Part 21

In the United States the charcoal process was used until a period much later than that of its abandonment in England, for the supplies of timber were very great and men who were clearing the land for use in agriculture were glad to turn the wood into charcoal and find a market for it. The simple charcoal furnace and forced draft by a simple process furnished the iron-making systems of the world until the early part of the nineteenth century. As a result there were hundreds of small furnaces, simply operated, and turning out small quantities of iron, in various sections of the United States. Meantime somebody discovered that if the air which was forced into the furnace was heated before being sent into the fire it would greatly increase the heat-giving power of a given quantity of charcoal or coke, and the hot blast became a part of the larger furnaces. Then it was found that the anthracite coal of the United States was hard enough to bear the weight of the ore and would produce a heat sufficiently intense to melt it; and so a great iron industry developed in the anthracite region of the United States. Then it was found that certain bituminous coal in western Pennsylvania would make excellent coke for the manufacture of iron, and the Connellsville coke became a successful competitor of anthracite coal, and later other cokes were also used. Later came the natural gas discoveries and they contributed to iron making and working. Meantime railways were built to carry the ore to 200 the coal or the coal to the ore or both the ore and coal to some convenient meeting point, and machinery began to be introduced for handling the ore and the coal along the railway and at the furnace. This led to the devising of other machinery for handling the iron after it left the furnace and of rollers for rolling the iron into bars and for giving it the sort of manipulation that the hammer of the earlier iron maker had given it when produced in the primitive furnaces. Then great deposits of iron ore, the richest known to the world, were discovered in the Lake Superior regions; and steam-driven machinery was devised to scoop it up from the beds in which it was found, place it in cars, which in turn carried it to the water’s edge, and dumped it into great receptacles from which it could run by the force of gravity into the hold of the steamer. Then other machinery operated by steam was devised to take it from the hold of the steamer and load it again on the cars which transported it to the furnace where it met the coal or the coke, produced, transported and handled by similar machine processes, and was turned into iron to also be handled by great machines.

While all this was happening--indeed long before the later happenings above mentioned--workers in iron had found that the pig iron coming from the furnaces contained so much carbon that it could not be successfully worked. So they managed to get rid of the carbon, by melting the iron in an open hearth and passing flames over it, and as the carbon is combustible it was gradually burned out. This made soft malleable iron, but not of the consistency to have the required strength or serve the purposes that are now served by steel. To bring it to the proper condition it was necessary to reintroduce a very small quantity of carbon so evenly that both the quantity and the distribution could be determined. This was done for many years by placing the bars of iron in a crucible or other closed receptacle 201 surrounded by charcoal, and subjecting them to intense heat for several hours or days. So the making of steel was a slow and expensive process until about the middle of the nineteenth century. Then Sir Henry Bessemer, an Englishman, discovered that by forcing air into the bottom of a great retort containing molten iron the oxygen of the air would combine with the carbon of the iron and in a few minutes the objectionable carbon would be all burned out, and that by then reintroducing in this molten mass of pure iron the required amount of carbon in the form of spiegel iron or ferro manganese, steel could be made much more cheaply and quickly than before. William Kelly, an American, also devised a similar process about the same time. Thus began the process of modern steel making, which has in a single half century increased tenfold the world’s consumption of steel and thus of iron, for a very large proportion of the iron now utilized in the world is transformed into steel before being applied to the service which it is to perform for men.

