324 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1909. 
and thus supply the stack with a gaseous element of as constant and 
reliable a composition as the solid elements of fuel and ore. 
The advances in blast-furnace practice in the direction of fuel 
saving have been great. But they are not as startling or as pic- 
turesque as the economies which followed the introduction of the 
pneumatic method as applied through the mechanical and metal- 
lurgical skill of Bessemer, and as developed in the United States 
through the genius of Holley. We can all recollect the distressing 
sight, especially in summer weather, of the puddler, stripped to his 
waist, toiling over his furnace, while burning up from 20 to 27 
hundredweight of coal in converting 1 ton of pig iron into puddle 
bar. Leaving out of the question the fuel used in generating the 
power for operating the Bessemer converters, which, however, is 
generally recovered from the waste heat of the blast furnace, the 
amount of coal saved in making Bessemer steel instead of wrought 
iron during the same year of 1906 exceeded 22,000,000 tons. 
The metallurgy of copper has benefited as acutely as the metallurgy 
of iron and steel from the combined science and skill of the mechan- 
ical and metallurgical engineers. One recollects distinctly how, in 
the old brick furnace, a campaign of ten days, with a daily charge 
of 10 tons of ore, was looked upon as almost phenomenal; and that 
from the time we began roasting sulphide ore in heaps until the 
refined copper was turned out after endless handlings of the mattes, 
as they were worked up from lower to higher grades, about three 
months was occupied. Now, by means of mechanical roasting fur- 
naces, large jacketed cupolas, electrical cranes, the Bessemer con- 
verter, and the Walker casting table, the ore is turned into metal in 
fewer hours than it formerly took weeks, and at the same time almost 
dispensing with hand labor. 
While these industrial changes were going on in the mining and 
metallurgical fields, the electrical engineer was bringing under con- 
trol that tremendous force which Faraday. investigated as dynamic 
electricity; and we metallurgists have not been slow to apply it, both 
to the saving of fuel and other natural resources, and to the con- 
servation of human labor. The modern rolling mill, in which a 
motor replaces the small engine and boiler that used to operate the 
rolls, and the modern electrolytic plant which turns out electrically 
pure copper, are only the more visible benefits that electricity is 
conferring. When some of us commenced our technical experience 
the deduction in precious metals made by the refiner of copper be- 
fore any contribution was made to the miner or the seller was $60 
worth per ton of ore or metal. Under such heavy charges com- 
paratively small amounts of gold or silver were or could be saved. 
To-day, through the application of electrolysis to the metallurgy of 
copper, about $8,000,000 in value, which was formerly lost, is now 
