Larger types of American geography; by McMurry Charles Alexander 1857-

Author:McMurry, Charles Alexander, 1857- [from old catalog]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Economic geography
Publisher: New York, The Macmillan company; London, Macmillan & co., ltd.
Published: 1907-03-25T05:00:00+00:00

Interior View of Ladle.

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144 LARGER TYPES OF AMERICAN GEOGRAPHY

see the contents of the cup only through a darkened glass.

The Cambria Steel Company has fifteen of these open-hearth furnaces and turns out at present a thousand tons of steel per day. They are now building large blast furnaces near the open-hearth furnaces so as to supply them directly with molten pig iron. By this saving of time and fuel they expect to produce from 1300 to 1600 tons of steel daily. By means of the Bessemer converters which produce 2000 tons of steel daily and the open-hearth furnaces with 1000 tons daily, the total output of the Cambria Steel Company is now 3000 tons daily, or more than a million tons a year.

In both cases (converters and open-hearth furnaces) the molten steel is carried by the great ladles and poured into ingot moulds which stand upright upon cars ready to receive the metal. An ingot mould is a hollow, slablike structure about eight feet tall, flat on the bottom so that it can be set upright on a flat car, and with a rectangular hollow extending through its length. The molten metal is poured into this hollow centre and the sides of the mould soon cool and harden the column of hot steel. An ingot mould will receive from seven thousand to twenty-five thousand pounds of molten metal. The fifty-ton ladle may, therefore fill up six or seven of these moulds as they stand waiting.

When the column of metal in each of these moulds has cooled suflSciently, an engine drags the cars under a stripper, a powerful machine, which reaches down a pair of great iron claws and laying the iron teeth into the sides of the mould, strips off the mould, leaving the column of red-hot

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steel standing on the car. The ingot mould is slightly wedge-shaped with the small end at the top, and in addition to this an iron piston is pushed down from above to loosen the iron from the mould. The iron, in cooling, also shrinks away somewhat from the mould so as to aid the stripping.

Before being carried to the rolling mills these columns of red-hot iron are lifted one by one by an overhead electric machine, and lowered into a soaking pit, where they are " soaked " in a flame of burning gases until they are of uniform temperature throughout the mass. When first stripped the outer crust is hard and the interior still molten, so that if put under the rollei-s the columns would go to pieces or collapse.

The third great process is that of the rolling mills, where these red-hot, soft steel slabs are passed under the roUere and shaped into various forms, as steel rails, broad steel plates, steel billets, and armor plate.

" From the soaking pit the ingot is taken to the blooming mill and is given seven passes through the blooming rolls, by which it is reduced to a section nine and one-fourth inches square and fifteen feet in length.

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