442 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



was the one thing which was absolutely essential to make them finally 

 possible ; inasmuch as the cost of frequently replacing rails of iron 

 would have entailed such a burden of expenditure as to have rendered 

 the present cheapness of railway transportation utterly unattainable. 

 And it is most interesting to note how rapidly improvements in pro- 

 cesses have followed the discovery of Bessemer, until, on the score of 

 relative first cost alone, it has become economical to substitute steel 

 for iron in railroad construction.* In 1873 Bessemer steel in England, 

 where its price has not been enhanced by protective duties, commanded 

 $80 per ton ; in 1886 it was profitably manufactured and sold in the 

 same country for less than $20 per ton ! "Within the same time the 

 annual producing capacity of a Bessemer converter has been increased 

 fourfold, with no increase but rather a diminution of the involved 

 labor ; and by the Gilchrist-Thomas process, four men can now make 

 a given product of steel in the same time and with less cost of material 

 than it took ten men ten years ago to accomplish. A ton of steel rails 

 can now also be made with 5,000 pounds of coal, as compared with 

 10,000 pounds in 1868. 



One of the most momentous and what may be called humanitarian 

 results of the recent great extension and cheapening of the world's 

 railway system and service is, that there is now no longer any occa- 

 sion for the people of any country indulging in either excessive hopes 

 or fears as to the results of any particular harvest ; inasmuch as the 

 failure of crops in any one country is no longer, as it was, no later 

 than twenty years ago, identical with high prices of grain ; the prices 

 of cereals being at present regulated, not within any particular coun- 

 try, but by the combined production and comsumption of all coun- 

 tries made mutually accessible by railroads and steamships. Hence 

 it is that, since 1870, years of locally bad crops in Europe have gen- 

 erally witnessed considerably loAver prices than years when the local 

 crops were good, and there was a local surplus for export. 



In short, one marked effect of the present railroad and steamship 

 system of transportation has been to compel a uniformity of prices for 

 all commodities that are essential to life, and to put an end forever 

 to what, less than half a century ago, was a constant feature of com- 

 merce, namely, the existence of local markets, with widely divergent 

 prices for such commodities. How much of misery and starvation a 

 locally deficient harvest entailed under the old system upon the poorer 

 classes, through the absence of opportunity of supplying the deficiency 



* The average price of iron rails in Great Britain for the year 1883 was 5 per ton. 

 Steel rails in the same market sold in 1886 for 4.5 per ton; and the London "Econo- 

 mist" of June, 1887, mentions a sale of 4,500 tons of steel rails, by a Belgian company, 

 at the equivalent of 3 16s ($18.47) per ton, deliverable at their works. Since the begin- 

 ning of 1883 the manufacture of iron rails in the United States has been almost entirely 

 discontinued, and during the years from 1883 to 1887 there were virtually no market quota- 

 tions for them. The last recorded average price for iron rails was $45 per ton in 1882. 

 The yearly average price of steel rails at the works in Pennsylvania for 1886 was $2S. 



