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So far as we could see down the Monongahela, the air was thick with the smoke of glowing chimneys, and the pulsating whang of steel-making plants and rolling-mills made the air tremble. The view up the "Yough" was more inviting; so, with oars and paddle firmly set, we turned off our course and lustily pulled against the strong current of the tributary.
The great industrial syndicates, especially in the steel-making industry, which control so large a part of the Press among the majority of the States of Europe, and even beyond Europe, find easy allies in the inadequate preparation of the major part of the journalists to discuss the most important problems, and the indisposition on the part of the public to examine those questions which present difficulties, and are so rendered less convenient for discussion.
Thomas & Gilchrist, by which a very large field of ironstone is now, for the first time, made available for the purpose of making good steel by the Bessemer process, bids fair to make very considerable alterations in the steel-making trade, and in the hands of Mr. E. Windsor Richards it has been made a great success, while in Germany there are several works also using the process largely.
The technical detail of steel-making is exceedingly interesting to students of applied science, but it is detail, the key to which is in the process mentioned; the forcing of a stream of air through a molten mass of iron.
This sort of competition is fast degrading legitimate American labor. Its regulation ought not to be thought impossible. A visit to a great steel-making plant, in full operation, is an event in a man's life.
We have, all the way down, an almost constant succession of iron and steel-making towns, chief among them Homestead, on the left bank, seven miles above Pittsburg. The great strike of July, 1892, with its attendant horrors, is a lurid chapter in the story of American industry.
William Chisholm, born in Lochgelly, Fifeshire, in 1825, demonstrated the practicability of making screws from Bessemer steel, organized the Union Steel Company of Cleveland, , and devised several new methods and machinery for manufacturing steel shovels, scoops, etc. His brother, Henry, was the first to introduce steel-making into Cleveland, and might justly be called "The Father of Cleveland."
It is no wonder that the father was proud of George, now chemist of the vast steel works, for he was manly and respected by all the employees. When a boy, George worked nights, Saturdays, and during his vacations in the mills, and the men came to know and love his genial ways and fair methods, and thus he gained a good knowledge of steel-making.
One of the most interesting and striking investigations made by Edison in this connection is worthy of note, and may be related in his own words: "I felt certain that there must be large bodies of magnetite in the East, which if crushed and concentrated would satisfy the wants of the Eastern furnaces for steel-making.
Into these loans, and the multitudinous mines and miscellaneous enterprises, gas, railroad, canal, steam, dock, provision, insurance, milk, water, building, washing, money-lending, fishing, lottery, annuities, herring-curing, poppy-oil, cattle, weaving, bog draining, street-cleaning, house-roofing, old clothes exporting, steel-making, starch, silk-worm, etc., etc., etc., companies, all classes of the community threw themselves, either for investment or temporary speculation, on the fluctuations of the share-market.
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