We had a pleasant, light brown chocolaty slag, that day, which meant
good iron. When the metal runs out with large white speckles, she has
too much sulphur; when she smokes, you'll get good iron.
The other day they had too large a load of ore for the coke and stone in
her.
"Sledge!" yelled the keeper.
A cinder-snapper brought up two, and held the bar while the keeper and
first-helper sledged. They worked well, and I watched with fascination
the hammer head whirl dizzily, and land true at the bar.
At last the liquid slag broke through, jet-black as if it were molten
coal, flowing thickly down the clay spout. The clay notch was hammered
and eaten away, and had to be remade.
I watched the stove-tender on Number 7 as he opened the cold-air valve.
His motions were exactly calculated--the precise blow, to an ounce, to
loosen that wedge.
"How long have you been stove-tender?" I asked.
"Ten years," he said.
"Go down to the stockroom and tell the skip-man, one more coke," said
McLanahan.
I was glad to get a glimpse of that part of the blast-furnace operation.
Gondola cars bring up ore and the other ingredients of blast-furnace
digestion, and run over tracks with gaps between the sleepers. The cars,
by means of their collapsible bottoms, drop the loads down through, and
the material falls into an underground "stockroom."
I entered it by climbing down two ladders, and found the skip-man at the
base of one of the endless chains. The chamber had the appearance of a
mine gallery de luxe. I looked at the tons of ore moving upward neatly,
efficiently. What an incalculable saving of labor and time, this endless
chain affair with its continually moving boxes, over the old manner of
hoisting painfully, in few-pound lots, by hand!