Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/45

Rh movement is usually very slow, these cranes are very rapid in their action, more so than any other form of crane; were this not the fact, it would be impossible to handle the vast quantity of hot materials—"ingots," and their "molds"—that must be disposed of with great promptness in a modern steel-works. These cranes are veritable giant arms, lifting and conveying with a tireless strength, insensible alike to heat and weight, such masses of steel as have only come to the knowledge of man since the invention of the Bessemer process.

The various operations of the "converting-house," embracing the turning of the converter, the regulation of the blast, and the movement of the cranes, are all directed and controlled by means of proper "hand-gear" located upon the platform called "the pulpit" represented in the foreground of the picture.

The general aspect of the interior of a converting-house at night is at once startling and grandly impressive. Here heat, flame, and liquid metal are ever present; locomotives whistle and puff, dragging with clatter and clang huge ladles of molten iron; the lurid light, flashing and flaming, that illuminates the scene, throws shadows so intensely black that they suggest the "black fire" of Milton, for in such a place it is impossible for a shadow to be cool; half-naked, muscular men, begrimed with sweat and dust, flit about; clouds of steam arise from attempts to cool in some degree the roasting earth of the floor; converters roar, vibrate, and vomit flames mingled with splashes of metal from their white-hot throats; at intervals the scorching air is filled with a rain of coruscating burning iron; ingot molds lift mouths parched with a thirst that can only be appeased for a short time by streams of liquid steel that run gurgling into them; the stalwart cranes rise, swing, and fall, loading scores of tons of red-hot steel upon cars of iron: all these conditions and circumstances combine to make an igneous total more suggestive of the realms of Pluto than any other in the whole range of the metallurgic arts.

The ingots of steel are taken from the "converting-house" as promptly as possible after they are cast, and carried on iron cars to the "blooming-mill" (Fig. 67), where they are put into gas-fired furnaces (the end of one is seen on the right of Fig. 67), where their heat is maintained, and thence they are taken to the "blooming train" and rolled into blooms. The steel-rail bloom is a rectangular bar of steel, long enough to produce four or even six rails.

In the cut (Fig. 67) on the left is seen a white-hot ingot of steel being carried on an iron "buggy" to the rolls of the blooming train, which occupies nearly the center of the picture. On the right of this train is seen a bloom about to pass through the