The Open-Hearth Furnace: A Chapter in Steel. Ii

I

PETE, the Russian melter, came out on the gallery behind the furnaces, and I could see by the way he looked the pit over, that he was picking a man for furnace work. Somebody had stayed out, and they were short a helper. He looked at the fat workman beside me, and then grunted.

This was the third time he had picked Russians, in preference to the rest of us, who were Serbian, Austrian, and American.

The next day I tackled Pete.

‘How about a chance on the floor?’ I said, standing in front, of him to keep him from lurching away.

‘Y’ get chance ’miff, don’ worry.’

‘If I can’t get. a crack at learning this game here in Bouton, I ’ll go somewhere where I can,’ I said, boiling up a little.

Dick Reber, the Pennsylvania-Dutch melter, came up.

‘I want a chance on the floor,’ I said.

‘All right, boy, go on Number 7 today.’

I made all speed to Number 7. ‘ Is he doing that,’ I thought, as I picked up my shovel, ‘because I ’m an American?’

I looked up and saw the big ladlebucket pouring hot metal into a spout in the furnace-door, accompanied by a great swirl of sparks and flame.

‘At last,’ I said, ‘I ’m going to make steel.’

The steel starts in as ‘scrap’ — scrap from anywhere in America — anything from a broken casting, the size of a man’s trunk, down to corroded pipe, or strips the thickness of your nail salvaged in bales. The overhead crane gathers them all from arriving flat cars by a magnet as big as a cart wheel; the pieces of steel leap to meet the magnet with apparent joy, stick stoutly for a moment, and fall released into iron charge-boxes. By trainloads they pass out of the stockyard and into the mill, where the track runs directly in front, of the furnace-doors. There the charging machine dumps them quickly into the hot belly of the furnace. Old furnaces, charged by hand, hold about ten tons; the new, 250 to 300 tons a ‘heat.’

That is the first step in starting to make a ‘heat,’ which means to cook a bellyful to the proper temperature for steel, ready to tap into a ladle for ingotmaking. Next comes making ‘frontwall.’ No self-respecting brick, clay, or any other substance can stand a load of metal up to steel-heat, without being temporarily relined right away for the next draft of flame. We do that relining by shoveling dolomite into the furnace. The official, known as secondhelper, wields a Brobdingnag spoon, about two inches larger than a dinnerplate and fifteen feet long, which a couple of third-helpers, among them myself, fill with dolomite. By use of the spoon, the second-helper spreads the protect ion over the front-wall.

But the sporting job on the openhearth comes a bit later, and consists in making ‘back-wall.’ Then all the men on the furnace and all the men on your neighbor’s furnace form a dolomite line, and, marching in file to the open door, fling their shovelfuls across the flaming void to the back-wall. It’s not a beginner’s job. You must swing your weapon through a wide arc, to give it ‘wing,’ and the stuff must hop off just behind the furnace-door, and rise high enough to top the scrap between and land high. I say it’s not a beginner’s job, though it’s like golf — the first shovelful may be a winner. What lends life to the sport is the fact that everybody ’s in it: it’s the team play of the open-hearth, like a house-raising in the community.

Another thing giving life is the heat. The mout h of the furnace gapes its widest, and you must hug close in order to get the stuff across. Every man has deeply smoked glasses on his nose when he faces the furnace. He ’s got to stare down her throat, to watch where the dolomite lands. It ’s up to him to ‘ place’ his stuff — the line is n’t marching through the heat, to warm its hands. Here’s a tip I did n’t savvy on my first back-wall. Throw your left arm high at the end of your arc, and in front, of your face; it will cut the heat an instant, and allow you to sec if you have ‘ placed ’ without flinching. It ’s really not brawn, — making back-wall, — but a nimble swing and a good eye, and the art of not minding heat.

After that is done, she can cook for a while, and needs only watching. The first-helper gives her that., passing up and down every few minutes to look through the peepholes in her furnacedoors. He puts his glasses down on his nose, inspects the brew, and notices if her stomach’s in good shape. If the bricks get as red as the gas flame, she’s burning the living lining out of her. But he keeps the gas blowing in her ends as hot as she ’ll stand it without a holler. On either end the gas, and on top of it the air. The first-helper, who is cook of the furnace, makes a proper mixture out of them. The hotter he can let the gas through, the quicker the brew is cooked, and the more ‘tonnage’ he ’ll make that week.

