Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/40

30 either hammered in the forge, or "bloomed" from nine-inch ingots, at the Rensselaer Rolling Mill in Troy, N. Y., or the Spuyten Duyvil Rail Mill at Spuyten Duyvil, N. Y., and then rolled into rails at these establishments, but on the above date Mr. Holley had a thirty-inch blooming mill ready to run. This mill was the joint invention of James Moore, William George, and A. L. Holley, and was built by James Moore, at his Bush Hill Iron Works, Philadelphia. The mill was provided with front and back lifting tables raised by hydraulic power. The tables carried loose rolls, on which the twelve-inch ingot (heavy enough to make two rail blooms) was placed and pushed into the rolls by men. Eight men were required to attend the mill. This mill proved to be a great advance over previous practice, but in the fall of 1872 improvements were added (invented by George Fritz, of Johnstown, Pa.) which reduced the force required at the mill to three men and a boy.

It is manifestly impossible in these pages to give in detail the history of the several Bessemer steel-works now in operation, and I have been thus particular in sketching at length the inception and development of the plants at Wyandotte, Mich., and Troy, N. Y., because they were the genesis of the Bessemer steel industry in America, and their history admirably illustrates the manifold obstacles which the promoters of all ultra-novel and radically revolutionary inventions have always had to encounter. I well remember the sneers which greeted my statement that the time would come "when a steel rail could be made cheaper than an iron one"; and now that time having arrived, it is no small compensating satisfaction to know that the faith delivered thirty years ago to the workers at Wyandotte and Troy has expanded with the years and by "works" has been made perfect: mountains have been removed, and the metal of their ores now in our railways binds the nation together with bars of steel, along which glide shuttle-like, to and fro, the steam-propelled carriers of the commerce of a continent; interweaving it with the warp threads of agriculture and all arts, and producing a fabric of national prosperity and happiness that shall wear through the ages and continue to clothe this people while time endures.

A modern establishment for the manufacture of steel rails is vastly different from those ancient "plants" in which bar iron and iron rails were made forty years ago. Works that would turn out seventy tons per day then were thought to be remarkable both in size and in administration, but at the present time there