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The Steel Workers
Philadelphia: Press of Wm. F. Fell Co, 1911. 42-51, 57-63.
by John A. Fitch
CHAPTER V: THE STEEL MAKERS
(pages 42-44)
The third method employed in the manufacture of steel, the open-hearth process, came into use later than the Bessemer, and despite certain advantages made slower headway, as relatively it took longer to produce the same tonnage and the expense was greater. The method consists in exposing molten pig iron, steel scrap, and certain chemical agents to the heat of a gas flame and to the action of air as it passes over the surface of a containing tank. An open-hearth furnace is arranged with brick checker work chambers at either end of the hearth, or reservoir, of the furnace. These are connected with the flues, and as the gas is admitted from one end through the checker work the flame sweeps across, and the resulting heated gases and air pass through the checker work at the other end, heating the contents of the hearth to a high temperature. By occasionally reversing the gas, that is, admitting it from the opposite end, the chambers are kept heated and the gas and air always enter the hearth at a high temperature.
As in the Bessemer process, it is quite generally the custom now to charge molten iron directly from the mixer, although cold pig iron is sometimes used. Molten iron is poured from the ladle cars which run on a track in front of the furnaces. A chain from an electric crane above is attached, and as the ladle is drawn up it tips, pouring its charge into the hearth. For charging cold pig iron, scrap, ore and dolomite, electrical charging machines are used. The essential feature of the machine is a horizontal bar, like a great arm, moving forward or backward, up or down. Charging boxes about four feet long, with a socket at one end to fit this bar, are filled with the charge. The operator, who sits in the rear of the machine and manipulates the levers, moves the bar in such a way as to pick up a box. He then runs the machine before a furnace door, thrusts the bar with its load through into the hearth, and gives it a half revolution; the box turns turtle, releasing its contents. The bar is drawn back, the empty box is quickly set aside, a filled one picked up, and the operation repeated.
At the back of an ordinary open-hearth furnace there is a pit about eight feet deep and perhaps ten feet in diameter. Into this pit a ladle is lowered which is large enough to hold all of the steel in the furnace. When a tap is made, about eight hours after the furnace has been charged, a hole in the back of the furnace is knocked out, just as in tapping a blast furnace. The steel pours out into the ladle and fills it to the brim so that the slag, which always floats on the surface of the metal, runs over the lips of the ladle into the pit below. At this point an alloy of iron and manganese is introduced, as in the Bessemer process. The ladle is raised by a crane and a pouring crew fills the molds. The slag is left in the pit to cool. Steel hooks are placed in the bottom of the pit before the heat is poured, and when the slag has solidified around these hooks, it is easily removed by a crane.
There are three men regularly employed at an open-hearth furnace,—"first helper," "second helper" and "cinder-pit man." The first helper was formerly called a "melter," but now, with a different organization, a melter has charge of several furnaces. In an open-hearth plant there are usually a superintendent and an assistant superintendent in control, a foreman or boss melter in active charge of from three to five furnaces, and a first helper on each furnace. The superintendent gets the orders from the office specifying the quality of steel desired. He delivers them to the melters and they, in turn, to the first helpers. A first helper is supposed to know how to get the desired result and he sees that the necessary steps are taken. Each furnace crew works together when tapping the furnace, and in fixing bottom between heats, but there is much of the time when the first helper is idle except for watching the heat. The second helper and cinder-pit man are busy between tapping periods throwing lime or other material into the furnace to change the quality of the steel when that is necessary, but they too have periods of rest. There are in addition laborers who get stock ready, wheel in limestone and dolomite, and assist the furnace men when necessary.
In spite of the greater expense of manufacture, the future appears to be much brighter for open-hearth than for Bessemer steel. Railroads are beginning to call for open-hearth steel in their rail orders, and other consumers favor open-hearth steel for withstanding heavy pressure. This demand is due largely to the fact that the Bessemer process is not quite as accurate as is the open-hearth. When the Bessemer blower thinks his steel is in condition, he turns down the converter. He usually gets a product closely approximating that desired, but he cannot produce absolutely accurate results, for he cannot interrupt a blow to take tests. The open-hearth melter may know the condition of his furnace at any time. Tests are frequently taken and analyses made at the laboratory, and the metal can be kept in the furnace until it is brought to the exact point desired. In addition, the open-hearth method has an advantage over the Bessemer in that it can convert any quality of iron into steel, while a special grade of iron is required by the Bessemer process.