‘Get me thirty thousand pounds,’ said the first-helper when I was on the furnace that first night. Fifteen tons of molten metal! I was undecided whether to bring it in a dipper or in my hat. But it’s not more than running upstairs for a handkerchief in the bureau. You climb to a platform near the blower, where the stuff is made, and find a man there with a book. Punch him in the arm and say, ‘Thirty thou’ for Number 7.’ He will swear moderately and blow a whistle. You return to the furnace, and on your heels follows a locomotive dragging a bucket—the ladle — ten feet high. Out of it arise the fumes of your fifteen tons of hot metal. The overhead crane picks it up and pours it through a spout, into the furnace. As it goes in, you stand and direct the pouring. The craneman, as he tilts or raises the bucket, watches you for directions, and you stand and make gentle motions with one hand, thus easily and simply controlling the flux of the fifteen tons. That part of the job always pleased me. It was like modeling Niagara with a wave of the hand. Sometimes he spills a little, and there is a vortex of sparks, and much molten metal in front of the door to step on.

She cooks in anywhere from ten hours to twenty-four. The record on this floor is ten, which was put over by Jock. He has worked on most, of the openhearths from Scotland to Colorado.

When it’s time for a test, the firsthelper will take a spoon about the size of your hand, and scoop up some of the soup. But not to taste. He pours it into a mould, and when the little ingot is cool, breaks it with a sledge. Everyone on the furnace, barring myself, looks at the broken metal and gives a wise smile. I ’m not enough ot a cook. They know by the grain if she has too much carbon, or needs more, or is ready to tap, or is n’t. With too much carbon, she ’ll need a ‘jigger,’ which is a few more tons of hot metal to thin her out.

That’s about the whole game — abbreviated — up to tap-time. It takes on an average of eighteen hours, and your shift may be anything, from ten to twenty-four. Of course, there are details like shoveling in fluor spar to thin out the slag. Be sure you clear the breast of the furnace, with your shovelful, when you put that into her. Spar eats the dolomite as mice eat cheese.

At intervals the first-helper tilts the whole furnace forward, and she runs out at the doors, which is to drain off the slag that floats on top of the brew. But after much weariness it’s tap-time and the ‘big boss’ comes to supervise.

Move aside the shutters covering the round peepholes on her doors, at this time, and you ’ll see the brew bubbling away like malt breakfast-food ready to eat. But there’s a lot of testing before serving. When it is ready, you run to the place where you hid your little flat manganese shovel, and take it to the gallery behind the furnace, near t he tapspout. There you can look down upon the ‘pit,’ strewn with those giant bucket-ladles, and sprinkled with the cleanup men who gather painfully all that ’s spilled or slobbered of hot metal and saved for a second melting. The whole is swept by the omnipresent crane.

At a proper and chosen instant, the senior melter shouts, ‘Heow!’ and the great furnace rolls on its side on a pair of mammoth rockers, and points a clay spout into the ladle, held for it by the crane. Before the hot soup comes rushing, the second-helper has to ‘ ravel her out.’ ‘Raveling’ is poking a pointed rod up the tap-spout, till the stopping is prodded away. You never know when the desired, but terrific, result is accomplished. When it is, you retire just as you would from an exploding oil-well. The brew is loose. It comes out red and hurling flame. Into the ladle it falls, with a hiss and a terrifying ‘splunch.’

The firstand second-helpers immediately make matters worse. They stagger up with bags containing fine anthracite, and drop them into the mess. These have a most, damning effect. The flames hit the roof of the pit, and sway and curl angrily along the frail platform on which you stand. Some occult reasoning tells them how many of these bags to drop in, whether to make a conflagration or a moderate house-burning.

The melter waits a few minutes, and then shouts your cue. You and another helper run swiftly along the gallery to the side of the spout. At your feet is a pile of manganese, one of the heaviest substances in the world, and seeming heavier than that. It’s your job and your helper’s to put the pile into the cauldron. You ’re expected to get it in fast. You do.

