Thomas J. Misa A Nation of Steel:  The Making of Modern America, 1865-1925 Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995

TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1: THE DOMINANCE OF RAILS (1865-1885) Introduction Inventing the Process Developing the Technology Shaping Technological Knowledge Building Transcontinental Railroads

Developing the Technology

If we compare the two men we see strikingly exemplified the difference between the inventor and the industrious engineer.  Where Bessemer left the process which bears his name, Holley's work began.²⁶

 INSERT Figure I.6 U.S. Rail Production, Imports, Construction (1867-90)

 To a remarkable extent, the shape and definition of Bessemer technology in the United States was achieved though the efforts of Alexander L. Holley.  An early immersion in railroading prepared him for a brilliant and prolific steel engineering career: he designed eleven of the nation's first thirteen Bessemer plants.  As a young man Holley saw in his father, a successful cutlery manufacturer and lieutenant-governor of Connecticut, the established connection between politics, industry, and the wider world.  Holley's own easy familiarity with people of all classes gained him entree into steel mills and engineering circles on both sides of the Atlantic, and he served as a model for mechanical engineers seeking to combine professional values, technical knowledge, and social grace.  Inevitably, he was one of the organizing spirits behind the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

 Holley arrived at such a position through detailed experience with two of the principal mechanical technologies of his era, railroads and steel manufacture.  In the seven years after graduating from Brown University in 1853, he designed locomotives for George Corliss and for the New York Locomotive Works, published two books based on first-hand knowledge of European railways, and served as technical editor for the American Railway Review.  Between 1858 and 1863 he also wrote 200 articles for the New York Times, mostly on engineering subjects.  Holley learned the craft of technical publicity not by hiring a "leading article writer" as Bessemer had done but by being one.  In 1862, while working for Edwin Stevens,  the founding manager and longtime treasurer for one of the nation's oldest railroads, the Camden & Amboy, Holley began gathering information about shipbuilding, armor plate, and armament in Europe.  He visited Bessemer's steel works in Sheffield, where he observed the new process as a prospective licensee.  "The Bessemer process of making steel," Holley observed in a widely acclaimed book based on this trip, "promises to ameliorate the whole subject of ordnance and engineering construction in general, both as to quality and cost."²⁹

 When he returned to the United States in 1863, Holley found several parties interested in Bessemer technology.  The Assistant Secretary of the Navy had just urged the prominent engineer John Ericsson to establish a steel plant with the new technology.  When Holley consulted with Ericsson about realizing the steel process he put the young man in touch with the ironmaster John F. Winslow and banker John A. Griswold, who had jointly sponsored Ericsson's ironclad Monitor.  These two businessmen from Troy, New York, provided Holley with steadfast support for the steelmaking venture.  To secure an American license for Bessemer's patents Holley crossed the Atlantic in the summer of 1863, yet again, and arranged to pay Bessemer £10,000.  Winslow, Griswold, and Holley set up a partnership and began planning a Bessemer plant at Troy.  The following year Holley was once again in England, as he put it, "to finish my education in the Bessemer process."³⁰

 INSERT Figure I.7 Troy Bessemer Plant (Plan of 1865)

 In the mid-1860s Troy sustained the gathering storm of railroad building in two distinct ways.  The immediate region had nurtured, educated, or given railroad experience to a surprising number of the Union Pacific's and Central Pacific's leading figures, including Leland Stanford and Charlie Crocker.  More prosaically, it had also become a center for re-rolling rails.³¹  The Erie Canal, the Hudson River, and a growing railroad network linked the region to consumers and raw materials.  Before Holley's effort, however, Troy lacked steelmaking facilities.  After promising results from initial experiments in an abandoned grist mill, Winslow and Griswold approved a full-scale plant located with access both to the Hudson River and the Hudson River Railroad.  When it opened with a public demonstration in May 1867, the mill would scarcely have been recognizable to Henry Bessemer (see Figure I.7).³²

 "Holley seems to have at once broken loose from the restraints of his foreign experience," noted one observer.  "Where Bessemer left the process which bears his name, Holley's work began," stated another.  One of Holley's assistants, who had copied tracings of machinery and fixtures sent by Bessemer's office, noted that "very few of the features ... of Mr. Bessemer's practice as thus given were embodied in the American work."  Another assistant, Robert W. Hunt, whose career spanned the entire first generation of the industry, recorded the details.  At Troy Holley did away with the English mills' deep casting pits and raised the converting vessels to get working space under them on the ground floor.  He replaced the English counter-weighted cranes with less-expensive top-supported hydraulic ones, adding a third ingot crane to expedite the flow of material around the pit.  He modified the ladle crane, and worked all the cranes and the vessels from a single control station.  He located the converting vessels more conveniently to the casting pit and melting-house.  He substituted cupolas for reverberatory furnaces, and introduced the intermediate or accumulating ladle which was used to weigh each charge of melted iron before it went into the converter.³³  Holley eventually designed a dozen other Bessemer steel rail mills -- each one more and more capable of maximum quantity, to fit the insatiable demands of transcontinental railroad building, but less and less capable of maximum quality.

