Steel is an alloy of iron, which is not an uncommon metal. But humanity found making steel difficult, especially in quantity, and no one was able to do so until Englishman Henry Bessemer invented machinery that could produce steel by the ton. The result radically altered civilization—steel made the industrialized world. It made railroads, bridges, skyscrapers, cargo ships, battleships, manufacturing machines, electricity grids, food containers, cars, and trucks. Steel also made America a world power.
In the mid-1980s, the American steel industry was making headlines it loathed. Because of global competition and domestic blunders, steel mills were closing. Communities and politicians wailed and called for protective government policies. People wondered how the steel industry might reform itself.
I wondered about something else: how steel was actually made. So I researched the industry’s history and technology. The history was in books, but for the rest I descended into open pit iron mines, rode an iron-ore boat from Lake Superior to Cleveland, and spent time among blast furnaces, steel furnace mills, and rolling mills. Given the nation’s interest in the steel industry I expected my inquiry to find a backer. I was wrong, and none came forth … until now. I am grateful to Zenith Press in joining with me for explaining both how steel is made and something of its impact on the world.
The steel industry in the United States has changed since I spent time in the mills. It employs fewer persons. It composes less of the national economy. Open-hearth steel furnaces have largely given way to what are called basic oxygen furnaces (BOFs), which produce steel faster. Ingot rolling has largely given way to what are called continuous casters.
But much is the same; in fact, it can hardly be altered. Iron ore has to be mined in immense quantities and then smelted, mainly in gigantic blast furnaces that spew liquid iron out the bottom at 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit (lava from volcanoes being 1,300 to 2,200 degrees). The resulting pig iron, running almost as thin as water and too bright to look at directly, then has to be refined in steelmaking furnaces. Finally, the steel has to be shaped by rolling mills into I-beams, sheet metal, or other products. Never think of steelmaking as somehow “low tech”; it requires an immense sophistication of chemistry and physics, and it is spectacular.
The text that follows is mainly about integrated steel mills—ones that convert iron ore into steel, the kind of mills that built up America and continue to convert “undeveloped” countries into “developed” ones. Non-integrated mills feed on scrap steel rather than ore, and although these produce an increasing share of the nation’s steel, it is the integrated mills that are to the economy as rain is to the farmer: basic and necessary. Integrated mills are fewer now in America than during their heyday of the decades of two world wars. But they are the mother lode of steel, and steel continues to be the backbone of industrialized societies.