In all the processes by which iron and steel making have been transformed from the simple methods of a century or two centuries ago to the present system by which a single establishment may now make in a week or month or year as much iron or steel as the whole world then made in an equal length of time, machinery and capital have been the great causes of the development--machinery for digging iron and coal, for transporting them to the place of manufacture, for handling the material in the natural state, for handling it in the furnace, for handling it in the molten state, for rolling and shaping it after it passes from the molten state to that in which it begins to take the form of the finished product, and capital to purchase this machinery and the great quantities of material required. “The very richness of our resources,” says J. Russell Smith in The Story of Iron and Steel, “has made such a wealth of opportunity for occupation in the United States that labor is and has been scarce. As a consequence the 202 American iron industry has been driven over to a machine basis, and its very success has arisen from the fact that a scarcity of labor has compelled the introduction of machinery which has surpassed the dreams of its inventors. In the iron and steel industry of America man does little more than touch levers, while the balance is done by steam and electricity. Four large Bessemer converters, holding 15 or 20 tons of molten iron do their work by an air blast driven through the molten material by the force of an engine. The electric cranes swing the 20-ton charges and the heavy converters as easily as a schoolboy swings his dinner pail, and pours the new made steel into a metal mold which stands on a tram ready to take it to the hydraulic machine which draws the mold off the red-hot ingot. The manless way in which this great steel ingot is turned into a useful piece of steel never ceases to be a marvel. The great machines are seen but the plant seems to be deserted. Then there arises a rumble and roaring noise and the great piece of red-hot metal is seen to travel with all the independence of a serpent across a lot of black rollers and dive into the jaws of the rollers which squeeze it into flatter shape. Then it stops, turns over and dives again through the same rollers, which flatten it still more. After this has been repeated a few times you discover, standing on a high platform, a man or two pulling the levers which start the machinery of the six or seven thousand horsepower engines that drive the knowing rollers which are crushing and rolling the ingot into the shapes which man can use.”

“Perhaps the greatest difference between English and American steel works,” said an English writer on this subject, “is the absence of laborers in the American mills. The large and growing employment of propelling and directing machinery is responsible for this. In a mill rolling three thousand tons of rails in a day not a dozen men are to 203 be seen on the mill floor. To witness in such a mill the conversion in a half hour of a red-hot steel ingot weighing several tons into finished stamped steel rails ninety feet long, and all this perfectly, by the agency of unseen hands, is to gain new ideas of the possibilities of mechanism, of the subservience of matter to mind.”

These are some of the steps by which the systems of the manufacturing world have been, in the past 150 years, transformed from household work, or that of the small shop, into that of the factory--and the factory developed into enormous establishments through the investment of great sums of money in the purchase and installation of ever-improving machinery, more ingenious, more productive, more costly, but turning out more and better of the finished product with each new device and new investment of capital.

III. DEVELOPMENT OF THE FACTORY SYSTEM.

The inventions by which the manufacturing of the world was transformed from the household and the workshop to the great factory were the result of years, generations indeed, of study of conditions one by one as they arose. “No one of the inventions which were greatest in their effect,” says Hobson, “was in the main attributable to the effort or ability of a single man: each represented in its successful shape the addition of many successive increments of discovery; in most cases the successful invention was the slightly superior survivor of many similar attempts. This is the history of most inventions. The pressure of industrial circumstances directs the intelligence of many minds toward the comprehension of some single point of difficulty, the common knowledge of the age induces many to reach similar solutions, that solution which is slightly better adapted to the facts comes out victorious, and the inventor, purveyor or in some cases the robber is crowned as a great inventive genius.”

England was the earliest scene of the development of the factory 204 system, the bringing together of great buildings and centers of great masses of machinery operated by water or steam power and manned by great numbers of people--for however ingenious the machine a certain amount of human intelligence is necessary for its management and the conduct of the work which it is to perform. The reasons for the earlier development in England are not difficult to find. It had its colonies in all parts of the world, from which to draw the raw material and in which to market the manufactures, for it for many years discouraged or prohibited manufacture in the colonies; it had great shipping facilities for transporting its products to all parts of the world, and to bring raw material and food supplies to its workers at home; the ownership of its lands in great estates had a tendency to send to the cities and manufacturing centers that part of the population which under other circumstances would have employed itself in agriculture; the laboring population yielded more readily to the methods of the manufacturing interests than in other countries where trade guilds determined more definitely the occupations and methods of occupation of the working classes; and the comparative freedom from wars permitted a more rapid growth than that of other countries in which disturbances of this character were more frequent and more liable to frequency than in an insular country, England. “When Crompton’s mule, Cartwright’s power loom and Watt’s engines were transforming the industry of England,” says Hobson, “her continental rivals had all their energies absorbed in wars and political revolutions.”

