Still there were difficulties quite enough to keep John’s mind
enthralled. The steel wire nails soon got the N. A. M. Co. out of the
woods. But as the German nail making machines would devour nothing but
German wire their food had to be imported by the shipload. The German
wire drawing machines, acquired along with the nail making machines,
miserably failed when they were asked to reduce American steel to
the form of wire. That was not their fault really. It was the fault
of American steel. The N. A. M. Co. had either to import German and
English steel to make the wire the nail machines ate or import the wire
itself.
And now for the first time John turned his mind to this great problem
of steel. Six or eight Bessemer steel plants had been built in the
United States under the English patents at enormous cost and every one
had failed. They could produce steel all right, and do it with one melt
from the iron ore, which was what they were after. The trouble was that
the steel was never twice the same. Its quality and nature varied. The
process was treacherous. There were those who said it simply could
not be adapted to American ores; that the only way this country could
produce true steel was the old long way, which made it much more
expensive than iron.
One night John recognized in the hotel lobby a figure that tormented
both the flesh and the spirit of Pittsburgh,--the flesh by wasting
its substance and the spirit by keeping always before it a riddle it
had not solved. He was a frail, bent little man, not yet old, with a
long thin mustache and a pleasing, naïve voice that had cost several
iron men their entire fortunes. Wood Street bankers wished he were
dead or had never been born. This was Tillinghast, metallurgist and
engineer, who had already designed and constructed four steel plants
that were a total loss. He knew in each case what was wrong,--knew it
in the instant of failure,--and begged to be permitted to make certain
changes. Very simple changes. Quite inexpensive. He would guarantee
the result. But as his changes at length involved rebuilding the whole
plant and as the last of the steel was still like the first his backers
sickened and turned away.
“What’s the matter, Tillinghast?” John asked. “You look so horribly
down.”
It was a long story, incoherent with unnecessary details, technical
exposition, expostulation and argument aside, told at the verge of
tears. A steel plant on the river, opposite Allegheny,--one that
everyone knew about,--had been under trial for a week. It was almost
right. It needed only one correction. They were actually touching the
magic. Yet his backers were on the point of throwing it up in disgust.
“No more money, maybe,” said John.
“Fifty thousand more,” said Tillinghast. “I guarantee the result if
they will spend fifty thousand more. They have spent eight times that
already.” His idea of money in large sums was childlike.
John heard for a while, then heard without listening, while Tillinghast
went on and on, thinking to himself out loud. On leaving him John was
in a state of vague apprehension. Afterward he could not remember
whether he had said goodnight.
All that he had ever heard, here and there, first from Thaddeus and
then from others about his father’s fateful steel experiment at New
Damascus came back to him, fused and made a vivid picture. That was
not so strange. But he seemed to know more than he had ever heard. He
seemed to be directly remembering,--not what he had learned from others
but the experience itself as if it had been his own. He saw it. And
presently in another dimension he saw the steel age that was coming.
His imagination unrolled it as a panorama. He understood what it meant
to increase one hundred fold the production of that metallic fibre of
which there could never be enough.
The next morning he went to look at the abandoned steel plant. It was
cast on a large scale. Quite four hundred thousand, as Tillinghast
said, must have been spent on it.
“They do it in Europe,” he kept saying to himself. “We can do it here.
There is only some little trick to be discovered.”
Later in a casual way he made contact with the owners. They were eager
to get anything back. On the faintest suspicion that he might be
soft-minded, they overwhelmed him with offers to sell out. At last he
got it for nothing. That is, he agreed to take it off their hands flat
and go on with Tillinghast’s experiment. If success were achieved their
interest in it should be exactly what they had already spent on the
plant; if not, he would owe them nothing and lose only what he himself
put in.
North American Manufacturing Company stock was now valuable. He took a
large amount of it to Slaymaker for a loan.
“What’s up now?”
John told him shortly, knowing what to expect. Slaymaker’s phobia was
steel. The word made him mad. He had once lost a great deal of money
in that experimental process. He snatched the stock certificates out
of John’s hands, put a pin through them and tossed them angrily into a
corner of his desk.
“I knew it. I knew it. All right. You can have the money. But I warn
you. You’ll never see that stock again. You’ll be bankrupt a year from
now.”
Nothing else was said.
Tillinghast treated John not as if John had adopted him but as if
he had adopted John and his attitude about the steel plant was one
of sacrosanct authority. He was really a cracked pot. It took six
months to make the changes. Then they fired up. The first run was good
steel, the second was poor, the third was good and the fourth was bad.
They got so far that the steel made from the raw iron of one furnace
would always be good. When they took the molten iron from two or more
furnaces successively the results went askew again. Tillinghast cooed
when the steel was good and was silent when it was bad. He could not
deny that they were baffled and John had sunk two-thirds of everything
he owned.
Thane was a constant onlooker. He looked hard and saw everything.
“It ain’t what you do to it afterward,” he said, breaking a long
silence. “That’s the same every time. It’s back of that. It’s in the
furnace.”
“Well, suppose it is,” said John. “What are you going to do about it?”
“Mix it,” said Thane.
“Mix what?”
“The molten iron from the blast furnaces before it goes to the steel
converter.”
“What will you mix it with?”
“With itself,” said Thane. “Ore’s various, ain’t it? Pig iron as comes
from ore is various, ain’t it? That’s why you puddle it so as to make
it all the same, like wrought iron’s got to be. Here you take a run of
stuff from this furnace ’n one from that furnace ’n it ain’t the same
because it ain’t been puddled, but you run it into that converter thing
’n think it’s got to come out all one kind of steel. It won’t.”
“How can you mix six or eight tons of molten iron?” John asked.
“There’s got to be some way,” Thane answered.
Tillinghast was deaf. It didn’t make sense to John. Yet Thane kept
saying, “Mix it,” until they were sick of hearing him, and the steel
persisted in being variable until they were desperate.
“Well, mix it then,” said John. “If you know how, mix it.”
Thereupon Thane built the first mixer,--an enormous, awkward tank
or vat resting on rollers that rocked and jigged the fluid, blazing
iron. Now they started the blast furnaces again and molten iron in
equal quantities from all three was run into this mixer and sloshed
around. From there it went to the converter. After two or three trials
they began to get and continued to get steel that was both good and
invariable.
And that was Eureka!
They tried the steel in every possible way and it was all that steel
should be and is. They fed it to those fastidious German wire drawing
machines and they loved it. Never again would it be necessary to import
German or English steel to make wire, or German wire to make nails.
They had it.
John formed a new company. Slaymaker came in. The men from whom John
had taken the plant got stock for their interest. A large block was
allotted to Thane for his mixer. John had the controlling interest. It
was named the American Steel Company. But John and Thane between them
spoke of it as the Agnes Plant.
“Let’s call it that for luck,” said John.
Thane made no reply. However, the next time he referred to it he called
it so.