This introduces another factor more influential even than the growing demand for open-hearth steel,—the diminishing supply of ores suitable for the Bessemer process. The outcome is that steel companies everywhere are enlarging their open-hearth plants. The Homestead plant, which made far more Bessemer than open-hearth steel fifteen years ago, operates today sixty open-hearth furnaces, while its two Bessemer converters are idle half the time. At Duquesne, the same company has torn out its converters and built more open-hearth furnaces. The Jones and Laughn Company in its new plant at Woodlawn, Pennsylvania, and the United States Steel Corporation at Gary, Indiana, are prepared to manufacture open-hearth steel exclusively.
CHAPTER VI: THE MEN OF THE ROLLING MILLS
(pages 44-51)
BESSEMER men and open-hearth operatives, no less than the blast furnace workers, are craftsmen in heat. They deal with molten metal. The iron which the blast furnace men turn over to them in ladles or hardened into pigs becomes, in their hands, "ingots" of steel—the units with which the steel mills begin their work. From now on, not heat, but pressure, with heat as its ally, is the chief agent of production; for the ingot as it leaves the mold is not in condition to make a good finished article, on account of its lack of homogeneity and the presence of blow holes. The steel needs to be "worked" in order to give it a firmer quality and a greater strength. This is accomplished in the rolling process, during which the pressure is such that the blow holes are practically eliminated by welding. At the same time, the ingot is broken down and shaped into forms for the market— rails, beams, plates, tubes, etc.—which give name and character to the plants producing them.
Altogether, rolling mills handling steel exclusively were to be found in 36 plants in Allegheny County in 1907-08. Some of these are special mills, not typical of the steel industry, and are not considered in this study. The facts here presented are based, chiefly, upon the practice in the mills owned by the companies subsidiary to the United States Steel Corporation, and by the Jones and Laughlin Steel Company, the largest of the independents in the Pittsburgh District. Of the 60,000 men engaged in all departments of these plants a majority are employed in the rolling mills. In the last chapter we left the molds full of molten steel at the pouring platform. From there a dinkey engine crew takes them into the mill yard to cool down. As soon as the ingots are cool enough to stand alone, the molds are taken to the "stripper." An ingot mold has no bottom and is made with a projection or lug on either side near the top like the handles of a jug. The stripper is a crane arrangement with a pair of huge links or clamps which fit over the lugs and lift them, and an iron plunger between the two clamps which presses down on the ingot. The molds slip up and off easily once they are loosened, and the crane sets them over one at a time on empty buggies drawn up alongside, thus leaving on one track a train of empty molds ready to be filled again, and on the other, the red hot steel ingots standing upright on the buggies. An ingot made in a mold of ordinary size weighs more than three tons.
When the molds are removed the outside has solidified to a depth of a few inches but the interior is still in a molten condition.1 At this stage the outside is in condition to roll, but by the time the center has been reduced to a temperature fit for rolling, the surface is black and comparatively cold. It is necessary to adopt some means of equalizing the temperature. Various methods have been tried. Burying the ingot in sand so as to hold the temperature of the exterior was at one time the custom in Europe. In this country twenty-five years ago the ingots were shoved horizontally into heating furnaces. The general practice now is to use a "soaking pit." Brick-lined pits are sunk below the floor level of the mill, each pit usually large enough to accommodate four ingots at one time. A crane grips the ingot with a pair of tongs not unlike those that the ice man uses, carries it over and lowers it into a pit. The pit is at once covered and the ingots are submitted to a comparatively low gas heat, calculated to equalize the temperature throughout, or to "soak" the ingot.
The man in charge of the soaking pits is the "heater." His work involves judgment rather than physical labor. He decides which ingot is sufficiently soaked for the crane man to draw. To do this he comes in contact with considerable heat. A crew of bottom-makers repair the pit bottoms whenever these are in danger of burning through, placing a shield with a small hole in it over the pit, and working with a bar or rod through this hole. This work is difficult and taxing to the physical strength on account of the heat. The foreman bottom-maker occupies the position next to the heater, and is next in line of promotion.
