114 JOHN FRANKLIN CROWELL 



means that this country has reached a position of self suffi- 

 ciency unhke that of her principal competitors — Great Britain 

 and Germany — both of whom have been obliged to rely to a 

 considerable extent on importations of either iron ore or coal. 

 This has given a greater freedom to the American iron industry 

 in its effort to adjust itself to the conditions of maximum 

 economy in the accumulation of raw materials and in the dis- 

 tribution of products. Hence the general tendency of iron 

 and steel production to seek in the north the shores of the 

 lower lakes where the lake ores can be easily distributed, or 

 to concentrate in the neighborhood of Birmingham in the 

 south, where the raw materials are most economically placed 

 by nature. 



There are no international boundaries to cross, and pro- 

 duction and distribution have consequently been organized 

 on a scale that admits of the most economical location of 

 plants. In obedience to this principle of progress by reloca- 

 tion, the pig iron industry — the basic industry of iron and 

 steel manufactures — has developed through three distinct 

 stages in the United States: (1) The charcoal era (to 1854, 

 say) when every state had its own small furnaces and foun- 

 dries. (2) The anthracite era, when the country's iron in- 

 dustries flourished mainly in the valleys of the Lehigh, the 

 Schuylkill, and the Susquehanna, from the hard coal regions 

 to the sea (1854-1875). (3) The bituminous coal and coke 

 era (1875 to date), in which the center of pig iron production 

 passed beyond the Alleghenies, and thence spread westward 

 and southward with the growth of national consumption. 



The production of pig iron serves possibly better than 

 that of any other product as an index to the comparative suc- 

 cess with which the leading countries have utilized their raw 

 materials. 



The world's six greatest producers of pig iron are, in 

 quantitative order, the United States, Great Britain, Ger- 

 many, Russia, France, and Belgium. The primacy of the 

 United States cannot be fully underetood without reference 

 to the way in which this industry has made use of inventions 

 for the utilization of iron ores. In the manufacture of pig 

 iron to be made into steel, two principal methods are gen- 



