still there were difficulties quite enough to keep john’s mind enthralled. the steel wire nails soon got the n. a. m. co. out of the woods. but as the german nail making machines would devour nothing but german wire their food had to be imported by the shipload. the german wire drawing machines, acquired along with the nail making machines, miserably failed when they were asked to reduce american steel to the form of wire. that was not their fault really. it was the fault of american steel. the n. a. m. co. had either to import german and english steel to make the wire the nail machines ate or import the wire itself.
and now for the first time john turned his mind to this great problem of steel. six or eight bessemer steel plants had been built in the united states under the english patents at enormous cost and every one had failed. they could produce steel all right, and do it with one melt from the iron ore, which was what they were after. the trouble was that the steel was never twice the same. its quality and nature varied. the process was treacherous. there were those who said it simply could not be adapted to american ores; that the only way this country could produce true steel was the old long way, which made it much more expensive than iron.
[229]
one night john recognized in the hotel lobby a figure that tormented both the flesh and the spirit of pittsburgh,—the flesh by wasting its substance and the spirit by keeping always before it a riddle it had not solved. he was a frail, bent little man, not yet old, with a long thin mustache and a pleasing, na?ve voice that had cost several iron men their entire fortunes. wood street bankers wished he were dead or had never been born. this was tillinghast, metallurgist and engineer, who had already designed and constructed four steel plants that were a total loss. he knew in each case what was wrong,—knew it in the instant of failure,—and begged to be permitted to make certain changes. very simple changes. quite inexpensive. he would guarantee the result. but as his changes at length involved rebuilding the whole plant and as the last of the steel was still like the first his backers sickened and turned away.
“what’s the matter, tillinghast?” john asked. “you look so horribly down.”
it was a long story, incoherent with unnecessary details, technical exposition, expostulation and argument aside, told at the verge of tears. a steel plant on the river, opposite allegheny,—one that everyone knew about,—had been under trial for a week. it was almost right. it needed only one correction. they were actually touching the magic. yet his backers were on the point of throwing it up in disgust.
“no more money, maybe,” said john.
“fifty thousand more,” said tillinghast. “i guarantee the result if they will spend fifty thousand more.[230] they have spent eight times that already.” his idea of money in large sums was childlike.
john heard for a while, then heard without listening, while tillinghast went on and on, thinking to himself out loud. on leaving him john was in a state of vague apprehension. afterward he could not remember whether he had said goodnight.
all that he had ever heard, here and there, first from thaddeus and then from others about his father’s fateful steel experiment at new damascus came back to him, fused and made a vivid picture. that was not so strange. but he seemed to know more than he had ever heard. he seemed to be directly remembering,—not what he had learned from others but the experience itself as if it had been his own. he saw it. and presently in another dimension he saw the steel age that was coming. his imagination unrolled it as a panorama. he understood what it meant to increase one hundred fold the production of that metallic fibre of which there could never be enough.
the next morning he went to look at the abandoned steel plant. it was cast on a large scale. quite four hundred thousand, as tillinghast said, must have been spent on it.
“they do it in europe,” he kept saying to himself. “we can do it here. there is only some little trick to be discovered.”
later in a casual way he made contact with the owners. they were eager to get anything back. on the faintest suspicion that he might be soft-minded, they overwhelmed him with offers to sell out. at last[231] he got it for nothing. that is, he agreed to take it off their hands flat and go on with tillinghast’s experiment. if success were achieved their interest in it should be exactly what they had already spent on the plant; if not, he would owe them nothing and lose only what he himself put in.
north american manufacturing company stock was now valuable. he took a large amount of it to slaymaker for a loan.
“what’s up now?”
john told him shortly, knowing what to expect. slaymaker’s phobia was steel. the word made him mad. he had once lost a great deal of money in that experimental process. he snatched the stock certificates out of john’s hands, put a pin through them and tossed them angrily into a corner of his desk.
“i knew it. i knew it. all right. you can have the money. but i warn you. you’ll never see that stock again. you’ll be bankrupt a year from now.”
nothing else was said.
tillinghast treated john not as if john had adopted him but as if he had adopted john and his attitude about the steel plant was one of sacrosanct authority. he was really a cracked pot. it took six months to make the changes. then they fired up. the first run was good steel, the second was poor, the third was good and the fourth was bad. they got so far that the steel made from the raw iron of one furnace would always be good. when they took the molten iron from two or more furnaces successively the results went askew again. tillinghast cooed when the steel was[232] good and was silent when it was bad. he could not deny that they were baffled and john had sunk two-thirds of everything he owned.
thane was a constant onlooker. he looked hard and saw everything.
“it ain’t what you do to it afterward,” he said, breaking a long silence. “that’s the same every time. it’s back of that. it’s in the furnace.”
“well, suppose it is,” said john. “what are you going to do about it?”
“mix it,” said thane.
“mix what?”
“the molten iron from the blast furnaces before it goes to the steel converter.”
“what will you mix it with?”
“with itself,” said thane. “ore’s various, ain’t it? pig iron as comes from ore is various, ain’t it? that’s why you puddle it so as to make it all the same, like wrought iron’s got to be. here you take a run of stuff from this furnace ’n one from that furnace ’n it ain’t the same because it ain’t been puddled, but you run it into that converter thing ’n think it’s got to come out all one kind of steel. it won’t.”
“how can you mix six or eight tons of molten iron?” john asked.
“there’s got to be some way,” thane answered.
tillinghast was deaf. it didn’t make sense to john. yet thane kept saying, “mix it,” until they were sick of hearing him, and the steel persisted in being variable until they were desperate.
“well, mix it then,” said john. “if you know how, mix it.”
[233]
thereupon thane built the first mixer,—an enormous, awkward tank or vat resting on rollers that rocked and jigged the fluid, blazing iron. now they started the blast furnaces again and molten iron in equal quantities from all three was run into this mixer and sloshed around. from there it went to the converter. after two or three trials they began to get and continued to get steel that was both good and invariable.
and that was eureka!
they tried the steel in every possible way and it was all that steel should be and is. they fed it to those fastidious german wire drawing machines and they loved it. never again would it be necessary to import german or english steel to make wire, or german wire to make nails. they had it.
john formed a new company. slaymaker came in. the men from whom john had taken the plant got stock for their interest. a large block was allotted to thane for his mixer. john had the controlling interest. it was named the american steel company. but john and thane between them spoke of it as the agnes plant.
“let’s call it that for luck,” said john.
thane made no reply. however, the next time he referred to it he called it so.
