At the end of every shift, when I walked toward the green mill-gate just past the edge of the power house, I could look over toward the blast-furnaces. There were five of them, standing up like mammoth cigars some hundred feet in height. A maze of pipes, large as tunnels, twisted about them, and passed into great boilers, three or four of which arose between each two furnaces. These, I learned, were "stoves" for heating the blast. I had had in mind for several days asking for a transfer to this interesting apparatus. There was less lifting of dead weight on the blast-furnace jobs than on the open-hearth. Besides, I wanted to see the beginning of the making of steel--the first transformation the ore catches, on its way toward becoming a steel rail, or a surgical instrument.
I went to see the blast-furnace superintendent, Mr. Beck, at his house on Superintendent's Hill.
"I'm working on the open-hearth," I said, "and want very much to get transferred to the blast-furnace. I intend to learn the steel business, and want to see the beginnings of things."
"I graduated from college," I said, "Yale College." Would that complicate the thing, I wondered, or get in the way? I wanted badly to sit down for a talk, tell him the whole story--army, Washington, hopes and fears; I liked him a good deal. But he was in a hurry--perhaps that might come on a later day.
We talked a little. He said I ought to come into the office for a while and "learn to figure burdens." I replied that I wanted the experience of the outside, and a start at the bottom.
"All right," he said, "I'll put you outside. Come Monday morning."
On Monday morning I followed the cindered road inside the gate for three hundred yards, turned off across a railroad track, and passed a machine-shop. The concrete bases of the blast-furnaces rose before me. Somebody had just turned a wheel on the side of one of the boiler-like "stoves," and a deafening blare, like tons of steam getting away, broke on my eardrums. I asked where the office was.
Up some steps, over a concrete platform, past the blaring "stove," I went, to the other side of the furnaces, and found there a flat dirty building--the office. Inside was Mr. Beck, who turned me over at once to Adolph, the "stove-gang boss."