities, and hardened by a mixture of carbon and other ingredients, it becomes one of the hardest of metals. Iron, apparently, is common to all the planets. Meteorites usually contain a large percentage of it. So general is its distribution on this planet that a theory has been advanced that the globe on which we live is nothing but a vast mass of iron thinly incrusted with rock and earth, and that the deposits found near the surface are merely the outcropping of this inexhaustible mine. The Western Hemisphere is particularly favored in regard to deposits of iron. Immense ore bodies exist in the United States and Canada, Chile, Brazil, Cuba, and other parts. Of the known ore beds in this country, the most important lie around Lake Superior. Near this great inland sea there are no less than six different ore ranges, the Mesaba, Vermilion, Marquette, Gogebic, Menominee, and Cuyuna. Of these the Mesaba is the largest, richest, and most easily worked and from it is taken a material portion of all the ore mined in the United States. There are ore bodies of considerable size in Alabama, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, and Utah, and another large deposit is now reported to have been discovered in Oregon. Some American steel makers import part of the ore they use from Sweden, Cuba, Spain, and Chile. But the Steel Corporation’s subsidiaries have depended so far upon the Lake regions for their ore supplies, except the Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co., which uses Alabama ores. Although iron had been made in America long before the War of Independence nothing was known of the immense deposits in the region of the Great Lakes until 1845, in which year Philo M. Everett was guided by Indians to “a mountain of solid iron,” to which he gave the name of the great missionary explorer, Marquette. Shortly afterward a surveyor named Stunz set out to seek gold in the wild region north of Superior, and came back to civilization with a tale of vast iron deposits in what is now known as the Vermilion range. But so far and hard to reach were these deposits that it was not until the early seventies that capital, as represented by the late Charlemagne Tower, could be interested in the exploitation of these deposits. Still another gold seeker was responsible for the discovery of the greatest of all the ranges, the Mesaba. Some years before the Civil War Louis H. Merritt, a prospector, struck out into the woods in quest of the yellow metal, but brought back with him nothing but a few samples of iron ore. Little did he dream that he had found what would one day prove more precious than gold. Merritt told of his discovery only to his four sons, and it was not until 1885 that these young men staked out their first mine in the desolate region. The Merritts were lumbermen, and the mining fraternity, having proved to its own complete satisfaction that iron deposits in the Mesaba section were geologically impossible, scoffed at their enterprise, but in one single year since the Steel Corporation alone has taken 24,928,039 tons of ore from this range, a single mine yielding 3,500,000 tons. There is a legend told in Minnesota, the story of a practical joke which had a different end from that expected by its perpetrators, and the result of which has been a great boon to the cause of education in that state. The story had its beginnings before the Civil War. At that time, it goes, the public school system of Minnesota, neglected in State appropriations and impoverished, clamored long and loud at the door of the legislature for a share in public lands, and eventually gathered enough popular support to wring from the law-makers a promise of ten sections. The promise was kept, but to the discomfiture of the educators and the amusement of everyone else it was found that the sections lay beyond the pale of civilization far in the northeastern corner of the state, an uninhabited, unexplored territory. And then Merritt discovered the Mesaba range, and the implements of the steel companies began to shovel gold to the credit of the Minnesota school system. The story is of doubtful authenticity, but it is nevertheless a fact that the Minnesota schools own large acreages of ore land, and their enormous receipts of royalties on ore shipped therefrom make them probably the richest in the world. A mine, in the commonly accepted sense of the word, is a deep shaft in the ground from which tunnels, or “drifts,” radiate through the ore bodies. But nature, in the Mesaba region, has saved the steel maker the trouble of burrowing under the earth’s surface to get at her riches. The majority of the mines here are not mines in the accepted sense at all. They are what a veteran of pick-and-shovel methods called them when he first saw one in operation. “Mine?” he exclaimed. “Why, that isn’t a mine, it’s an ore farm.” Imagine a vast amphitheatre hollowed out of the ground half a mile wide and a mile and a half, or more, long--these are the dimensions of the Hull-Rust mine at Hibbing--and descending in a series of deep terraces to 120 feet or more from the surface, every terrace, save the first, being dug out of iron ore, and you will get a vague idea of what one of these Mesaba “ore farms” is. The mines are graded toward one end to permit the entrance of trains, and big steam shovels burrow into the soft ore, scooping up, some of them, seventeen tons of ore at each lift, and dumping it into the waiting cars. Under these conditions mining becomes principally a matter of speeding up steam shovels and of transportation. At the beginning of the century no mine had ever shipped 500,000 tons of ore in a season. The Hull-Rust mine has shipped more than that a month, a ton of ore every two seconds, allowing for a ten-hour working day. Exclusive of the mines covered by the now abandoned Hill lease the Corporation has developed more than seventy mines in the Mesaba range. In the Vermilion range it has three; in the Menominee, seven; in the Marquette, twelve; in the Gogebic, thirteen, and in the Baraboo range in southern Wisconsin, one. This does not include twenty-one mines of the Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co. in the South. In a single year, 1916, the Corporation mined 33,355,169 tons of ore, of which 30,255,616 came from the northern regions. Some idea of the immensity of the Corporation’s mining operations may be obtained from the fact that the excavations involved in “stripping,” or removing the surface earth overburden from the open pit mines, aggregates about a quarter of a billion cubic yards of earth, or more than the excavation made in digging the Panama Canal, in the Mesaba range alone. Total excavation in this range, including mining operations, amounts to about a half a billion cubic yards. The vast Hull-Rust mine, the greatest of the Mesaba deposits, is perhaps the largest single body of ore in the world. Its exact extent is not known. Only recently it was discovered that the ore body led under the town of Hibbing, a fair-sized municipality, whereupon it was decided to move the town to get at the ore. So in the summer of 1920 houses and other buildings forming the town were lifted bodily from their foundations and moved to a new location near by. This enormous undertaking seemed to be considered quite part of the day’s work by officials of the Oliver Iron Mining Co., which subsidiary has charge of the Corporation’s ore operations. An official of that company, questioned about the expense of moving the town, said: “Oh, it will cost a million or more, but there’s at least $40,000,000 in ore under the old site.” Ores obtained from the Mesaba and other Lake ranges usually average slightly more than 50 per cent. in iron. There is an enormous amount of ore in this region, however, which runs less than 40 per cent. in metallic content, and further, is too rich in silicon, which factors make it unavailable for steel making without previous treatment, but this ore is too valuable and too much needed to be allowed to go to waste. The Corporation solved the problem by erecting at Coleraine a “concentrator,” which is really nothing but a great washing plant for ore, and by this means crude ore containing 37 per cent. or thereabout, in iron, after treatment in which water and gravity are the principal factors, is brought up to an average of about 56 per cent. metal. In one day this concentrator has treated 50,000 tons of crude ore, producing 32,000 tons of concentrates. Let us leave the mining regions and follow the ore on its journey to the furnaces. The journey is begun in either of the two railroad systems owned by the Corporation, and radiating over the ranges--the Duluth, Missabe & Northern, at the head of which is William A. McGonagle, which serves the Mesaba range principally, and the Duluth & Iron Range, of which F. E. House is president, which serves the Vermilion section. We shall soon arrive at Duluth, or near-by Two Harbors, where these roads terminate. Here the ore trains run out on the huge Corporation docks, some of which project half a mile into the lake, and dump their cargo into enormous pockets in these docks. This ends the first stage of the journey. But our travels have hardly begun. The next stage of the journey is made by boat. The Corporation, through the Pittsburgh Steamship Co., owns no less than seventy-eight large steamers, many of them capable of carrying 12,000 tons of cargo, and all built specially for ore transportation. To and fro between Duluth and Two Harbors on Lake Superior, and Gary, Chicago, Cleveland, Ashtabula, Conneaut, Fairport, and other points in the lower Lake, this great fleet goes constantly except when winter freezes up transportation. Arrived at the ore docks, the boat makes fast alongside, and the work of putting in its ore cargo begins immediately. This is a rapid-fire operation. A touch of an electric lever and from each of the three-hundred-ton “pockets” on the dock descends a great chute into the maw of the ship, and through these chutes the ore, impelled by gravity, comes cascading. In a few hours at most the work is done, and the ship is ready for her return trip. The average time taken to load a thousand tons of ore is half an hour, but on one occasion 12,817 tons were put into a vessel in thirty-five minutes. In one day twenty-four boats were loaded with 211,887 tons. From a single dock 10,921,107 tons have been put on ship-board in one season. A sail of