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but single-track roads have been double-tracked, while some roads have increased their trackage to three, four, or five tracks, in heavy traffic territory. All this betterment work gives tonnage to the steel mills.

In 1875 we first passed the English pig-iron production and turned out twice as much as Germany. Two years later, President Harrison said we were at the height of our prosperity. The reaction came the next year, the development of the steel industry in this country was momentarily checked, and England took again, but for the last time, her ancient position as the world's greatest iron-producer. But, with this country's indorsement of the gold standard, in 1896, there began another period of prosperity, the most remarkable in the world's history. The American pig-iron production increased at a tremendous rate. In 1896 our output was less than nine million tons. Four years later it approached fourteen million tons, and in the next year, the year of J. Pierpont Morgan's consolidation of more than half the steel mills of the country into the United States Steel Corporation, it nearly reached the sixteen-million-ton mark, or, for the first time, as much as England and Germany combined.

It was not so much the overproduction of iron as the overspeculation in securities that caused the setback of 1903 and 1904 and resulted in a decline in the pigiron output from eighteen million tons, in 1903, to sixteen million five hundred thousand tons, in 1904. The halt in the country's industrial progress was again only momentary. In the summer of 1904 confidence returned, after the investing public had recovered from its attack of acute financial indigestion, and the steel mills were soon working to the limit of their capacity. In 1905 the pig-iron output reached the enormous total of twenty

two million tons, and by the end of January our blastfurnace capacity became nearly thirty million tons a year, or not far from one hundred thousand tons a day.

From the iron mines at the head of the Great Lakes to the blast furnaces at the meeting of the Allegheny and the Monongahela it is more than a thousand miles by lake and rail, but in the Pittsburg district is a raw material almost as important to the steel industry as iron ore itself, and that is coal. From soft coal is made coke, and for every ton of ore that goes into the blast furnace there is added half a ton of coke. Of the twenty-five to thirty million tons of coke produced in this country in a year, more than half comes from the thirty thousand coke ovens in the Connellsville region, in Western Pennsylvania.

The iron industry located itself naturally around Pittsburg, because it was the center of the bituminous coal country, and the early iron ore came from the Cornwall mines in Pennsylvania. We have records of ore from these famous mines as early as 1740, and in 1786 the legislature of Pennsylvania lent a Mr. Humphries £300 for five years to further his project of making steel "as good as in England.”

More than a hundred years after the opening of the Cornwall mines, iron was found at the head of the Great Lakes, a thousand miles away. The blast furnaces and rolling mills could not move up to the Lake Superior region, and, even had they done so, they would have left the coal of Pennsylvania behind. The ore had to be brought down the lakes to the coal regions. The lake ore seemed, at first, a long way off, and, during the ten years intervening between the discovery of the Cleveland mines and the Civil War, the shipments never reached seventy thousand tons in a year. Not until after the introduction from England of the Bessemer steel-con

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verter, at the end of the war, the lake ore began to be brought down in any quantity. By 1870 about onefourth of the iron ore of the country was being taken out of the Lake Superior mines.

The cheapening of the cost of transporting ore from the mines at the head of the lakes to the blast furnaces, a thousand miles away in Pittsburg, is one of the factors that has given this country preeminence in the steel industry. When we began rolling Bessemer rails, in the late 60's, it cost more to carry ore from Marquette to Ohio than the ore is now sold for. In the old days the ore was mined and loaded on cars by human labor, hauled to the docks in small trainloads, put aboard one-thousandton sailing vessels by means of wheelbarrows, and unloaded again by human labor at Ohio ports. Before the first "Soo" canal was dug, the ore had to be rehandled at the Portage, between Lake Superior and Lake Huron, and taken across on a railway. In the first years of the lake ore trade, the ore at the Portage was hauled across on a strap railroad in little cars drawn by a horse.

As late as 1866 the freight rate on ore from Marquette to Ohio ports varied from $3 to $6.25 á ton. Now the rate is seventy-five cents a ton or less. Power-driven shovels and loading and unloading machines, and big cars, locomotives, and ships have revolutionized the lake transportation of ore. At the mines in Michigan and Minnesota, and along the shores of Lake Superior, a fifty-ton steel car is loaded in three minutes in eight thrusts of a giant steam shovel. The long ore trains, carrying a thousand tons of ore to the train, are hauled to the marvelous ore docks at Duluth, Two Harbors, Superior, Ashland, Escanaba, and Marquette by onehundred-and-thirty-ton engines. There the cars empty through drop bottoms into steel steamships. The "Au

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