USES TO WHICH IRON IS PUT. 



BY JOHN O'DONNELL. 



[John O'Donnell, author and editor, is managing editor of the Pittsburg Chronicle- 

 Telegi-aph ; he has studied and written much on the iron industry as a result of inves- 

 tigations of the immense plants in the territory tributary to Pittsburg; he is a fre- 

 quent contributor to newspapers and periodicals on these subjects.] 



The United States is now making iron and steel at a rate 

 never before attained, even for a brief period, and the question 

 naturally is asked, Where is all the iron going? Steel is, of 

 course, merely a form of iron. Pig iron, the result of smelting 

 iron ore in the blast furnace, is the raw material from which 

 finished iron and steel products are made, by removing slight 

 impurities. Pig iron is now being produced at the rate of 

 almost 22,000,000 gross tons per annum, and such a quantity, 

 loaded on ordinary freight cars, would make a train over 

 10,000 miles long, or four times the air line distance from New 

 York to San Francisco. At ordinary speed it would take three 

 weeks for the train to pass a given point. The iron would 

 make a girdle for the earth ten feet wide and an inch thick. 

 Made into telegraph wire three sixteenths of an inch thick it 

 would run a line to the sun, nearly a hundred million miles 

 away. 



Nearly all this iron is consumed in the United States. 

 Although last year was, comparatively speaking, a heavy ex- 

 port year, only about one sixth the total was exported. The 

 outside world makes some iron, also, its production in recent 

 years lying between 25,000,000 and 30,000,000 tons, but these 

 figures show how much the iron consumption of the United 

 States exceeds that of the remainder of the world, relative 

 to population. With only one eighteenth of the world's 

 population, the United States is to-day consuming about 

 two fifths of the total iron production. 



This comparison makes still more pertinent the question, 

 ** Where is all the iron going?" The layman, if he lives in 



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