three or four days and we arrive at one of the lower Lake ports. Here the boats are unloaded by methods even more impressive than those connected with the loading operation, and so efficient that a twelve-thousand-ton steamer has been emptied to the last spadeful in three short hours. Of the various unloading devices employed the Hulett machines are the most modern and impressive. Notwithstanding their weight, which runs into hundreds of tons, these gigantic affairs are moved up and down the dock and perform all their operations by the touch of a light lever. Almost “a child can handle them.” The mighty arms of these machines give them somewhat the appearance of gargantuan grasshoppers. The operator sits in comfort in what corresponds to the wrist of one of these great arms, and, at his will, the clamshell bucket hand dips down into the bowels of the vessel and, opening its metal fingers wide, to a span of 22 feet in the largest sizes, closes with irresistible might on everything within its grasp. The Hulett machine is the very embodiment of power, power chained and subservient to the will of man. The incalculable force of those mighty fingers would crush a steel railroad car as one might squeeze a sponge. A miscalculation by the operator, and the steel ribs of the unloading steamer would be torn away, gnarled and twisted. And each lift of that hand brings with it a load worthy of its might, some seventeen tons of ore. Before following the ore farther on its trip to the furnaces we can find time to devote a minute to a related operation, the shipment of coal to the mining regions to supply the power for the operations there. This is marked by the same big-scale, time-saving methods. Arriving at the docks at the lower Lakes, the coal train is run out beside the now empty vessel, and another great machine picks up car after car, and swinging it out over the hold of the ship, overturns it and empties it in a few seconds. To Pittsburgh, centre of the steel industry, comes a large portion of the ore shipped from the Great Lakes. Ore destined for the Pittsburgh furnaces is brought from the Lake ports by the Bessemer Lake Erie, another Corporation subsidiary, with its two hundred and five miles of main line, the third longest and perhaps the best known of the Steel Corporation roads. The Duluth, Missabe & Northern holds first place among these roads in respect to mileage, two hundred and forty-seven miles, with the Elgin, Joliet & Eastern second, two hundred and eleven miles, and the Duluth & Iron Range fourth, one hundred and ninety-seven miles. The total trackage of the U. S. Steel roads, including sidings, branches, switches, and yard track, is 3,774 miles, every yard of it maintained in prime condition and absolutely modern. A line drawn from New Orleans to St. Louis, thence to Kewanee, Ill., through Minneapolis and north to the Canadian border would about form the western boundary of the big Corporation’s manufacturing and mining activities. The northern boundary would be the Canadian border (except for one plant at Hamilton, Ont.) with the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico forming the east and south boundaries. Half the United States! And another plant is started in Canada. All over this vast area are scattered the Corporation’s plants, but nowhere are they so thickly clustered as around Pittsburgh, the steel city of the world. Here the biggest of the subsidiary companies, Carnegie Steel, has its headquarters, and here, too, is the home of the National Tube, American Sheet and Tin Plate, and American Bridge companies. All the Carnegie plants are in or near Pittsburgh, as are the major part of the plants of the National Tube Co., but the Tin Plate and Bridge companies reach out in many directions. The Chicago territory provides a home and a market for the Illinois Steel Co. with its “South Works” plant at South Chicago and the Indiana Steel Co., which operates the great Gary plant at Gary. The American Steel & Wire Co. has its head office at Cleveland, but its plants are scattered over a great many states from Illinois to Massachusetts and down to Alabama, and it has a plant at Hamilton, Ont. All over Pittsburgh and its environs are to be seen the stacks of the blast furnaces of the Corporation and other steel companies in which the ore is transformed into pig iron, the first step in the manufacture of steel. These furnaces, usually built in “batteries” several together, are immense ovens of steel and firebrick in which a temperature of more than 3,000 degrees is generated and in this terrific heat the ore, fluxed with limestone, is melted and converted into iron. From the ground to the tops of the furnaces run “skips” or buckets on inclined tracks, which carry the ore to their mouths, where, with a mixture of coke and limestone, it is dumped. Soon the ore, coke, and limestone become one liquid mass of fire and the oven, after a sufficient time, is “tapped” by breaking open a small mud-sealed cavity at the bottom and letting the molten contents run out through gutters into receiving ladles. The iron, being heavy, runs out first. The rest, following, is diverted into other gutters and cooled, when it is used for making cement, ballasting