File:Harper's New Monthly Magazine Volume 34 December 1886 to May 1887 (1887) (14783130435).jpg

Identifier: harpersnew72various (find matches)
Title: Harper's New Monthly Magazine Volume 34 December 1886 to May 1887
Year: 1887 (1880s)
Authors: various
Subjects:
Publisher: New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers
Contributing Library: Brigham Young University-Idaho, David O. McKay Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Brigham Young University-Idaho

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s slag with-out destruction of the carbon and siliconnecessary for the bloom of steel; and inone hour after its creation this may passto the rolling-mill. There is a better steel, perhaps, made bythe Martin-Siemens process, but it is moreexpensive. And tliere is a best, made bycrucibles, which is as much more expen-sive than the others as hand-work gener-ally is as compared wdth machine-work.The English—nearly the only nation thatconsiders expense in making ordnance—need so many plates for their ships thatthey use the Martin-Siemens steel for theircannon, for economy. But in a Kruppgun nothing is ever allowed but cruciblesteel, w^hich, by the perfected metliods ofthis establishment, can be so made as tosecure a tensile strength of nearly 80,000pounds to the square inch. This steel isattended at every stage with personal andtender devotion. Human sacrifices arerequired at its foundation, for in makingthe 1500 or more plumbago crucibles re-(juiicd daily—since most of them can only
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502 HARPERS NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE. be used once—the men wlio make themare under sentence of premature death.They are doomed to breatlie a thick dustby which their lungs are blackened andgradually clogged, and their lives short-ened. In the rooms where these cruci-bles are made I saw a rolly-poly of darkmud, plumbago, and fire-clay, seven oreight inches in diameter, oozing out, fromthe end of which a pallid, half-naked laddivided off section after section, about thelength of the diameter, weighing each,and rarely needing to subtract from oradd to it. Another, older and more pal-lid than the boy, and like him half naked—the heat was oppressive—received thesoft mass and placed it in a mould be-neath a revolving pestle which presseddown the interior, raising the sides, andmade it a jar of some eighteen inches inheight. This is set upon an elevator tobe lifted to the baking-room, which, whenI saw it, impressed me as a mausoleumfilled with funereal urns holding the ash-es of boys and m

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