Behemoth

by Joshua B. Freeman

  At last you’re tired of this elderly world

  Shepherdess O Eiffel Tower this morning the bridges are bleating

  You’re fed up living with antiquity13

  Blaise Cendrars concluded “Tower,” his 1913 poem dedicated to Delauney,

  You are all

  Tower

  Ancient god

  Modern beast

  Solar spectrum

  Subject of my poem

  Tower

  World tower

  Tower in movement14

  The huge numbers of visitors to the expositions and the flood of positive publicity attested to the widespread admiration for the new industrialism—the steam engines, vast iron structures, and machinery on display. 15 Of course, not everyone was entranced. Guy de Maupassant declared, “I left Paris, and France, too, on account of the Eiffel Tower. It could not only be seen from everywhere, but it could be found everywhere, made of every kind of known material, exhibited in all windows, an ever-present and racking nightmare.” The author tired of the crowds the 1889 fair attracted, among them “the people who toil and emit the odor of physical fatigue.”16

  Just how many working people actually attended the various fairs is difficult to say. The middle and upper classes apparently made up the bulk of the audience, better able to afford travel and entrance fees. The planners of the London Crystal Palace Exhibition paid considerable attention to attracting and controlling working-class visitors. Admission was cheaper on Mondays through Thursdays, facilitating visits by workers and their families, while allowing wealthier patrons to have Fridays and Saturdays largely to themselves. Many companies subsidized employee expeditions to the exhibition. The Philadelphia Centennial closed on Sundays, generally the only day workers had off, as a result of pressure from local clergymen, making it difficult for them to attend. But as in England, employers sponsored trips to the exposition for their workers.17

  Working-class visitors generally seemed to have enjoyed the fairs—by some reports, they were more interested in machinery and less interested in fine art than their economic betters—but some leaders of workers’ movements could not ignore what they saw as the exploitation that underlay the industrial bounty on display. Radical Chartist G. Julian Harney called the exhibits at the 1851 exposition “plunder, wrung from the people of all lands, by their conquerors, the men of blood, privilege, and capital.” During the 1889 Paris fair, socialists from Europe and the United States gathered at congresses in the city. Friedrich Engels, who by then had retired from his Manchester cotton mill, stayed away. He wrote Laura LaFarge, Marx’s daughter, “There are two things which I avoid visiting on principle, and only go to on compulsion: congresses and exhibitions.” Paul LaFarge, Laura’s husband, complained to Engels that “the capitalists have invited the rich and powerful to the Exposition universelle to observe and admire the product of the toil of workers forced to live in poverty in the midst of the greatest wealth human society has ever produced.”18

  Iron

  The crystal palaces in London and New York, the great machinery halls, and the Eiffel Tower were possible because of advances in the iron industry. If the first half of the nineteenth century constituted the age of cotton, the decades after 1850 were the age of iron. By the time of the Centennial Exhibition, the largest manufacturing plants in Europe and the United States made iron and steel goods, not textiles. Iron mills and, later, steel mills supplanted textiles mills as symbols of modernity, as poles for debate about the nature of the society and what kind of future people sought.

  Until the nineteenth century, iron was made only in small quantities for specialized products. Typically, in Europe and North America, the mining of ore, its conversion into iron, and the production of finished goods all took place at one site, by small groups of skilled workers. But by the middle of the nineteenth century, the rising demand for iron outstripped traditional production techniques, in which small furnaces, fueled by charcoal or coke, were used to remove oxygen and impurities from iron ore, producing metal which could be cast into finished goods or later reheated and converted into stronger, more malleable wrought iron.19

  A huge boost in the demand for iron came from the spread of the railroad and the need for rails. In 1840, there were 4,500 miles of railway worldwide; by 1860, 66,300 miles; and by 1880, 228,400. At first, producing rails proved painfully difficult. Because not enough iron could be rolled at once to make a single rail, small bars had to be rolled into strips, which were layered, reheated, and rolled again. Quality was low; sometimes rails delaminated and, on heavily used lines, they wore out in as little as three months. American metallurgist Frederick Overman wrote in the early 1850s, “The application of science and machinery in the manufacture of iron does not exhibit so high a state of cultivation as we find in . . . the manufacture of calico prints and silks.”20

