262 REPORTS ON THE STATE OV SCIENCE. 



give a minimum of change in composition during melting show, accord- 

 ing to a student's preliminary analysis, compositions in the ingots 

 practically equal to those by calculation from the constituents, a result 

 better than expected but still requiring thorough checking. The results 

 at least serve as a text for one fact that must never be forgotten. The 

 electric furnace of whatever design will not make good steel auto- 

 matically. The same metallurgical skill required by the older processes 

 must be expended on the proper killing and finishing of the steel, by 

 whatever type of electric furnace it is being melted, and the fact that in 

 electric as in other furnaces bad steel may be made from good materials 

 increases the difficulties of finding the exact place of any steel in the 

 world's work. Several cases where the electric steel has been found 

 unsuitable, especially in the earlier days, have been investigated, and it 

 has been found that the steel has been wrongly made. In other cases 

 no such explanation could be given. Recently I had a long talk with 

 a man using large quantities of electric steel ; he could get great purity 

 but no better mechanical tests, yet he found the electric steel gave a 

 better life than his former steel and so he used it. Here again another 

 difficulty comes in as represented by the fact that I did not think his 

 ordinary steel was specially well made. 



One point of importance is that this production of electric steel has 

 introduced a new competitor into the field by giving great impetus to 

 the use of what is sometimes called white coal — namely, the great water- 

 falls, mostly far removed from coal — and much energy is now being 

 used that formerly ran to waste, whilst the successful application of 

 electric power to the production of charcoal pig-iron allows of a much- 

 reduced consumption of charcoal. The rapidly increasing price of 

 charcoal in Sweden, owing among other causes to so much of the wood 

 being used for making wood pulp for paper-making, is quite a serious 

 situation which this application of electric power may help to relieve. 



The whole subject of electric iron-smelting and electric steel-melting 

 is attracting much attention. Several books have been published on 

 electric furnaces, and during 1909 and 1910 many interesting articles 

 on the subject have appeared in the technical journals, and many papers 

 have been read before the Iron and Steel Institute. At the Autumn 

 meeting of 1909, Mr. C. A. Ljungberg gave a paper on ' Production of 

 Iron and Steel by Electric Smelting Processes. ' He mentioned the 

 Kjellin electric induction furnace at Gysinge, with which the writer 

 had the pleasure of making with Mr. E. C. Ibbotson a full week's trial, 

 as being still in work, making tool steel, special steels, self-hardening 

 and high-speed steels, and others such as nickel and chromium steels. 

 The paper dealt more in detail, however, with the successful experi- 

 ments on smelting pig-iron at Domnarfvet by electrical means and the 

 resulting saving in the proportion of charcoal used. 



It will be only necessary merely to touch upon the various principles 

 used in the construction of electric furnaces as these are found in text- 

 books and in the proceedings of the Iron and Steel Institute. Having 

 obtained an electric current, its energy may be converted into heat by 

 putting a suitable resistance in its path, and the heat may be concen- 

 trated at any part of the circuit by making the resistance of other parts 



