CHAPTER XVI. WRESTING A PRIZE FROM NATURE'S HAND

After melting down the pig-iron as quickly as possible, which took me

thirty minutes, there was a pause in which I had time to wipe the back

of my hand on the dryest part of my clothing (if any spot was still dry)

and with my sweat cap wipe the sweat and soot out of my eyes. For the

next seven minutes I “thickened the heat up” by adding iron oxide to the

bath. This was in the form of roll scale. The furnace continued in full

blast till that was melted. The liquid metal in the hearth is called

slag. The iron oxide is put in it to make it more basic for the chemical

reaction that is to take place. Adding the roll scale had cooled the

charge, and it was thick like hoecake batter. I now thoroughly mixed it

with a rabble which is like a long iron hoe.

“Snake bake a hoecake,

And lef' a frog to mind it;

Frog went away, an'

De lizard come and find it.”

Any lizard attracted by my hoecake would have to be a salamander--that

fire-proof creature that is supposed to live in flames. For the cooling

down of that molten batter didn't go so far but that it still would make

too hot a mouthful for any creature alive.

The puddler's hand-rag is one of his most important tools. It is about

the size of a thick wash-rag, and the puddler carries it in the hand

that clasps the rabble rod where it is too hot for bare flesh to endure.

The melted iron contains carbon, sulphur and phosphorus, and to get rid

of them, especially the sulphur and phosphorus, is the object of all

this heat and toil. For it is the sulphur and phosphorus that make the

iron brittle. And brittle iron might as well not be iron at all; it

might better be clay. For a good brick wall is stronger than a wall of

brittle iron. Yet nature will not give us pure iron. She always gives

it to us mixed with the stuff that weakens it--this dross and brimstone.

Nature hands out no bonanzas, no lead-pipe cinches to mankind. Man must

claw for everything he gets, and when he gets it, it is mixed with dirt.

And if he wants it clean, he'll have to clean it with the labor of

his hands. “Why can't we have a different system than this?” I heard a

theorist complain. “I'll bite,” I said. “Why can't we?” And I went on

boiling out the impurities in my puddle.

Man's nature is like iron, never born in a pure state but always mixed

with elements that weaken it. Envy, greed and malice are mixed with

every man's nature when he comes into the world. They are the brimstone

that makes him brittle. He is pig-iron until he boils them out of his

system. Savages and criminals are men who have not tried to boil this

dross out of their nature. Lincoln was one who boiled it out in the

fires of adversity. He puddled his own soul till the metal was pure, and

that's how he got the Iron Will that was strong enough to save a nation.

My purpose in slackening my heat as soon as the pig-iron was melted

was to oxidize the phosphorus and sulphur ahead of the carbon. Just as

alcohol vaporizes at a lower heat than water, so sulphur and phosphorus

oxidize at a lower heat than carbon. When this reaction begins I see

light flames breaking through the lake of molten slag in my furnace.

Probably from such a sight as this the old-time artists got their

pictures of Hell. The flames are caused by the burning of carbon

monoxide from the oxidation of carbon. The slag is basic and takes the

sulphur and phosphorus into combination, thus ending its combination

with the iron. The purpose now is to oxidize the carbon, too, without

reducing the phosphorus and sulphur and causing them to return to the

iron. We want the pure iron to begin crystallizing out of the bath like

butter from the churning buttermilk.

More and more of the carbon gas comes out of the puddle, and as it

bubbles out the charge is agitated by its escape and the “boil” is in

progress. It is not real boiling like the boiling of a teakettle. When

a teakettle boils the water turns to bubbles of vapor and goes up in the

air to turn to water again when it gets cold. But in the boiling iron

puddle a chemical change is taking place. The iron is not going up

in vapor. The carbon and the oxygen are. This formation of gas in the

molten puddle causes the whole charge to boil up like an ice-cream soda.

The slag overflows. Redder than strawberry syrup and as hot as the fiery

lake in Hades it flows over the rim of the hearth and out through the

slag-hole. My helper has pushed up a buggy there to receive it. More

than an eighth and sometimes a quarter of the weight of the pig-iron

flows off in slag and is carted away.

Meanwhile I have got the job of my life on my hands. I must stir my

boiling mess with all the strength in my body. For now is my chance to

defeat nature and wring from the loosening grip of her hand the pure

iron she never intended to give us.