  That changed with a series of technical innovations that increased the quantity and quality of production. First came the blast furnace. Instead of forcing cold air through heated iron ore to remove the carbon in it, starting in 1828 in England and six years later in the United States, hot air, heated by the exhaust of the furnace itself, was used, greatly increasing the speed and efficiency of the process. Raising the temperature and pressure of the air yielded further gains. From a typical output in the 1850s of one to six tons of iron a day, by 1880 furnaces neared an output of one hundred tons a day.21

  Iron produced by blast furnaces could be used to make some products by casting, like stoves and plows. But it was too brittle for many uses. Further reducing the carbon content to make wrought iron gave it greater strength and flexibility but required intensive labor, either repeated pounding at a forge or chemical transformation through a process known as puddling. Puddlers reheated cast-iron bars, so-called pig iron, along with scrap iron in special furnaces, stirring the mixture to oxidize the carbon and burn off impurities. Experience, skill, and physical strength were needed to control the process.

  With a strong craft culture and a high level of unionization, puddlers forced iron manufacturers into what effectively was a partnership. The workers regulated all aspects of the puddling process, including how much iron to produce in each turn and their hours of work. They often paid helpers out of their own wages. In Pittsburgh, the most important iron center, a sliding scale linked puddlers’ pay to their output and the selling price of iron, so that they shared any gains that resulted from higher productivity or improved market conditions. The men who operated rollers for shaping rails and other products also exerted near total control over the production process. In some mills, they negotiated a price per ton for an entire team of workers, which they decided among themselves how to divide.22

  Early iron plants tended to be small, as puddling could make wrought iron in batches of only about six hundred pounds at a time. Soon, though, technical and financial considerations pushed up plant size. Rolling rails required expensive equipment; to be profitable, rail mills had to be operated around the clock, which necessitated a great deal of wrought iron. Some rail makers purchased iron from other firms, but the leading companies integrated backward, setting up their own blast and puddling operations. Switching fuel from charcoal to coke liberated them from the need to be near large tracts of forested land from which charcoal could be produced. Coal deposits and major rail lines made Pennsylvania particularly attractive for large-scale operations.

  Figure 3.2 Cambria Iron and Steel Works in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, circa 1880.

  The Cambria Iron Works, near Johnstown, Pennsylvania, was for a time the most advanced mill in the United States, introducing a system of three-high rollers, which allowed iron to be moved backward and forward between shaping rollers, minimizing the need for reheating. Its rail mill extended over a thousand feet long and a hundred feet wide, far larger than the largest cotton mill. In 1860 it employed 1,948 workers, about as many as the largest Lowell mills. The Montour Iron Works in central Pennsylvania, another rail producer, had three thousand employe
es. Though like the first textile mills, iron mills often lay in rural areas or small towns near rivers, they proved far more disruptive, sprawling over large sites and spewing out dark smoke. One European traveler described iron-mill smoke in Pittsburgh as giving “a gloomy cast to the beautiful hills which surround it.”23

  The introduction of the Bessemer process led to a further leap in the scale of mill complexes. Puddling created a bottleneck in the production of iron goods, both because of its small-batch process and the strong control exerted by the puddlers. The Bessemer process, developed by Englishman Henry Bessemer in the mid-1850s, provided an alternative way of turning blast-furnace iron into a stronger, more malleable metal. As modified by subsequent inventors, it worked by forcing air into molten pig iron, allowing oxygen to combine with the carbon in the metal, thus removing it, with a manganese-based ore introduced to remove excess oxygen and sulphur. The end product fell somewhere between pig iron and wrought iron in its carbon content and proved more durable for rails than puddled metal. Its promoters dubbed it steel, appropriating the name of an older form of purified iron that had been very difficult to produce.