In the chapter on iron mills, the rolls were compared to those of a clothes wringer. This is a homely description that will apply, in a general way, to all rolling mills,2 but there are, nevertheless, wide variations in their shape and size. Steel is usually rolled in at least two different kinds of mills, with an interval of re-heating between. The "blooming" and "slabbing" rolls "break down" the ingot; that is, they reduce it to a more convenient size, and at the same time, by working it, increase its strength. This is the first stage in the process, and the product varies according to the ultimate purpose the steel is intended to fill after going through the second, the finishing mills. If the ingot is to be rolled out to rails, it is broken down to about one-half or one-third its initial thickness and the product is called a "bloom." If something smaller is to be made, the ingot is rolled down to billets of lesser sizes. If plates are to be made, the ingots are first broken into slabs.
When the ingot has soaked long enough, the overhead crane seizes it and sets it on end in a sort of dump cart, which carries it to the proper point, tips over and deposits it on a "roll-table." This is a succession of steel rollers ranged on each side of the blooming rolls and so geared that they must revolve and carry the ingot forward or backward at the will of the man operating a lever.
There are few more interesting or spectacular sights in a steel plant than a blooming mill. The roll-table extends for 75 feet or more on either side of the rolls, and to one side at the-far end rests the ingot, glowing and inert. Then a man, high up on a raised platform, moves a lever and the three-ton block rumbles forward. At the same moment, the roll engine is set in motion, the clank and sweep of the connecting-rod suggesting a power relentless and irresistible. The heavy blooming rolls seize the ingot with seeming fury and it passes through with a bang that sounds like an explosion, heard even above the roar of the mill. Sparks and red fragments of scale fly in a shower. The engine is suddenly reversed, the rolls revolve in the opposite direction, and the partially flattened ingot comes back on a second pass. Then, from beneath the roll-table, a row of great steel fingers push up; they tip the ingot, now twice its original length, one-quarter way over, and toss it about as if it were a plaything. Again it goes through the rolls, and soon is pressed square again, as in the beginning, while its thickness lessens and its length as steadily increases.
The slabbing or "universal" mill differs from a blooming mill, in that it has vertical as well as horizontal rolls, making it unnecessary to tip the ingot. Pressure is exerted on all four sides, and the ingot is rolled down four to six inches thick and cut into rectangular slabs about 30 inches square instead of to the billet size.
The labor involved is about the same in slabbing as in blooming mills, and in either it seems absurdly small, considering the tons of steel handled. A blooming mill requires a roller, an engineer and a "tableman." Three men supervise the rolling of 600 to 1000 tons of steel in twelve hours. They stand in an elevated box where they can obtain a direct view of the rolls. A gauge shows the roller just what the space is between the rolls, and each time after an ingot has passed through, he moves his lever and narrows the gap a little more. On one side stands the tableman grasping levers that operate the roll tables and the manipulators; and on the other side the engineer, controlling the engine, stopping it, starting, or reversing, as may be necessary. The work about a slabbing mill is similar. Here the roller reverses the engine and adjusts both the vertical and the horizontal rolls; so he has three levers before him. A tableman stands with the roller in the pulpit, and performs the same duties as in the blooming mill.
After an ingot is brought down to a bloom, it is usually passed on to another mill where small work can be done more advantageously. In some plants what is termed the continuous process is used. A series of mills are placed in line, and after a few passes through the blooming mill the bloom passes, without again being reversed, straight down through the mills. These are set at such distances apart and their relative speed is so finely adjusted that, as the bloom gets drawn out, it will at the last stage of its journey be passing through as many as three mills at the same time, with the forward end traveling about twice as fast as the rear. Attempts have been made to roll out finished products in this way, and the method is regularly employed in some mills for rolling rails. It is conceded, however, that the best results cannot be attained without re-heating and a more thorough working of the steel, so the continuous process is used principally for making billets.