 Even before railroads produced the huge, spiky demands that determined the characteristics of successful steel production technology, they helped structure the emerging industry..   In the early 1860s the leading rail mills organized a patent pool around John Fritz's three-high rail mill, which helped boost rail output so prodigiously; this activity was soon extended to Bessemer technology.³⁴  Through the Bessemer Association, which formally was again a patent pool, railroads met periodically with rail mills to agree on prices and divide contracts among the rail mills.

 The Bessemer Association was the product of a complicated legal battle that threatened to stall the industry's growth.  Challenging Holley and the Troy entrepreneurs was a group headed by Eber Brock Ward, who had investments in transportation, minerals, banking, and iron ventures across the Midwest.  In May 1863 Ward organized a company to exploit the legal strength of William Kelly "air boiling" patent.  Kelly was a sometime ironmaster who had used some suggestive experiments in Kentucky in the 1850s to successfully fight an American patent interference case against Bessemer, and thus guaranteed his patent covered the concept of blowing air through molten metal.³⁵  Ward controlled not only Kelly's patent but also the American rights to Robert F. Mushet's key patents for treating converted and decarburized Bessemer metal with manganese, which improved its mechanical properties.  These patents informed the design of the Eureka Iron Company south of Detroit -- the site of a new air-blowing steelworks (see Table I.1).  Another Ward holding, the North Chicago Rolling Mill Company, stood ready to roll Eureka's steel into rails.  On the other hand, the Troy group possessed the American rights to Bessemer's patents, which included the tilting converter.  Given this split, neither group could construct a state-of-the-art steel works without infringing on the other.  "Litigation of a formidable character," as Holley put it, "was imminent."³⁶

 INSERT Figure I.8 Cambria Bessemer Plant (1876)

 The legal block was resolved through a series of out-of-court settlements beginning in 1866 and lasting three years.  The precise course of these negotiations was kept out of the public eye and remains unknown, but the outcome was clear enough.  The Kelly and Bessemer patents were pooled and the proceeds from licensing them were split.  The Troy group received 70 percent of the proceeds, and the Ward group, 30 percent.  To administer the patent pool the two groups set up "The Trustees of the Pneumatic or Bessemer Process of Making Iron and Steel."  This organization -- subsequently reorganized as the Pneumatic Steel Association, the Bessemer Steel Association, and the Bessemer Steel Company -- did not operate plants directly but rather provided a means for licensing the pooled patents, collecting royalties, and dividing the proceeds.  For the immediate future the Bessemer Association assured that no protracted legal battle would check growth.  From 1866 to 1877 it licensed eleven plants, to all the major rail mills including Cambria (see Figure I.8).³⁷

 But after 1877 the Bessemer Association prevented others from legally acquiring the technology it controlled, which then included several key mechanical patents of Holley, by sharply restricting the number of licensees.  Additional licensees meant additional competitors, and the established concerns wanted neither.  Further, in the early 1880s Holley's detailed reports on state-of-the-art steel technology, from both sides of the Atlantic, circulated only to its members.  By controlling access to technology in these ways, the Bessemer Association amputated the invisible hand of a competitive market.  Moreover, its visible hand of administrative coordination lasted through the Bessemer era and beyond.  From 1877 until 1915, with the exception of the depression decade of the 1890s, the price of steel rails was largely determined by the Bessemer Association and its successors.³⁸  These restrictive practices are comprehensible only by recognizing that railroads and steel mills were not atomistic actors meeting in a classical free market; rather, even beyond the market-killing coordination of the Bessemer Association, the users and producers of rails could be owned or controlled by the same (railroad) corporation.