railroad tracks, and other purposes. This material is known as slag. Meanwhile, the iron is carried in the ladles to the mixers, huge cradles holding 250 tons or more each of molten metal, and rocking slowly but continuously to and fro. Into these mixers different heats of iron are poured, and the constant motion of the mixer gradually brings them to a homogeneous mixture, insuring uniformity in the metal. William R. Jones, or Captain Bill as he was generally and affectionately known in the steel trade, was for many years in charge of the Braddock plant of the old Carnegie company and was one of the most picturesque figures that ever flitted across the pages of the history of the industry. Big, with a temper as hot as the metal with which he worked, but with a heart of gold, he was an ideal leader for a steel mill army. Gifted with unquenchable energy and enthusiasm, he acquired a habit of breaking world’s steel-making records, and in the earlier days of his management of the Braddock works he time and time again set the steel world agog by his feats in the matter of production. He continued to do so until the steel makers of Europe and America became so used to “Jones breaking another record” that his feats went unheeded. And the mixer, which still bears his name, was one of his many inventions. In a letter to the writer, Andrew Carnegie said of Jones: “Jones volunteered in the Civil War as a private and returned at its close a Captain. You can’t keep a good man down. I wished to make Jones a partner along with many of our pioneers, and informed him of this one morning. His reply was: ‘I don’t want to be troubled with business matters. You just give me a ---- of a salary.’ “‘All right Captain,’ I said, ‘hereafter the salary of the President of the United States is yours.’ And so it was.” From the mixer the iron is taken to the converter to be turned into steel. And now we come to the most spectacular, the most impressive sight that is to be witnessed in the steel industry, the theme for the poet who may one day be born to sing the Song of Steel. A Bessemer blow, a converter in action, is a small-sized Vesuvius in eruption, a volcano tamed and chained by man. From its great steel crater shoot forth flames to the height of perhaps 100 feet, showering sparks in every direction and creating a pyrotechnic display of unequalled splendor. Its glare lights up the countryside for miles around, and the hissing and roaring of the molten iron, or rather of the steel groaning in its birth throes, forms a fitting accompaniment. It is a sight that once seen will never be forgotten. [Illustration: The Original Jones Mixer] Both England and America claim the invention of the Bessemer converter, the most epoch-making of all the discoveries in the steel trade and one that has influenced all industries, civilization itself, immeasurably. For before it existed steel could only be made by a slow and expensive process in small quantities, and was not available for the varied uses for which it is employed to-day. Had it not been for the Bessemer converter, there would have been no skyscrapers, no steel railroad cars, no steel ocean liners, no “Steel Trust.” [Illustration: A Bessemer Blow] Shortly before the middle of the nineteenth century William Kelly in America and Henry Bessemer in England were struck by the same idea, that air could be used as fuel, that the oxygen in air, blown through a mass of molten iron, would burn out its impurities and would at the same time blow them away. The records are slightly in favor of Kelly as the earlier discoverer, although Bessemer got all the credit and a knighthood for his work, while the American got nothing. A Bessemer converter is actually a big retort with air holes at the bottom where molten iron is purified into steel with air. The first attempts at “making steel with air” met with scant success. The pioneers of the new process encountered the same sort of opposition as later confronted George Westinghouse when his fertile brain gave birth to the air-brake. The youthful inventor secured an interview with Commodore Vanderbilt, then head of the New York Central System, and endeavored to interest him in his invention. “Do you mean to tell me,” Vanderbilt asked, “that you propose to stop a railroad train running at full speed with nothing but air?” “Just that,” replied Westinghouse. Vanderbilt turned to his secretary: “Show this lunatic out and never let him trouble me again,” he said. Kelly’s first attempt at purifying iron with oxygen was a failure. The blast was too strong and the iron, along with the impurities, was blown away in one gorgeous display of fireworks. But he was not to be discouraged, and after many experiments got the blast right, only to find that the metal which resulted was too soft, as the small percentage of carbon and other alloys needed to give the steel its hardness had been taken out. To Robert F. Mushet, a Scotch ironmaker, belongs the credit for overcoming this difficulty. He came forward with a practical suggestion: “Burn out all your carbon and then put back what you need to make the metal hard.” Simple enough, but the others had not thought of it. And the thing was done. The hissing, roaring