Britain at Work
A Pictorial Description of Our National Industries

48 BRITAIN AT WORK. quality; and steel of the finest quality from the crucible is still absolutely necessary in the manufacture of a thousand things, from big guns to music wire for pianofortes. Much depends, of course, on the quality and also on the manipulation of the steel used for all cutting instruments; and it is only by a careful process of heating and cooling, of hardening and tempering, that the knife- blade, lancet, or razor are made fit to receive their indispensable edge on the grindstone. Bessemer, Siemens, Martin, Armstrong, and others have revolutionised the steel manu- facture by new processes, that new properties have been found in it by the addition of silicon, manganese, chromium, tungsten, and nickel, and that' the scientist and the manu- facturer have by no means exhausted the limits of discovery in the realm of steel. Meanwhile, there are two chief processes of steel manufacture—the Bessemer and the open-hearth process. It is contended by Photo: By permission of the Wigan Coal and Iron Co., Ltd. ROLLING STEEL RAILS. Yet there were clever handicraftsmen in this direction in the sixteenth century, for one writer says, “Though plain knife-making was very ancient in Yorkshire, yet Thomas Matthews, on Fleet Bridge, London, was the first Englishman who, quinto Elizabethæ, 1563, made fine knives.” If you speak to an authority on iron and steel production, he will probably tell you that quality and intensity are now sought in steel ; that “ allotrophy and carburisation of iron are the passwords of to-day, and that their significance has been blended by showing that the power of iron to retain carbon in solid solution depends on the peculiar allo- tropic form in which the iron exists.” These fine words have been created out of half a century of experiment. They indicate that experts that the rapidity of the Bessemer process is only obtained by a large initial outlay, and by considerable waste of metal ; and that the open-hearth process, invented by Siemens, though giving a higher yield of metal, takes a much longer time, and involves a heavier expenditure in labour. The com- plaint is macle that in the Bessemer process there is practically no time to examine the product ; whereas in the open-hearth process the mode of action is more deliberate, and the quality of the steel can be ascer- tained during manufacture. Attention is con- sequently given to the improvement of the open-hearth process, and one development, already in vogue, is “the use of the fluid metal from the blast furnace, mixer, or cupola, to avoid loss of time, and oxidation by air