"
Henry Bessemer, "On the Manufacture of Cast Steel: Its Progress and
Employment as a Substitute for Wrought Iron." British Association for the
Advancement of Science, Report, 1865. Mechanical Science Section, pp. 165-
6.]
To-day, on the same authority, "there are more than a hundred Bessemer
converters in the United States," and they "breathe iron into steel at the
rate of eighteen billion pounds a year"--"two and a quarter millions of
pounds every hour of the day and night."
With their companion open-hearth converters and attendant furnaces and
mills, they not only hold the site of the old fort but make a circle of
glowing fortresses around the valley--in Buffalo, in Birmingham, Alabama,
and in the "red crags" of the Rockies at Pueblo, beneath Pike's Peak. And
within ten years a whole new city, [Footnote: Gary, Indiana.] not far from
Chicago, on Lake Michigan, has been made to order. A river was turned from
its course, a town was moved, and an entirely new city was constructed
with homes for nearly twenty thousand workmen near a square mile of
furnaces and mills.
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