volcano is easily handled by one man. As he watches the flame that pours from its mouth change from red to yellow and finally burn white, he touches a lever which turns the huge caldron on its axis, while workmen quickly shovel into it the required amount of carbon, silicon, etc. The converter is then further tilted and its contents emptied into a ladle which swings away with its load while the converter is charged afresh with iron. Open-hearth steel, more popularly used nowadays than the Bessemer product, is made by a different process. As the name implies, the iron is changed into steel in large ovens, where it is mixed with the necessary alloys and purifying ingredients and a considerable amount of scrap. The proper melt being arrived at, the metal, now steel, is run off into ladles. The open-hearth method has many obvious advantages. In the first place, it gives the steel a greater tensile strength. In the second, using as it does about 60 per cent. of iron and 40 per cent. of old metal, it is an important factor in conserving the natural ore resources of the country and of the world for future generations. Times change and steel making with them. Open-hearth is fast supplanting Bessemer steel in all markets, and the day may not be far distant when Bessemer will be practically a thing of the past. But it must not be forgotten that the discovery of Kelly and Bessemer--to whose names should be linked that of Mushet--gave birth to the modern steel industry and made possible the age of steel. Open-hearth itself may one day yield to another process. In fact, a prominent steel manufacturer has suggested that electric steel will be the steel of the future. All the newer steel plants are equipped with open-hearth furnaces. At Gary, Bessemer is not produced at all, and even the Carnegie Steel Co., which probably did more than any other concern to develop the Bessemer process, now has 133 open-hearth furnaces to 14 Bessemer converters. The Corporation altogether has 335 open-hearth furnaces and 38 converters. The manner in which the newer process is displacing the older is best illustrated by some production comparisons. In 1901, the first year of the Corporation’s existence, the subsidiary companies produced 6,109,306 tons of Bessemer steel to 2,745,514 tons of open-hearth. It was not until 1909 that open-hearth production forged ahead, going to 7,508,889 tons against 5,846,300 tons of the other. But since that year its gain has been progressive and continuous. In 1919, open-hearth production was 12,412,131 tons compared with 4,788,242 tons of Bessemer. After the iron is converted into steel by either process it is poured into moulds some eight feet high and two feet or more in width. In a surprisingly short time the surface of the metal becomes sufficiently solidified to permit “stripping,” or removing of the mould, and we have an ingot, which is steel in its first form. If the ingot is not to be used for some time, it is permitted to harden, but usually it is taken to what is known as a soaking pit, where, for several days, it swelters in a high but even temperature until the entire mass of metal attains an even heat. If used immediately after stripping, the semi-solidified outer crust would crush and the still fluid inner portion would run out. From the soaking pit the ingot is lifted by immense cranes and carried to the rolling mills, where it undergoes the various processes transforming it into steel as we know it commercially. So many and various are these processes that no attempt will be made to describe them in detail. They vary from the rolling of a railroad rail or a fourteen-inch plate of battleship armor to a wire rod about a fifth of an inch in diameter or a sheet of tin plate such as is used in making food containers. To the spectator all these different processes are interesting and fascinating. Entering the mill at one end the red-hot ingot is gradually reduced in size as it passes through roll after roll and brought to the required shape before being allowed to cool. In one mill we may see the mass of steel lengthened and moulded to the shape of a rail. In another, it is brought to the form of a big “I” beam for bridge or skyscraper. In another, to a slender roll of wire rod, and so on. The more highly finished forms of steel naturally involve a further series of operations. Wire rods, for instance, are drawn through dies to smaller and still smaller sizes, and sometimes to shapes far from circular, until they become fence wire, piano wire, watch springs, and a thousand and one other products. Much of it goes to the nail mill, probably the noisiest place in the world, where it is cut, sharpened, and given a head. As stated elsewhere in this volume, the Corporation manufactures something like eleven thousand different varieties of wire products alone. We have now followed the ore all through its journey from the mine to the finished product. But the mining of coal and its conversion into coke plays as important a part in the manufacture of steel as the mining and refining of iron. And the Corporation’s coal and coke operations are carried on a scale in harmony with the general immensity of its steel operations. In 1916 the Corporation mined 