There are almost always two ladles to fill, but you have a ‘spell’ between. When she’s tapped, you pick up a piece of sheet-iron and cover the spout with it. That ’s another job to warm frostbitten fingers.

One more step and the brew is an ingot. There are several tracks entering the pit, and at proper seasons a train of cars swings in, bringing the upright ingot moulds. They stand about seven feet high from their flats. When the ladle is full and slobbering a bit, the craneman swings her gingerly over the first mould. Level with the ladle’s base, and above the train of moulds, runs the pouring platform, oil which the ingotmen stand.

By means of rods, a stopper is released from a small hole in the bottom of the ladle. In a few seconds the stream fills a mould, and the attendant shuts off the steel like a boy at a spigot. The ladle swings gently down the line, and the proper measure of metallic flame squirts into each mould. A trainload of steel is poured in a few minutes.

But this is when all omens are propitious. It’s when the stopper-man has made no mistakes. But when rods jam and the stopper won’t stop, watch your step, and cover your face. That fierce little stream keeps coming, and nothing that the desperate men on the pouring plat form can do seems likely to stem it. Soon one mould is full — but the ladle continues to pour, with twenty tons of steel to go. It can’t be allowed to make a steel floor for the pit. It must get into those moulds. So the craneman swings her on to the next mould, with the stream aspurt. It’s like taking water from the teakettle to the sink with a punctured dipper. Half goes on the kitchen floor. But the spattering of molten metal is much more exciting. A few little clots affect the flesh like hot bullets. So, when the craneman gets ready to swing the little stream down the line, the workers on the platform behave like frightened fishes in a mill pond. Then, while the mould fills, they come back, to throw certain ingredients into the cooling metal.

These ingots, when they come as virgin steel from the moulds, are impressive things — especially on the night turn. Then each stands up against, the night air like a massive monument of hardened fire. Pass near them and see what colossal radiators of heat they are. Trainloads of them pass daily out of the pit to the blooming-mill. But my spell with them is done.

II

I stood behind the furnace, near the spout, and Nick, the second-helper, beside me, was yelling things in AngloSerbian into my face. He was a looselimbed, sallow-faced Serbian, with black hair under a green-visored cap, always on the back of his head. His shirt was torn on both sleeves and open nearly to his waist, and in the uncertain lights of the mill his chest and abdomen shone with sweat.

‘ Goddam you, what you think! Get me’ — a long blur of Serbian, here — ‘spout, quick mak’ a’ — more Serbian wit h tremendous volume of voice ‘ fit mace, see ? You get that-mud! ’

When a man says that to you with profound emotion, it seems insulting to say ‘What?’ But that was what I did.

‘All right, all right,’he said; ‘what the hell, me get myself all the work ’ — blurred here—‘son of a — third-helper — wheelbarrow, why don’ youquick now when I say!’

‘All right, all right, I ’ll do it,’ I said, and went away. I was never in my life so much impressed with the necessity of doing it. His language and gesture had been profoundly expressive — of what? I tried to concentrate on the phrases that seeped through emotion and Serbian into English. ‘Wheelbarrow’ — hang on to that; ‘mud’ — that’s easy: a wheelbarrow of mud. Good!

I got it at the other end of the mill opposite Number 5.

‘Don’t use that shovel for mud!’ said the second-helper on Number 4.

So I did n’t.

I wheeled back to the gallery behind Seven, and found Nick coming out at me. When he saw that hard-won mud of mine, I thought he was going to snap the cords in his throat.

‘Hell!’ he said, when articulation returned, ‘I tell you, get wheelbarrow dolomite, and half wheelbarrow clay, and pail of water, and look what you bring!’

So that was it — he probably said pail of water with his feet.

‘Oh, all right,’ I said, smiling like a skull, ‘I thought you said mud. I ’ll get it, I ’ll get it.’