Much of the wool and flax required in the English industries was produced at home. The colonies supplied the other fibers; the ships returning from their voyages to the colonies brought the raw silk; the absence of mountains to separate the country and the people into districts and classes enabled the interchange of labor and materials; the early development of rivers and canals gave cheap transportation; 205 the plentiful supply of coal encouraged the development of steam power; and the proximity of iron ore and coal aided in developing that other great manufacturing industry, iron and steel. Mr. Mulhall, the celebrated statistician, estimates the value of the manufactures of the United Kingdom in 1780 at 177 million pounds sterling, France 147 million, Germany 50 million, Austria 30 million, Russia, Italy and Spain 10 million each, and the United States 15 million. In 1896 he estimated the value of the manufactures of the same countries as follows: United Kingdom, 876 million pounds sterling; France, 596 million; Germany, 690 million; Austria, 328 million; Russia, 380 million; Italy, 190 million; Spain, 121 million; and the United States, 1,980 million. According to his estimate the gain in the 116 years, from 1780 to 1896, was: United Kingdom, from 191 to 876 million pounds sterling; France, from 115 to 596 million; Germany, from 50 to 690 million; Austria, from 30 to 328 million; Russia, from 10 to 380 million; and the United States, from 15 to 1,980 million. Mr. Mulhall’s estimates put the total value of the manufactures of continental Europe in 1780 at about 1½ times those of the United Kingdom; in 1896 at about 3 times those of the United Kingdom. His estimates put the value of manufactures in the United States in 1870 at about 3⅓ per cent that of all Europe; in 1896 at about 55 per cent that of all Europe.

It must not be supposed, however, that this transformation was, by any means, instantaneous. It was, in fact, a matter of slow growth, even in the older countries, and still more so in those countries which had not yet developed their natural products or their agricultural industries. In the case of the United States, for example, the transformation from the hand to the machine methods did not come until many years after that of the leading countries of Europe. The reason for this slow movement on the part of the United States is not 206 difficult to understand. Her people were chiefly engaged in agriculture, in felling the trees and clearing the lands in the eastern part of the country, and in opening farms on the prairies of the great West. Those who had capital to invest in enterprises other than that of agriculture gave their attention to the construction of methods of transportation, first, toll roads, stage coaches and pack trains, then, canals, and finally railways. This occupied the attention of the people of this new country for a generation after the people of Europe and especially England were engaged in developing their manufacturing industries.

So it is not surprising to see that Mr. Mulhall’s figures show that English manufactures in 1820 were nearly 6 times as much as those of the United States, and in 1840, 4 times as much as those of this country; and even in 1860, considerably exceeded our own. But in the next twenty-year period there came a great change. The Civil War in the United States, with the home demands in the manufacturing section, the North, rapidly developed the manufacturing industries, and the development thus created continued after the close of that unhappy period. So his figures indicate that in 1888, the next date which his table touches, that our manufactures were 1¾ times as much as those of the United Kingdom, and in 1896, 2¼ times as much in value as those of the United Kingdom and half as great as those of all Europe. Accepting the figures of Eugene Parsons, elsewhere referred to, for the European countries in 1904, and accepting the official figures of the United States for that same year, we find that the figures of the value of manufactures in the United States are nearly 3 times those accredited to the United Kingdom and but little less than those of all Europe.

