Up: Glassmaking
Pittsburgh: 12 of 20
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finished surface is smooth and burnished as a mirror, while the four
corners are as true in angle as if planed.
In Pittsburgh's coronet of flame
there are many brilliants, but her youngest steel-making enterprise
holds the position of a central crown diamond. This occupies a portion
of the site of General Braddock's defeat in 1755. Here is found one
of the most perfect Bessemer
"plants" in the world, and here also stands a blast furnace with a
record unequalled in the globe.
Relapsing into statistics, it may be said of this furnace (known as "B")
that in the month of May, 1880, it produced in seven days 1141 tons
of pig-metal, a single day's product being 184 tons.
Thus does this
big busy "B" improve the hours, shining and nocturnal, on the spot
where Braddock received his death-wound a century and a quarter ago.
But to the stranger the triumphs of furnace "B" seem possessed of far
less interest than the pyrotechnical wonders of the "converting-house."
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[View] FROM THE PULPIT.
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In the bewildering precincts of this place, fire, air, and water are in
harness, and do their master—man's—bidding
submissively, but in a way that appalls. Air, at a pressure of twenty-five
pounds to the square inch, enters an enormous receptacle, the "converter,"
that, swinging on trunnions, like a great canon, is pointing skyward.
In this poised vessel eight tons of molten iron are seething and
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