This is amusing enough on the first day; you can go off and laugh in a superior way to yourself about the queer words the foreigners use. But after seven days of it, fourteen hours each, it gets under the skin, it burns along the nerves as the furnace heat burns along the amis, when you make back-wall. It suddenly occurred to me one day, after someone had bawled me out picturesquely for not knowing where something was that I had never heard of, that this was what every immigrant hunky endured; it was a matter of language largely, of understanding, of knowing the names of things, the uses of things, the language of the boss. Here was this Serbian second-helper bossing his third-helper largely in an unknown tongue, and the latter getting the full emotional experience of the immigrant. I thought of Bill, the pit boss, telling a hunky to do a clean-up job for him, and when the hunky said, ‘What?’ he turned to me and said, ‘Ain’t these hunkies dumb?’

Most of the false starts, waste motion, misunderstandings, fights, burnings, accidents, nerve-wrack, and desperation of soul would fall away if there were understanding — a common language, of mind as well as of tongue.

But then, I thought, all this may be because I’m oversensitive. I had this qualm till one day I met Jack. He was an old regular-army sergeant, a man about thirty. He had come back from fixing a bad spout. They had sledged it out — sledged through the steel that had crept into the dolomite and closed the tap-hole.

‘ Do you ever feel low ? ’ he said, sitting down on the back of a shovel. ‘Every once ’n while I feel the way I do now, like telling ’em to take their damn job, and — You sweat and burn yourself, and strain your guts out, and then they swear at you — that’s what gets my goat.’

I went out of the open-hearth shelter slowly, and watched the line — nearly a quarter of a mile long — of swinging dinner-buckets. Some were large and round, and had a place on top for coffee; some were circular and long; some were flat and square. I looked at the men. They were the day-shift coming in.

‘I have finished,’ I said to myself automatically; ‘I ’m going to eat and go to bed. I don’t have to work now.’

I looked at the men again. Most of them were hurrying; their faces carried yesterday’s fatigue and last year’s. Now and then I saw a man who looked as if he could work the turn, and then box a little in the evening for exercise. There were a few men like that. The rest made me think strongly of a man holding himself from falling over a cliff, with fingers that paralyzed slowly.

I stepped on a stone, and felt the place on my heel where the limestone and sweat had worked together to make a burn. I’d be hurrying in at five o’clock that, day, and they’d be going home. It was seven-twenty. That would be nine and a half hours from now. I had to eat twice, and buy a pair of gloves, and sew up my shirt, and get sleep before then. I live twenty minutes from the mill. If I walk home as fast as I can drive my legs, and bolt breakfast, seven hours is all I can work in before three-thirty. I ’ll have to get up then to get time for dinner, fixing up my shirt, and walking to the mill.

I wonder how long this night-shift of gray-faced men with different-sized dinner-buckets will be moving out toward the green gate, and the day-shift coming in — how many years?

The car up from the nail mill stopped, just before it dove under the railroad bridge.

‘I’m in luck.’

I suddenly had a vision of how the New York subway looked: its crush, its noise, its overdressed Jews, its speed, its subway smell. I looked around inside the clattering trolley-car. Nobody was talking. The car was filled for the most part with Slavs, a few Italians, and some negroes from the nail mill. Everyone, except two old men of unknown age, was under thirty-five. They held their buckets on their laps, or put them on the floor between their legs. Six or eight were asleep. The rest sat quiet, with legs and neck loose, eyes open, steady, dull, fixed upon nothing.

III

Another day went by, hewing cinders in the pit. I tried to figure to myself persuasive or threatening things I could say to the melters, to let me work on the floor. A shrewd-looking little man with moustachios worked near me.

‘Did you ever work on the floor?’ I asked.

‘Oh, yes,’ he said: ‘too damn much hot; to hell with the money!’

They pay you two cents more an hour on the floor. At twenty minutes to five I went upstairs to my locker. Dick Reber, senior melter, stopped me. ‘Need a man to-night; want to work?’ he said; ‘always short, you know, on this damn long turn.’

‘Sure,’ I said.

That was one way to get promoted, I thought, and wondered how I’d stand fourteen more hours on top of the ten I had had.

‘Beat it!’ yelled the melter.

Jack and I got our flat manganese shovels, and went on the run to the gallery. We were tapping at last. This fumaeeful had cooked twenty-two hours. Nick was kneeling on watersoaked bagging, on the edge of the hot spout. He dug out the mud in the taphole with a pointed rod, and sputtered oaths at the heat. Every few minutes the spout would burn through the bagging to his knees. He would get up, refold the bagging, and kneel again.

