Scanned from The Pittsburgh Survey, Vol. 3: The Steel Workers

This excerpt is from the introduction.

"THERE is a glamor about the making of steel. The very size of things—the immensity of the tools, the scale of production—grips the mind with an overwhelming sense of power. Blast furnaces, eighty, ninety, one hundred feet tall, gaunt and insatiable, are continually gaping to admit ton after ton of ore, fuel, and stone. Bessemer converters dazzle the eye with their leaping flames. Steel ingots at white heat, weighing thousands of pounds, are carried from place to place and tossed about like toys. Electric cranes pick up steel rails or fifty-foot girders as jauntily as if their tons were ounces. These are the things that cast a spell over the visitor in these workshops of Vulcan. The display of power on every hand, majestic and illimitable, is overwhelming; you must go again and yet again before it is borne in upon you that there is a human problem in steel production."