We have now arrived at the point where differentiation and specialization begin. Practically every form in which steel is found today is a further transformation after the soaking pits and blooming mills have done their work. Every process up to this point is preparatory. Now come what are called the "finishing" mills, of which there are as many distinct kinds as there are forms of product. One variety shapes the girders and beams of bridges and skyscrapers. Another rolls out the pathway for our "Limited" express trains; a mile or more an hour, for twenty-four hours in the day and twenty-five days in the month. There are plate mills of massive proportions; tube mills where pipe is made from a quarter inch to two feet in diameter; hoop mills and rod mills whirling out their product with amazing velocity; and merchant mills of all sizes, the last to succumb to automatic processes.
But before slabs and blooms pass through these finishing rolls, they go through the re-heating furnaces which are a part of every variety of mill. The size and manner of operation of these furnaces vary greatly, but the principle involved in the heating process is everywhere the same. The most noticeable variations are in the manner of charging and drawing. As in the re-heating furnaces at the iron mills, the billets or blooms lie in the furnace side by side and a gas flame sweeps over them from one end of the furnace to the other.
The billets used in the smaller merchant mills are charged by hand, and are drawn with a pair of tongs. A welding heat is not desired in the case of steel, and consequently the process is not so difficult as in the iron mills. In the larger mills using blooms or slabs a mechanical device is necessary for drawing and charging. At Homestead the heating furnaces for the 84-inch plate mill are arranged in a semicircle and the charging and drawing are done by an electric crane which swings about in the air. The slabs are brought in on buggies, and are picked up one at a time by the crane by means of an arrangement like a thumb and forefinger. A heavy steel bar with a hook-shaped projection at the end is extended over a slab. The hook is brought down over the edge in front, a clamp grips from behind, and the slab is thus held firmly as it is lifted into the furnace. In the same way, the slabs are drawn when heated and are placed on the roll table. At the rail mills of the Edgar Thomson works in Braddock, the blooms are brought to the rear of the furnace three or four at a time on an electrically driven buggy or car, and a bar, so extended from a movable electric machine as to strike them on the end, simply shoves them in. The furnaces have doors opening both in the front and in the back. When a bloom is sufficiently heated a door at the front is opened, and electrically operated tongs are thrust in to drag it out onto a second buggy. An endless cable carries it to the rolls.
An example of modern ideas in furnaces is to be observed in mills Number 15 and 16, together referred to as the "Double storage" mill, in the plant of the Jones and Laughn Steel Company. These are automatic bar mills, and the process is a continuous mechanical operation. The furnace at the Number 15 mill uses 5 x 5 billets about seven feet long. A billet is laid down by a crane at the door of the furnace, and an electric machine forces it in. The furnace is about twenty feet long, and the billets push each other along each time a new one is admitted. By the time a billet has crossed the furnace it is heated and ready to roll. At the opposite end, a great pair of hooks reaches in and drags it out into a steel channel where rollers carry it at once to the rolls. The Number 16 mill has a furnace almost equally automatic.
Classified by product, finishing mills fall into four general groups. In the first class are included the mills turning out the smaller material, such as guide mills, bar mills, rod mills, wire mills and mills rolling hoops and cotton ties. Guide mills and bar or merchant mills roll rounds, squares, hexagons, angles, and flats, all to be used in some subsequent process in the production of a finished article; the main distinction is that bar mills roll larger sizes than do the guide mills. The product of rod mills may be cut up for rivets or chain links or it may be drawn out into wire. Various mills in the Pittsburgh District carry on these specialized processes. Hoop mills roll out flat strips for barrel hoops and a smaller size used to bind up bales of cotton.
These mills give you a better idea than any others of what the steel industry used to be, for in most plants the man and the tongs are still essentials. Yet it is but a suggestion of the older days; for you have only the little rods, after all, to help you to imagine how the great ingots used to be handled by human labor at the blooming rolls.
They are the younger men who work at these mills. Here where agility is at a premium and where a false step may possibly mean death, there is no room for the man whose joints are stiff or whose eye is not keen. I remember one such mill especially, where I watched the heater's helper before the furnace, pulling out billet after billet and throwing them along the steel floor to the "rougher." Dressed only in trousers and a flannel shirt with sleeves cut off at the shoulder, the sweat was pouring from his body and his muscles-stood out in knots. The rougher was leaping at his work, thrusting the red billets almost in a stream through the first pair of rolls, and yet before he could turn back there was always another billet on the floor behind him. The rolls were built in a train side by side in line; the billets went through one pair and the "catcher" shoved them back through the next; back and forth, back and forth, they went at an ever increasing speed and with ever increasing length, until the catcher at the last pair of rolls, seizing the end of the rod as it came through, described with it a fiery circle high in the air as the snake-like band leaped against the restraining force which bent it back and through again.