Finally the metal gurgled out, a small stream the size of two fingers. Nick dodged back, and it swelled to a sixinch torrent.

‘Heow! Crane!’

Pete Grayson had come out , and was bawling something very urgently at the pit crane. The ladle swung closer; we could feel the increased wave of heat.

He looked over at us, and held up two fingers. That meant that both piles of manganese t hat lay on the gallery next the crane were to be shoveled in.

‘Heow!’ yelled the melter.

Jack and I leaped forward to the manganese, and our shovels scraped on the iron gallery. I saw Jack slapping his head to put out a little fire that had started on the handkerchief wound round his neck. I slapped a few sparks that stung my right leg.

There was something queer about this heat. The soles of my feet — why in the devil should the gallery burn so! There was a blazing gas in the air — my nostrils seemed to flame as they took it in. This was different from most manganese shoveling. My face glowed all over in a single concentrated pain. What was it ? I saw Jack shoveling wildly in the middle of that second pile. We finished it in a panic.

‘ What was the matter with that damned ladle?’ I asked, as we got our breath in the opening between the furnaces.

‘Spout had a hole in the middle,’ he said: ‘ladle underneath, see!’

I did. The fire-clay of the spout had given way, and a hole forming in the middle let the metal through. That made it necessary, in order to catch the steel, to bring the ladle close, till part of it was under the platform on which we worked. The heat and gas from the hot steel in the ladle had been warming our feet, and rising into our faces.

‘Here’s a funny thing,’ I said, looking down. One of the sparks which had struck my trousers burned around, very neatly taking off the cuff and an inch or two of the leg. The thing might have been done with a pair of shears.

IV

I came out of the mill whistling, and feeling pretty much ‘on the crest.’ I’d worked their ‘damn long turn,’ and stood it. It was n’t so bad, except that ladle that got under the manganese. I ate a huge breakfast and climbed into bed with a smile on my lips.

The alarm clock had been ringing several minutes. I turned over to shut it off, and found needles running into all the muscles of my back. I struggled up on an elbow. I had a ‘ hell of a head.’ The alarm was still going.

I fought myself out of bed, and shut it off; stood up and tried to think. Pretty soon a thought came over me like an ache: it was ‘fourteen hours.’ That was beginning in fifty-five minutes, fourteen hours of back-walls — and hot ladles, and — Oh, hell! — I sat down again on the bed, and prepared to lift my feet back in.

Then I got up, and washed fiercely, threw on my clothes, and went downstairs, and out into the afternoon sun.

Down by the restaurant, I met the third-helper on Eight.

‘Long turn would n’t be so bad, if there were n’t no next day,’ he said, with a sort of a smile.

In the mill was a gang of malignant men; things all went wrong; everybody was angry and tired; their nerves made mistakes for them.

’I wish it were next Sunday!’ I said.

‘There ain’t any Sundays in this place,’ he returned. ‘Twenty-four hours ofi’ between two working-days ain’t Sunday.’

I thought that over. The company say they give you one day off every two weeks. But it’s not like a day off anywhere else. It’s twenty-four hours sandwiched between two workdays. You finish your night-week at seven Sunday morning, having just done a week of one twenty-four-hour shift, and six fourteens. You’ve got all the time from then till the next morning! Hurrah! How will you use it? If you do the normal thing, eat breakfast, and go to bed for eight hours — that brings you to five o’clock. Will you stay up all night? You’ve had your sleep. Yes, but there’s a ten-hour turn coming at seven. You go to bed at eleven, to sleep up for your turn. There’s an evening out of it! Hurrah! again. But who does the normal thing? Either you go on a tear for twenty-four hours, — you have it only twice a month, — or you sleep the twenty-four if the week’s been a bad one. Or — and this is common in Bouton — you get sore at the system and stay away a week.

‘Hey, you, get me a jigger, quick. Ten thou’.’

‘All right,’ I said, and shut off my mind for the day.

I usually had bad words and bad looks from ‘Shorty.’ Jack calls him ‘that dirty Wop.’ Late one afternoon he produced a knife, and fingered it suggestively while he talked. So I always watched him with all the eyes I had.