  The Bessemer process worked best with iron made from ore with a low phosphorous content, more readily available in the United States than in Europe. So it was in the United States, starting right after the Civil War, that the Bessemer process was first widely adopted. Some products, like pipes, bars, and plates, continued to be made out of puddled iron even as the Bessemer and the later open-hearth processes for steelmaking spread. As late as the 1890s, one company, Jones and Loughlins, had 110 puddling furnaces. But thereafter iron production plummeted and the age of steel was firmly established.24

  Even early on, Bessemer furnaces could convert five tons or more of iron into steel in one turn. To feed them, companies built bigger and bigger blast furnaces. Rather than making pig iron that later had to be reheated, they loaded Bessemer converters directly with molten metal. In Pittsburgh and Youngstown, they built bridges to allow trains with special ladle cars to carry liquid iron from blast furnaces on one side of a river to converters on the other. In the 1880s, some firms began taking ingots produced by converters directly to rolling mills, where, after adjusting their temperature in “soaking pits,” workers rolled them without reheating. Thus heat and energy were conserved as the molten metal never was allowed to fully cool between its initial creation and the completion of finished products.25

  Increased output, integration, and an ever-growing array of end products, requiring finishing mills for structural steel, wire, plate, and other goods, boosted iron and steel mills to unprecedented size. In Germany, the Krupp works in Essen, out of which came steel cannons that were crowd favorites at the Crystal Palace and other exhibitions, grew from seventy-two workers in 1848 to 12,000 workers in 1873. In France, the Schneider works in Le Creusot, an iron and steel producer which, like Krupp, came to specialize in armaments, had 12,500 workers in 1870.26 In the United States, firms were quicker to mechanize and had fewer employees but also were growing. In 1880, the Cambria mill had the largest workforce in the industry, 4,200. Andrew Carnegie’s Homestead plant, which displaced Cambria as the most technologically advanced mill in the United States, and which like Krupp and Schneider heavily engaged in producing armor, grew from 1,600 workers in 1889 to nearly 4,000 in 1892.

  In 1900, of the 443 manufacturing establishments in the United States with over a thousand employees, 120 produced textiles, mostly cotton, and 103 iron or steel, so that half of all the large factories in the country were in these two industries. Among the very biggest plants, iron and steel dominated. Three of the four factories in the United States with over eight thousand workers made steel (Cambria, Homestead, and the Jones and Laughlins Pittsburgh plant), while the fourth made locomotives. Three more steel mills had between six thousand and eight thousand workers.27

  The steel mill, as a production system, was far more complex than the cotton mill. Its products were less uniform. Rails made to standard specifications were produced in large quantities, but finishing mills also filled orders for myriad other goods, some in small numbers: structural steel in all shapes and sizes, steel sheets of varying dimensions, armor plate of different thicknesses and strengths, pipes, wire, bars, tinplate, and so on. Experienced workers and constant adjustment of machinery were needed to meet ever-changing specifications. Carnegie came to dominate the steel industry by running his business like the Lowell mills. “The surest way to continued leadership,” he believed, was “to adopt policy of selling a few finished articles which require large tonnage.” Bridges, he said, were “not so good because every order different.” But beyond rails, which became relatively less important as the railroad system was built out and stronger rails required less frequent replacement, Carnegie’s policy proved hard to imitate.28

  A single worker operating a single machine could turn roving into thread or thread into fabric, but no one worker could produce a bar of pig iron or a steel rail. Instead, coordinated activity by teams of workers was needed. Even puddlers, the most autonomous metalworkers, worked in pairs, the heat and effort being so draining that they needed to spell each other. Each was assisted by a helper and sometimes a “boy.” Larger groups of workers, some skilled and some laborers, operated blast furnaces, Bessemer and open-hearth converters, and rollers.

