Americans realize that steel was used even less in 1865 than
aluminum is used today? Nearly all the men who have made the
American Steel Age--such as Carnegie, Phipps, Frick, and Schwab-
-are still living and some of them are even now extremely active.
Thirty-five years ago steel manufacture was regarded, even in
this country, as an almost exclusively British industry. In 1870
the American steel maker was the parvenu of the trade. American
railroads purchased their first steel rails in England, and the
early American steel makers went to Sheffield for their expert
workmen. Yet, in little more than ten years, American mills were
selling agricultural machinery in that same English town,
American rails were displacing the English product in all parts
of the world, American locomotives were drawing English trains on
English railways, and American steel bridges were spanning the
Ganges and the Nile. Indeed, the United States soon surpassed
England. In the year before the World War the United Kingdom
produced 7,500,000 tons of steel a year, while the United States
produced 32,000,000 tons. Since the outbreak of the Great War,
the United States has probably made more steel than all the rest
of the world put together. "The nation that makes the cheapest
steel," says Mr. Carnegie, "has the other nations at its feet."
When some future Buckle analyzes the fundamental facts in the
World War, he may possibly find that steel precipitated it and
that steel determined its outcome.

Three circumstances contributed to the rise of this greatest of
American industries: a new process for cheaply converting molten
pig iron into steel, the discovery of enormous deposits of ore in
several sections of the United States, and the entrance into the
business of a hardy and adventurous group of manufacturers and