164 MODERN SCIENCE HEADER 



or perhaps even hundreds which will be built and operated 

 within the lifetime of most of this audience. The time at 

 our disposal forbids me describing these interesting fur- 

 naces ; I can only refer to Dr. Haanel 's interesting reports 

 and to the transactions of this society, particularly to our 

 volume xv. One surmise of my own I will, however, take 

 time to mention : I have predicted that this electric furnace 

 pig iron, made without the admittance or use of air blast, 

 will be far superior to ordinary pig iron for conversion into 

 steel, because of the absence of oxygen or, particularly, of 

 nitrogen. Time will test this prediction, too. 



Electric steel is at present a topic of absorbing interest 

 and great potentialities. It was primarily a competitor of 

 the most expensive kind of steel crucible steel. It was 

 first made commercially in 1900, by Mr. F. A. Kjellin of 

 Sweden, by melting together in an electric furnace the 

 same high-grade materials which are usually melted down 

 in crucibles to form crucible steel. The product was made 

 equal in quality to crucible steel, it was produced in lots 

 of a ton or more at a melt, of very satisfactory uniformity, 

 and with cheap water-power to furnish electricity the cost 

 was considerably below that of crucible steel. 



The steel melting pot or crucible is a siliceous vessel, 

 holding about 100 pounds of steel, lasting only a few heats, 

 and lifted in and out of the furnace by manual labor. The 

 consumption of fuel to get the required melting heat is 

 wickedly wasteful; not over five per cent, of the heat- 

 developing power of the fuel used is efficiently utilized as 

 heat in the melted steel, and the actual proportion is usually 

 less than half that much. The cost of labor, crucibles and 

 fuel is excessive, and to this must be added the high cost 

 of 'the pure material which must be used practically the 

 purest iron which can be made. 



The electric furnace is changing all this, rapidly in con- 

 tinental Europe, slower in Sheffield, and still slower in 

 America; but the change is spreading surely and inevit- 

 ably. Real crucible steel will soon be a thing of the past, 