  Unlike spinning and weaving, most iron and steel operations were not continuous. Blast furnaces were run nonstop, with raw materials poured in the top and iron tapped out at the bottom, until the linings burnt out or other problems developed, when they would be cooled and rebuilt. But most other processes were batch operations. Once a Bessemer converter was charged with molten iron, it took only eight to ten minutes before steel was poured out and the cycle restarted. Open-hearth converters took eight hours to complete their work—one reason why, though they produced higher-quality steel, companies were slow to adopt them. Unlike textile workers, many of whom did exactly the same thing all day long, ironworkers and steelworkers often took on varied tasks and alternated periods of intense labor with rest and recovery.29

  In textile mills, many identical machines operated side by side, drawing power from a common source. Integrated iron and steel mills had many fewer machines (often with individual engines driving them), but they were linked in tighter sequential operation.

  Some of those machines were gigantic. At Homestead, workers made armor from steel ingots that weighed as much as one hundred tons. After being rolled to the appropriate size, their ends were trimmed by a hydraulic press with a 2,500-ton capacity. They were then reheated to be tempered and cooled in a bath of 100,000 gallons of oil. Final machining was done with enormous equipment, like a planning machine weighing two hundred tons. The flywheel alone on one engine in the beam mill weighed one hundred tons. The Bethlehem Iron Company built an armor plant that had a 125-ton steam hammer, a massive, towering apparatus that dwarfed anyone standing nearby. Even equipment for handling raw materials grew to enormous size, like machines that could lift entire railcars full of ore or limestone and turn them upside down to load a blast furnace. Dignitaries at the 1890 opening of a steel mill in Sparrows Point, Maryland, rode in decorated gondola cars along the route iron ore would take, being pulled up to a charging platform over eight stories high.30

  The Romance of Steel

  “There is a glamor about the making of steel,” John Fitch wrote at the beginning of his 1910 study of Pittsburgh steelworkers. “The very size of things—the immensity of the tools, the scale of production—grips the mind with an overwhelming sense of power. . . . majestic and illimitable.” Fitch was only the latest in a long line of writers, artists, and journalists to be fascinated by the making of iron and steel. More than a half century earlier, Nathaniel Hawthorne was entranced by “exhibitions of mighty strength, both of men and machines” during a visit to an iron foundry in Liverpool, where he watched a twenty-three-ton cannon being made. “We saw lumps of iron, intensely white-hot, and all but in a melti
ng state, passed beneath various rollers and . . . converted into long bars, which came curling and waving out of the rollers like great red ribbons.” Hawthorne “found much delight in looking at the molten iron, boiling and bubbling in the furnace,” with “numberless fires on all sides, blinding us with their intense glow.”31

  Fire was a big part of the allure of iron- and steelmaking, the intense heat, the white molten metal, the glowing red ingots. Heroic images of workers using fire to turn ore into metal were commonly featured in nineteenth-century journals, often depicted at night to heighten the effect of radiant metal in blast furnaces or Bessemer converters. Several of the drawings Joseph Stella made for the early twentieth-century Pittsburgh Survey showed men’s faces lit by the glow of molten metal.

  One of the most common allusions in writing about the Industrial Revolution was to Prometheus, for giving man powers of the gods. Fire was the greatest of his gifts, iron and steel the most Promethean industry. In seeking classical reference for an act of alchemy that seemed beyond the realm of ordinary mortals, the nineteenth century also looked to Vulcan, the Roman god of fire and metalworking. When the Pittsburgh-area puddlers organized a union in 1858, they called themselves the Sons of Vulcan. An 1890 account of a large steelworks in Newcastle, England, reported that in the foundry “modern Vulcans, in shirt-sleeves and with unbroken legs, are still casting thunderbolts.” Artists commonly portrayed iron and steelworkers as intensely masculine, often bare-chested, with muscles rippling, a bit like ancient portrayals of Vulcan himself. The contrast was great to the typical representation of the English textile worker as a sickly child or the New England textile worker as a well-dressed young woman.32