32,768,381 tons of coal and produced 18,901,962 tons of coke. In the early years of the steel industry the iron master did not produce his own coke. He bought it. But as the industry became more and more integrated it became obvious that the two operations must go hand in hand if costs were to be kept down, and to-day most of the larger manufacturers produce all the coke they need in their steel operations. One of the first and certainly the most important mergers combining steel and coke interests was that which brought together Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick, and later resulted in giving to the Steel Corporation, when it absorbed the Carnegie Steel Co., control of the vast coal mines and numerous coke ovens originally owned by Frick and his associates. Long before his death, which took place December 2, 1919, Frick had earned the right to be reckoned as one of the outstanding figures in American industrial history. Like many other Americans who have achieved great success he began life without advantages, starting his business career as an errand boy and later occupying the position of a clerk in a distillery at Mount Pleasant, Pa., in the middle of what is now the big Connellsville coke-producing district. At that time the American coke industry was in its infancy. The young clerk perceived its possibilities and out of a very slender salary, by frugal living and many privations, saved enough to make some small investments in coal properties. Later, when the coke industry was in the dumps, and most of those connected with it could see nothing but disaster, Frick, convinced of a great future for coke, managed to enlist the aid of a Pittsburgh banker and purchased a number of properties at bargain prices, organizing H. C. Frick & Co., which later became the H. C. Frick Coke Co. In a few years the clerk had risen to be the dominating figure in the coke trade. When Carnegie decided that economical manufacture of steel implied the acquisition of coke properties he secured control of the Frick Company and later negotiated a partnership with Frick, merging the two companies. Eventually, after a lawsuit and much bitterness between the two men, Frick and Carnegie separated. But when the Steel Corporation took over the Carnegie Company, Frick was induced to become a member of the Finance Committee, and it is generally recognized that his financial acumen was of enormous assistance to the big Corporation in the days before it had established itself firmly. Frick remained a director of the Corporation and one of the most influential members of its Finance Committee until the day of his death. Frick left an enormous fortune. Although he left substantial legacies to his children and others, the mass of fortune was distributed among public institutions for the good of the community. The H. C. Frick Coke Co. is still the most important by far of the Steel Corporation’s coke-making subsidiaries. It owns vast areas of land in the Connellsville and surrounding regions near Pittsburgh, but already the writing on the wall may be discerned. The time is coming, slowly but surely, when the great company organized by Frick will produce nothing but coal, when its more than 21,000 coke ovens will be cold, and will no longer light up with their flares the blackness of the night around Connellsville. At the Frick coke plants coke is made by the old beehive process, in great open ovens, row upon row, where millions of tons of coal a year are turned into coke. But as explained elsewhere, the primitive beehive oven process is wasteful, both as to the amount of coal needed to produce a ton of coke and because the by-products of the coal, tar, ammonia, benzol, toluol, etc., are blown into the air. And gradually the modern coke by-product oven is replacing the old beehive. The Frick Company will be able to hold its own for a long time against the process of modernization. But it must eventually yield. The operations of the Steel Corporation are not confined to the manufacture of steel. They include a number of auxiliary and incidental activities, including the production of coke by-products, named in the preceding paragraph, a considerable volume of gasoline, all absorbed by the Corporation itself, the operation of steamship lines, the tale of which is told in the chapter on “Exports,” the building of ships, the control of a number of public utilities, and so on. And the tale of the expansion of the Corporation’s activities is not yet told. Already it is going into the manufacture of railroad cars. Land was acquired several years ago for a large steel plant across the Canadian border, at Ojibway, and it is probable that the building of this plant will not now be long deferred. In fact, it is a fairly safe assumption that the only reason for delay in erecting it is that of present inflated costs. While the growth of the Corporation will not be too rapid, if for no other reason than that its management is averse to achieving anything that might savor of monopoly, there is no question that its future development in regard to expansion of its steel-making facilities and allied activities will keep pace with the development of American commerce both at home and abroad.