CHAPTER VII: HEALTH AND ACCIDENTS IN STEEL MAKING
(pages 57-63)
I discovered that there is always a fine dust in the air of a steel mill. It was not very noticeable at first, but after being in a mill or around the furnaces for a time, I always found my coat covered with minute, shining grains. A visitor experiences no ill effect after a few hours in a mill, but the steel workers notice it and they declare that it gives rise to throat trouble. There is ore dust around the blast furnaces, and wherever saws are used for cutting the finished product into lengths there is steel dust. Many a workman justifies his daily glass of whiskey on the ground that it "takes the dust out of my throat." The irritation of the throat and air passages caused by this mineral dust may lead to catarrh or even to tuberculosis.3
I began to notice after a time that the men with whom I talked were often a little hard of hearing. It was some time before I connected this fact with the noise of the mill. The rolling mills are all noisy, the blooming mills and the plate mills especially so, while the cold saw bites into the steel with a screech that is fairly maddening. When I finally began to make inquiries I found that among the men I met, partial or slight deafness was quite common, and that they all attributed it to the noise. This noise has an effect also on the nerves, which is intensified by the constant vibration of the machinery; a strain more wearing on some of the men than the work itself.
The prevalence of nervous strain is a matter not to be lightly turned aside. Physical labor has without doubt been greatly lightened by the improved processes that have so changed the character of the steel industry within the last fifteen or twenty years. But where the strain upon the body has been lessened, responsibility has in most cases grown more tense, with a consequent increased demand on the nervous energy. This is true also in some work where the physical activity is not less than formerly. Improved processes frequently reduce the total amount of human toil by throwing part of a gang out of employment, only to leave the few who remain with as hard physical labor as before. Rollers, particularly, work as hard today as they did twenty years ago, and under an added strain due to the more complicated machinery under their control, and the greater speed of operation, which increases the danger of accident.
One of the hard conditions which the working force must face in iron or steel manufacture is heat. It is difficult to convey to the understanding of one who has never visited a mill, or who has visited one only in winter, the intensity of the heat in certain departments during the summer months. Lofty and specially designed roofs have added greatly to the comfort of the men in the more recently constructed plants; but in rolling mills the sheds can never be made so large nor the ventilation so good that much discomfort will not be occasioned by radiation from the red hot steel. In the blooming mill a glowing ingot weighing from two to ten tons is being worked all the time.
In open-hearth steel making the labor is not continuous, long periods of rest elapsing between the tapping of heats. But the temperature is high in the summer months; it could not be otherwise with a row of a dozen or more great ovens, containing each of them from 30 to 75 tons of molten steel. In the Bessemer department the situation is, if that were possible, more trying, for the work is continuous. There is not usually as much hot steel on hand at one time to radiate its heat, but the men work closer to the metal. The vesselman and his assistants, the "manganese" man and others, must stand frequently on the platform close beside the converter itself, while the steel pourer and his helpers work constantly close beside a ladle brimming with from ten to fifteen tons of liquid steel. There are other departments where the general atmosphere may be at a lower temperature than those just described, but where contact with the heat is equally trying, if not more so. I refer especially to places where the men stand on a heated floor. In sheet mills, small guide mills, muck and bar mills, and all mills of that class, the floor plates become heated by the hot steel continually passing over them. I have seen men standing on floors so hot that a drop of water spilled would hiss like a drop on a stove. The shoes with thick wooden soles that they wear, act as some protection, yet their feet are heated to a point of great discomfort; and this is a thing that they must encounter every day and for from eight to twelve hours, practically without relief.
