imperfect in plan, rude in structure, uncouth and clumsy as to machinery, yet these primitive works produced metal, albeit small in quantity (eight to ten tons per week), of a quality that has never been excelled by the colossal furnaces and forges of this day and generation. The progress of improvement in those early days was slow, painful, and uncertain. Steam and Electricity, twin sons of modern civilization, were unborn, and the mechanic arts only represented what was possible to be accomplished by
Fig. 9.—Old Furnace on the Conemaugh.
the skill and muscular energy of men and animals. The wonder-working mechanisms now known as "machine-tools" were unimagined, and men wrought laboriously, by dint of the acute eye, cunning hand, strong arm, and stalwart courage, at subduing the savagery of a continent.
In presence of so many obstacles, and having such plentiful lack of nearly everything that modern engineers and artisans would regard as indispensable, the failure of the pioneer American sons of Vulcan would have occasioned no surprise, and their triumphant success is therefore all the greater wonder.
Thus far we have spoken chiefly of the furnaces and apparatus used in colonial times for the production of cast iron in its three forms of "sowe iron," "pig iron,"[1] and "castings," and have
- ↑ Pig iron is usually in the form of roughly semi-cylindrical masses about two and one half feet in length, and weighing in the vicinity of one hundred pounds each. These
