The technical detail of steel-making is exceedingly interesting to
students of applied science, but it _is_ detail, the key to which
is in the process mentioned; the forcing of a stream of air through a
molten mass of iron. The "converter" is a huge pitcher-shaped vessel,
hung upon trunnions so as to be tilted, and it is usual to admit through
these trunnions, by means of a continuing pipe, the stream of air. The
converters may contain ten tons or more of liquid metal at one time,
which mass is converted from iron into steel at one operation.

Forty-five years ago, or less, works that could turn out fifty tons of
iron in a day were very large. Now there are many that make _five
hundred tons_ of steel in the same time. Then, nearly all the work
was done by hand, and men in large numbers handled the details of all
processes. Now it would be impossible for human hands and strength to do
the work. The steel-mill is, indeed, the most colossal combination of
Steam and Steel. There are tireless arms, moved by steam, insensible
alike to monstrous strains and white heat, which seize the vast ingots
and carry them to and fro, handling with incredible celerity the masses
that were unknown to man before the invention of the Bessemer process.
And all these operations are directed and controlled by a man who stands
in one place, strangely yet not inappropriately named a "pulpit," by
means of the hand-gear that gives them all to him like toys.

No one who has seen a steel-mill in operation, can go away and really
write a description of it; no artist or camera has ever made its
portrait, yet it is the most impressive scene of the modern, the
industrial, world. There is a "fervent heat," surpassing in its
impressions all the descriptions of the Bible, and which destroys all
doubt of fire with capacity to burn a world and "roll the heavens