Photograph from Brown Brothers 



TAPPING AN OPEN-HEARTH EURNACE IN A MODERN STEEE MILE 



When an open-hearth furnace is tapped a big ladle is brought into position, a workman 

 runs a crowbar through the clay stopper holding back the molten metal, and it runs out like 

 buttermilk from a churn. What slag accompanies it rises to the top as oil on water and 

 overflows the sides when the ladle becomes full of the melted steel. Once filled, the ladle 

 is picked up by a crane and its contents dumped into molds to harden into ingots. This is 

 the first process in making the major portion of the country's steel and is now almost exclu- 

 sively used in making steel rails 



an endless chain turning round sprockets 

 at the head and foot of the lakes, with 

 the Soo locks as an intermediate support. 



GLORIFIED WALKING BEAMS 



When the big ore carriers arrive at the 

 lower lake ports ■ — Lorain, Cleveland, 

 Ashtabula, Conneaut, Erie, and Buf- 

 falo — they hasten up to the ore-handling 

 plants, every hatch open and ready for 

 the unloading. Gravity may load a ship, 

 but it has never yet unloaded one, and so 

 machinery does the work. Instead of the 

 old way of hoisting shovel-filled buckets 

 by horse-power and dumping them into 

 the wheelbarrows of picturesque long- 

 shoremen, a method by which it cost 5° 

 cents a ton to get the ore from hold to 

 car or pile, today gigantic unloaders, the 

 most modern of them grabbing up 17 

 tons at a mouthful, save so much labor 

 that it costs in some cases less than five 



cents to take a ton of ore out of the hold 

 and put it on the small mountain the ore 

 folk call the stock pile, or in empty rail- 

 road cars waiting on the track hard by. 



The Hulett unloader reminds one of a 

 glorified walking beam of the sidewheel 

 steamboat variety, with one of the legs 

 left off. Instead of the other leg con- 

 necting with a crank shaft, it has a won- 

 derful set of claws at the lower end, and 

 above them an ankle of startling agility. 

 These great claws open and shut by elec- 

 tricity, and they take up 17 tons with as 

 much ease as you might close your hand 

 on an apple. The operator is stationed 

 inside the leg just above the claws and 

 gets all the sensations of riding a roller- 

 coaster, as he jumps in and out of the 

 ship hour after hour (see page 134). 



When the claws are full, the operator 

 turns a lever ; the walking beam seesaws 

 back to the opposite position ; the load 



131 