It is proper to say, however, that these statements, whether of Mulhall, Parsons, or other authorities on this subject, are liable to be extremely misleading unless carefully and intelligently 207 considered. The reason of this is found chiefly in the fact that the official figures of the United States are made up on a materially different basis from those of the other countries in question. To be sure, the figures of the United States are official and therefore may be considered reliable as to the facts which they purport to show, but in fact some of the things which they purport to show are presumably quite different from those quoted for the other countries included in these estimates--for they can be only estimates for the other countries, since no country other than the United States takes a census of manufactures (England is taking one as this text is being issued, but has not yet completed it), and the figures quoted regarding their manufactures are necessarily estimates. Generally speaking, it may be said that the census of the United States includes certain articles which are not usually classified as manufactures in other countries, such as products of slaughtering, canning, the milling industry, etc. Aside from this it must also be remembered that the usually quoted figures of the United States’ manufactures include many duplications, due, as elsewhere explained, to the fact that the total so quoted is merely an aggregation of the product of all factories; and as the product of one factory often becomes the manufacturing material of another, its value is again reported by the manufacturer who reports merely the total value of his products. These duplications are so numerous and prevail in such important and costly articles that the census estimates the net or true value of our manufactures at but about two-thirds as much as the usually quoted figures of gross products. It would appear, therefore, that the usually quoted figures of “manufactures in the United States,” when compared with the estimate of manufacturing in other countries, should be reduced about one-third to make them properly comparable with those usually quoted for the other countries of the world. Even if this 208 were done, however, it would show the value of the United States’ manufactures probably about twice as great as those of the United Kingdom and probably little less than those of continental Europe.

Taking Mulhall’s figures for the other countries which he includes, as presented in a table on another page of this text, it will be seen that the chief growth in manufacturing during the 116 years covered by the table under consideration has occurred in the last third of the period. English manufactures, he says, grew from 177 million pounds sterling to 290 million in the 40-year period from 1780 to 1820; from 290 to 577 million in the next 40 years, from 1820 to 1860; and from 577 to 976 million in the 36 years from 1860 to 1896--a growth of 113 million pounds sterling in the first 40 years, of 287 million in the second 40 years, and of 400 million in the third period of 36 years. Germany showed a more rapid growth in the third period; the growth in the first 40-year period being from 50 million pounds sterling to 85 million; in the second 40-year period, from 85 to 310 million; and in the third period, of 36 years only, from 310 to 690 million. France has not made as rapid a gain as Germany, the figures showing her products in 1780, 147 million pounds sterling; in 1840, 220 million; in 1860, 380 million; and in 1896, 596 million.

The total of Mulhall’s table, including the somewhat over-estimated figures of the United States, and relating chiefly to the products of Europe and the United States, show total manufactures of all the countries named, in 1780, 480 million pounds sterling; in 1820, 865 million; in 1860, 2,404 million; and in 1896, 5,710 million, again indicating that the chief growth has occurred in the last third of the period under consideration, the period of transformation from the hand industries to those of machine production in conjunction with vast sums of capital and plentiful transportation facilities for collecting the raw material and distributing the finished product.

When we consider nations or groups of people and their use of modern 209 methods of manufacturing, we may properly say that the principal manufacturing sections of the world are western Europe and the United States, and that, as above indicated, the bulk of the world’s manufactures by the factory process are now produced in those two sections of the world. Manufacturing by machinery may perhaps be said to have originated in England, spreading thence to France, to Germany, and westward to the United States. More recently it has extended in a somewhat limited form into Canada in the west and India and Japan at the extreme east. India has utilized modern methods of manufacture, especially in cottons and certain other industries, for more than a score of years, while the one other country of the Orient which has as yet entered the field of machine manufacture, Japan, though somewhat later in adopting machine methods, has been more active and extended modern manufacturing to a much greater variety of industries than have the people of India.

While certain of the European countries were earlier in the manufacturing field than the United States, the larger population, the greater supply of natural materials, the larger supplies of fuel for cheap power, the ingenuity of the American workman, and the enormous domestic demand of an active and prosperous people, have brought the United States clearly to the head of the list of manufacturing nations. It may safely be said that the value of manufactures produced in the United States is approximately twice as great as that of any other manufacturing nation, and that the stated value of our manufactures is nearly as great as the estimated value of the manufactures of all Europe. The latest official figures on the value of the manufactures of the United States are those of the Census Bureau, which put the value of manufactures produced in the calendar year 1904, as recorded by the Census of 1905, at 16,867 million dollars, including in this an estimate of a little more than 2 210 billion dollars’ worth of manufactures classed as “mechanical and neighborhood industries,” which were included in all former census reports, but not recorded by the Census of 1905, which was by law merely a census of manufactures produced under “the factory system.”