![View Corner of Fifth Avenue and Wood Street, Pittsburgh [1880]](fifth_and_wood_pittsburght.jpg "View Corner of Fifth Avenue and Wood Street, Pittsburgh [1880]")
VIEW CORNER OF FIFTH AVENUE AND WOOD STREET, PITTSBURGH.
corner set apart for bright levers, presses one of these. Water, at
a pressure of 300 pounds to the square inch, acting through suitable
mechanism, tilts the huge converter to a horizontal position, permitting
its "converted" contents to fall into a Brobdingnag ladle swung between a
pair of twin cranes. Another shout, and the boy touches another lever in
the gallery of levers, irreverently termed the "pulpit." The twin cranes
lift the brimming fiery ladle between them as deftly as would a brace of
country lasses carry an overfull pail of milk. Hand in hand these giants
of iron,
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whose muscles are of water as dense as quicksilver, convey the eight-ton
ladle to the ingot moulds in waiting. Still another pull at the distant
lever, and the ladle halts, while a valve below is opened. Lightened
by one-fourth, the ladle moves on, and another ingot is cast. And so
the work goes on. The converter, meanwhile, had been tilted back, and
freshly charged once more. The blast roars again, the glorious shower of
scintillating dazzling brilliancy leaps across the immense building, and
the Titanic labor that rests not from Sabbath midnight until Saturday's
midnight begins afresh. And while the new-born ingot is yet coral red,
other cranes lay hold of it, and a brisk little locomotive winds in among
the sparks and flames and din, tooting a warning as it speeds away with
the ingots to the "blooming" and "rail" mill. At the latter place the
ingot is attacked by ponderous machinery, and passed through successive
processes, until it issues from the last pair of rolls a perfect steel
rail for the foot of the iron horse.
From this rail mill there issued in
March of the present year 9538 tons, or 1000 miles of finished steel
rails—enough to band together in double lines the distant cities
of New York and Pittsburgh.
And this is but a single one of
Pittsburgh's wonderful workshops. To fittingly describe her acres of
similar industries would fill a large volume. There are squares of
great foundries, streets of machine-shops and locomotive-works and
engine-making establishments, besides huge shops that send wrought-iron
and steel bridges into the world, that furnish
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![View Corner of Fifth Avenue and Wood Street, Pittsburgh [1880]](fifth_and_wood_pittsburgh.jpg "View Corner of Fifth Avenue and Wood Street, Pittsburgh [1880]")