Who We Are - Volume 2 - Chapter 7: Steel as a National Project - Part 2
By Anton Chaitkin; Copyright Anton Chaitkin
Who We Are - Volume 2 - Chapter 7: Steel as a National Project - Part 2
By Anton Chaitkin; Copyright Anton Chaitkin
The Philadelphia Center Shapes a Steel Industry
On September 6, 1864, the Wyandotte plant finally demonstrated repeatable control over the process.
It was a spectacular show. The egg-shaped receptacle holding the molten iron became
a roaring volcano. From its crater shot forth flames perhaps a hundred feet high, lighting up the river bank for miles around.[1]
The purified metal, poured and cooled into an ingot that afternoon, was the first batch of steel produced by the pneumatic method.[2]
A new industry was in the offing, with revolutionary implications for living standards and the nation’s status as a world power.
The Philadelphia center immediately began preparing the way forward. A few weeks after that Wyandotte demonstration –
a number of iron manufacturers from Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Kentucky, New Jersey, Missouri, and Maryland met in Philadelphia [on October 19], and determined to invite the iron and steel makers of the United States to meet together [to consider] a plan of organization, “whereby the whole American iron interest might be promoted …”
A subsequent meeting, held at the Philadelphia Board of Trade November 16-17, organized the American Iron and Steel Association.[3]
There were then no U.S. steel mills, other than iron companies which produced some steel by old methods. The steel industry would be created after the war, and the Association founded in 1864 would help build it from scratch.
Moreover, the Association was to be a central agency of American nationalist influence, in intense political warfare with imperial interests.
The Association quickly gained at least 100 member firms from across the country, with a circular declaring that
the continued efforts of foreign capitalists and parties in their interest, to control our markets by means of laws injurious to domestic production [is among the chief concerns that] have led to the formation of the “American Iron and Steel Association.”[4]
The Association chose Eber Ward as its founding president. Beyond his recent technical triumph at Wyandotte, Ward had unique qualifications for such a position. He was Henry Carey’s most enthusiastic Midwestern supporter and literature distributor.[5] And Ward had just then demonstrated his formidable political militance, in a hair-raising showdown in the last days of the 1864 Presidential campaign. (See Appendix: Eber Ward’s Fortress.)
The Association was in effect an extension of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and more broadly, Philadelphia’s industrial/political/scientific complex. This may be seen in the person of the Association’s founding secretary and organizing manager, Robert H. Lamborn (1835-1895), a high-level PRR functionary. The son of science-loving Philadelphia Quakers and a life-long friend of William J. Palmer, Lamborn studied in Europe,[6] was in combat in the Civil War in Palmer’s Union cavalry unit, and then replaced Palmer as the coal and iron expert for PRR president Thomson.[7]
Preparations for the new industry accelerated early in 1865 as the Civil War neared its end. Alexander Holley and his partners, experimenting in their old iron facility at Troy, New York, produced their first Bessemer steel batch in February.
Then on May 24, the first American-made steel rail came off the line at the North Chicago Rolling Mill, owned by Eber Ward, using ingots from Ward’s experimental Wyandotte plant. The American Iron and Steel Association was meeting just then in Chicago, so Robert Lamborn and other of its leaders witnessed this historic event.
The Pennsylvania Railroad men, now confident of success, organized the Pennsylvania Steel Company (PSC) on June 26, 1865. It was the first American enterprise devoted to the manufacture of steel.
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