The effects of working in the heat are noticeable. On a street car the men who are employed where the heat strikes their faces can often be singled out because of their peculiar complexion. Sometimes their faces are red, sometimes covered with pimples, and the skin is nearly always rough. Many people, including steel workers themselves, believe that copious perspiration is healthful under such conditions of temperature. The mill men drink great draughts of water and sweat freely. This may be healthful within certain limits, but beyond these limits it is weakening to the whole system.4 Yet without this perspiration I am told that the blood would not keep at a normal temperature permitting work; consequently steel workers drink a great deal. During working hours they drink water and after work they drink beer and whiskey. It would seem that the round of heat, perspiration, copious water drinking, and the use of alcoholic stimulants could not fail in time to weaken considerably a man's vital energy.
The abnormal heat of the mills may lead directly or indirectly to other ailments, some of which could be avoided by precaution on the part of the men, and some of which are inevitable. It should be remembered that there is great heat even in the winter months; as much physical exertion is required then as at any other time, and the men perspire freely in the coldest weather. No man, with his work clothes in such condition, can go from the atmosphere of the mill out into the cold winter air without incurring great risk. To be safe, every man ought to take a bath and make a complete change of clothing before leaving the mill. This, however, is impossible because of the lack of bathing facilities and privacy in most of the Pittsburgh mills.
In view of the difficulties, a surprising amount of precautionary action is taken by the men. In most mills each man is provided with a locker in which he may keep extra clothing. Most of them carry an extra shirt so that they may put on a dry garment before leaving the mill, and most of them bathe at least their arms and faces in the "bosh," a trough of water in which tools are placed to cool after use. What convenient shower baths and clean towels would mean to mill men may be readily imagined.5 With but a single exception, the men to whom I mentioned bathing facilities agreed that they would be generally used and appreciated. Because of the lack of such facilities it is human nature for some men to leave the mills without preparing for the shock of the cold air beyond putting on an overcoat. Many others make a preparation that is wholly inadequate. I chanced to meet several men and was told of a number of others, who were affected, or had been, with throat, bronchial and pulmonary troubles which they attributed to the conditions just described. Rheumatism also seems to be a common trouble in the steel districts.
The Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel and Tin Workers established a death benefit fund in 1904, and since then they have kept a record of the number and causes of deaths. This record is not a complete list even for the members of that organization, for deaths of members not in good standing, and so ineligible to the benefits, are not reported. The reports indicate, however, that the diseases causing the most deaths among iron, steel and tin workers are of a sort likely to be induced by dust, heat conditions, and sudden changes in temperature. Among these tuberculosis leads and pneumonia stands second. Accidents claim a larger percentage than any other one cause; stomach and bowel troubles, especially typhoid, are common. Oliver states 6 that English iron and steel workers have a mortality figure 37 per cent above that of the standard of occupied males, and the same writer ascribes to iron workers greater suffering than that endured by others "from influenza and from diseases of the nervous, circulatory, respiratory, digestive and urinary systems." Their mortality figure from lung diseases he says is "more than double the standard figure."
As long as the twelve-hour day prevails, attempts to improve health conditions in the mills will be largely nullified. If the best of bathing facilities were installed, although the men today feel their lack, it would probably be the unusual man who would avail himself of them. At the end of twelve hours in the mill most men want the shortest cut out to what remains of the day.
When the mills are running full the men are chronically tired. The upsetting of all the natural customs of life every second week when the men change to the night shift, is in itself inimical to health. It takes until the end of the week, the men say, to grow sufficiently accustomed to the change to be able to sleep more than four or five hours during the day. And then they change back.7 The alternation of day and night shifts every fortnight is desired by the men; it gives each man 26 weeks a year of day employment. But the seven-day week and the twelve-hour shifts accentuate the evils inherent in all night work.
By far the greatest menace to health in the steel industry is, in my belief, this twelve-hour day. Beside this, heat and even speeding are unimportant. If the other conditions that I have mentioned are at all unhygienic in their nature, the effect of every one is intensified by the abnormal work-day. Who can doubt that toward the end of a twelve-hour shift a man's vital energy is sub-normal, and his power of resistance to disease materially lowered? If this is true, it must be trebly so at the end of the twenty-four hour shift, which is experienced fortnightly in Allegheny County by nearly 6,000 blast furnace men.7
Citation:
Fitch, John A. The Steel Workers. Philadelphia: Press of Wm. F. Fell Co, 1911. 42-51, 57-63.