IRON INDUSTRY IN THE UNITED STATES ioq 



Whether the ore j^joes to tlie coal or the c(jal meets the 

 ore half way, one or both must travel a long jom-ney, by land 

 as well as by water. One or ]:)0th must be laden and un- 

 laden several times. Fifty years ago, even twent}' years 

 ago, it would have seemed well nigh impossible to accom- 

 plish this on a great scale and with great cheapness. One of 

 the most sagacious of American students of economics, All:)ert 

 Gallatin, early predicted that the coal area of western Pennsyl- 

 vania would become the foundation of a great iron industry, 

 and that only with its development would the American iron 

 manufacture attain a large independent growth. But he could 

 not dream that his j^rophec}' would be fulfilled by the utiliza- 

 tion of ores distant fifteen hundred miles from the seaboard, 

 transported from a region which was in his day, and remained 

 for hall a century after his day, an unexplored wilderness. 



The history of the American iron trade in the last thirty 

 five years is thus in no small part a history of transportation. 

 The cheap carriage of the ore and coal has been the indis- 

 pensable conditions of the smelting of the one by the other. 

 And, clearly, this factor has not been peculiar to the iron 

 industry. The perfecting of transportation has been almost 

 the most remarkable of the mechanical triumphs of the 

 United States. In the carriage of iron ore and of coal the 

 methods of railway transportation developed under the stress 

 of eager competition have been utilized to the utmost; and 

 the same is true of the transfer from rail to ship and from 

 ship to rail agam, of the carriage in the ship itself, and of 

 the handling of accumulated piles of the two materials. 



Still another factor has been at work in the iron trade, 

 as it has m other great industries, — the march of production 

 to a greater and greater scale, and the combination of con- 

 nected industries into great single managed systems. Noth- 

 ing is more wonderful in the industrial history of the past 

 generation than the new vista opened as to the possibilities 

 of organization. The splitting up among different individuals 

 and separate establishments of the successive steps in a com- 

 plicated industry — those of the mining, carrying, smelting, 

 rolling, fashioning of iron — was supposed to be due to the 

 limitations of human brain and energy: the management of 



