SAFETY PROVISIONS BEYER. 213 



Meetings of the committee are held about once a month, when 

 arrangements for inspection are made, and reports considered. 

 Drawings, photographs, rules, specifications, etc., are submitted for 

 consideration, and such as seem desirable are sent out to all the com- 

 panies. During the two j^ears since the institution of this central 

 committee of safety its inspectors have reported to it, in round 

 numbers, 6,000 recommendations for increasing the safety of em- 

 ployees in the plants, mills, mines, and on the railroads and steam- 

 ship lines of the organization. Of these recommendations 93 per 

 cent have been adopted by the committee and carried out by the sub- 

 sidiary companies. New appliances, gTiards for the protection of 

 machinery, and other means for safeguarding the workmen, to the 

 number of 100 or more each A^ear, have been submitted for the con- 

 sideration of the committee, and through the committee have been 

 brought to the attention of and adopted by the subsidiary companies. 



There has been no attempt to establish a uniform safety organi- 

 zation in each of these companies, since the conditions vary so greatly 

 that this would be impracticable ; the Carnegie Steel Co. has 27 dif- 

 ferent plants, the Illinois Steel Co. 6, the National Tube Co.- 13, the 

 American Sheet & Tin Plate Co. 34, the American Bridge Co. 16, the 

 Tennessee Coal, Iron & Eailroad Co. 7, and the American Steel & 

 Wire Co. 32. In some cases the plants of a company are gTOuped 

 within a radius of a few miles, in others they are located in as many 

 as 10 or 12 States. While each company thus has its own safety or- 

 ganization, which has been evolved during a period of years, there 

 are many features common to all. The following pages treat partic- 

 ularly of the organization and methods used in the American 

 Steel & Wire Co., but it should be borne in mind that many of the 

 devices and ideas found in its plants were secured from some of the 

 other companies mentioned, through the central committee of safety 

 and the system of inter-company inspection. 



The American Steel & Wire Co. has plants in Worcester, Mass.; 

 New Haven, Conn. ; Trenton, N. J. ; Pittsburg, Donora, Allentown, 

 and Sharon, Pa.; Cleveland and Salem, Ohio; Anderson, Ind. ; De 

 Kalb, Joilet, and Waukegan, 111.; San Francisco, Cal. ; and Hamil- 

 ton, Canada. Its equipment includes docks and ore-handling ma- 

 chinery, blast furnaces, open-hearth furnaces, Bessemer converters, 

 blooming mills, plate mills, and rod mills ; finishing departments for 

 making nails, fence, market wire, etc., as well as specialty depart- 

 ments for springs, electric cables, rail .bonds, wire rope, and flat wire. 

 It unloads a boat of ore from the Michigan mines at its docks in 

 Cleveland, reduces this to pig iron in its blast furnaces, converts the 

 iron into steel ingots in open-hearth or Bessemer departments, rolls 

 these ingots out into billets in a blooming mill, reduces the billets to 

 a quarter-inch rod in the rod mills, and draws this rod down into the 