One day we had shoveled in manganese together over a hot ladle, and I noticed that he was in a bad mood. We finished, and leaned against the rail.

‘Six days more,’ he said very quietly.

I looked up, surprised at his voice.

‘’What do you mean?’

‘Six days more, this week, me quit this goddam job.’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Oh,-me lose thirteen pound this job, what the hell!’

‘What job will you get now?’

‘I don’t know, I don’t know; any job at all better,’ he said very bitterly.

Having adopted the quitting idea, six days were too much to endure. A little later, Jock was ready to make front-wall. He saw Shorty and said, ‘Get me that hook and spoon.’

Shorty stood and looked at Jock, with the utmost malignity in his face. ‘Get your — — hook and spoon yourself.'

Jock was greatly surprised, and returned, ‘Who the hell are you?’

Instantly Shorty snapped, ‘ Who the hell are you?'

And then he was fired.

This is the second ‘ quitting mad ’ I’ve seen. The feeling seems to be like the desire that gets piled up sometimes in the ranks of the army, to ‘tell ’em to go to hell.’ It’s the result of accumulated poisons of overfatigue, long hours, overwrought nerves, ‘the military discipline of the mills.’

At last, Saturday night. Everyone felt Sunday coming, with twenty-four hours of drunkenness or sleep alluringly ahead. The other shift had tapped the furnace at three o’clock. We might not tap again, and that was nice to think about. A front-wall and a hot back-wall we went through, as if it were better fun than billiards.

‘ Look out for me; I’ve got the de ’il in me,’ from Jock, Scotch first on Number 8.

I looked up, and the crazy fool had a spoon — they weigh over a hundred — between his legs, dragging it like a kid with a broomstick. As it bounced on the broken brick floor, he yelled like a man after a Hun.

‘Who’s the maun among ye, can lick a Scotchman?’ he cried, dropping the spoon to the floor.

‘Is this the best stuff you can show on Number 8?’ said Fred slowly. He dived for Jock’s waist, and drew it to him, though the Scotchman tried to break his grip with one of his hands, and with the other thrust off his opponent’s face. When Fred had him tight, he caught one of Jock’s straying arms, bent it slowly behind his back, and contrived a hammerlock.

‘You’re no gentleman,’ — in pain; ‘you ’re interruptin’ my work.’

Fred relaxed, and Jock jumped away.

‘Come over to a good furnace and fight it out!’ he yelled from a distance.

The charging machine in its perpetual machine tremolo shook past and stopped. George slid down from his seat, and came over to Number 8’s gang.

‘ Well, Fred, how in hell’s the world usin’ yer?’

‘Ask me that to-morrow.’

‘Well, guys, good night; I’m dead for forty minutes.’

He picked up a board some six feet long and about six inches in width. He laid himself carefully on it, and was sleeping inside of a minute.

I looked at him enviously for a few minutes. Suddenly it occurred to me that the board lay over a slit in the floor. It was the opening through which the pipes that attach to the gas-valve rise and fall. When gas is shifted from one end of the furnace to the other, the pipes emerge through the slit to a height several feet from the floor. Finally Fred made the same discovery, and a broad smile spread over his face. He continued to watch George, his grin deepening. At last he turned to the secondhelper.

‘Throw her over,’ he said.

Nick threw the switch. Slowly and easily the valve-pipes rose, lifting George and the head of his bed into the air perilously.

An immense and ill-controlled shout swelled up and got ready to burst inside the witnesses. George slept on, and the bed passed forty-five degrees. In another second it rolled off the side of the pipes, and George, scared, half-asleep, and much crumpled, rolled over on the furnace floor. It was several seconds before he recovered profanity.

The pure joy of that event spread itself over the entire shift.

I walked home with Stanley, the Pole. He always called me Joe, the generic name for non-hunky helpers.

‘Say, Joe,’ he said, as we came under the railroad bridge, ‘what ’s your name right?’

‘Charlie,’ I answered. ‘By the way, where have you been?’

‘Drunk, Charlie,’ he answered, smiling cheerfully.

‘Ever since I saw you in the pit?’

‘Three week,’ he stated, with satisfaction; ‘beer, whiskey, everyt’ing. What the hell, work all time goddam job, what the hell?’