tonnage of 1865. This enormous output was made in eighty-five "converters" owned by forty steel-works, which were distributed in eight States, viz., Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, and Colorado.
In 1772 the American manufacturers' price for steel was equal to $180.60 per gross ton. Steel of better quality can be purchased of the American manufacturer of to-day for thirty dollars per gross ton, a decline of eighty-four per cent in one hundred and nineteen years.
Twenty-seven years have elapsed since the first Bessemer steel was made in America, and that time, improved by the labors of skillful men from among our engineers, metallurgists, and chemists, has wrought wondrous changes in the construction and management of our furnaces, steel-works, and rolling-mills. To-day the tendency of all metallurgical manufacturing enterprises is toward concentration, not only in commercial and administrative affairs, but in their machinery as well. Giant engines, ponderous roll-trains, colossal hammers, crushing forging-presses, stalwart cranes, furnaces whose "fervent heat" destroys all doubt of the possibility of the fusion of worlds, ore piles rivaling mountains in magnitude; enormous stores of coal, suggesting yet more enormous mines; a vast entanglement of railways to all parts of the works; a water-supply sufficient for a town; miles of subterranean pipes bringing gaseous fuel to the roaring mills—are but the common details of a modern establishment for the manufacture of steel. Practices once condemned as criminal extravagances are now regarded as essential economies; things once deemed impossible by men of little faith are but the familiar occurrences of to-day. Buildings, machinery, methods, have all been touched by the spirit of progress. Science has become better acquainted with art, and art has a better appreciation of science, and their united forces are marching forever forward. Before their steady advance difficulties vanish, obstacles are surmounted, and seeming impossibilities are overcome; sound principles are established in place of empiricisms, and educated skill replaces laborious ignorance. Verily, "old things are passing away and all things are become new."