 The Pennsylvania Railroad was the outstanding example of the virtual fusion of user and producer that could result in this sector.  A large number of employees with "second" careers, the prevalence of insider contracting, and strategic personal investing by its top officers all contributed to this result.  Andrew Carnegie was only the most famous of its middle managers that had successful second careers in closely related fields.  Before becoming steel producer par excellence, Carnegie climbed the Pennsylvania's corporate ladder and proved himself an able manager of its western division.  After leaving the railroad in March 1865 with twelve years service he enjoyed close relations with Thomas A. Scott and J. Edgar Thomson, the Pennsylvania's vice president and president, respectively.  Thomson, Carnegie said, was the "great pillar in this country of steel for everything."  Scott and Thomson lent financial backing to Carnegie's manifold ventures, including the Union Iron Mills, the Keystone Bridge Company, and the eponymous Edgar Thomson Steel Company discussed below.  J. N. Linville, formerly a Pennsylvania bridge engineer, was an early member of Keystone's board and later its president.  Another Pennsylvania Railroad manager, Samuel M. Felton, after serving as president of the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad, capped his career as president of the Pennsylvania Steel Company.  The Pennsylvania Railroadand Pennsylvania Steel were more than namesakes.  The railroad formed the steel company with $600,000 in capital and promptly awarded it a $200,000 contract for steel rails.³⁹  The railroad's desire for a captive steel plant determined its location, however otherwise disadvantageous, on the road's main line near Harrisburg.⁴⁰  There, Holley built his second Bessemer steel rail mill (see Table I.1).
 
 

Table I.1 Bessemer Works in United States (1864-76) 
Source: Robert W. Hunt, "A History of the Bessemer Manufacture in America," AIME Trans. 5 (1876): 201-16. 

First Blow	Company	Location	Context
Sept. 1864	Kelly Pneumatic Process	Wyandotte MI	rolling mill
Feb. 1865	Winslow & Griswold	Troy NY	rolling mill
June 1867	Pennsylvania Steel	Harrisburg PA	railroad
May 1868	Freedom Iron & Steel(a)	Lewistown PA	rolling mill
Oct. 1868	Cleveland Rolling Mill	Newburgh OH	rolling mill
July 1871	Cambria Iron	Johnstown PA	rolling mill
July 1871	Union Iron(b)	S. Chicago IL	rolling mill
April 1872	North Chicago Rolling Mill(c)	Chicago IL	rolling mill
March 1873	Joliet Iron & Steel(d)	Joliet IL	rolling mill
Oct. 1873	Bethlehem Iron	Bethlehem PA	iron mill
Aug. 1875	Edgar Thomson Steel	Pittsburgh PA	new mill
Oct. 1875	Lackawanna Iron & Coal	Scranton PA	iron mill
1876	Vulcan Iron	St. Louis MO	iron mill

(a) Of the 12 Bessemer plants built during 1865-76, Holley did not design this one; lacking suitable pig iron it failed after one year.

(b) Owned by the owners of Cleveland Rolling Mill.

(c) Owned in part by E. B. Ward.

(d) Used blowing engine, converters, and hydraulic cranes purchased from Freedom Iron and Steel's abandoned works.

 The railroad's influence extended even beyond such directed financing.  In his formative years Andrew Carnegie gained first-hand experience with the Pennsylvania's pioneering of modern managerial structures and procedures.  In 1853 he joined the Pennsylvania as telegraph operator, and three years later he followed his mentor Tom Scott to the road's central shops and office at Altoona, just as the road's transportation superintendent Herman Haupt was implementing a military-inspired managerial system.  Detailed reporting and accounting from employees at all levels, as well as careful division of managerial responsibilities into so-called line and staff functions, was the essence of the Haupt plan.  Under this system Carnegie worked as superintendent of the road's western division beginning in 1859 for six years, with a brief tour of duty managing railroads in Washington during the Civil War.  Then, as well as later in his industrial undertakings, Carnegie understood the importance of not only getting the right people but organizing them the right way.  "I am neither mechanic nor engineer, nor am I scientific.  The fact is I don't amount to anything in any industrial department," wrote Carnegie.  "I seem to have had a knack of utilizing those that do know better than myself."⁴¹  For his entry into the manufacture of Bessemer steel rails, aptly named the Edgar Thomson works, a none-too-subtle bid for the goodwill of his anticipated leading customer, Carnegie capitalized on all his railroad connections and then some.

 Railroad executives brought to Carnegie's new steel venture effective managerial models, the ability to mount large-scale financing, and not least detailed knowledge of the Bessemer industry's leading consumer: railroads themselves.  Besides Carnegie at least five railroad executives -- David Stewart, John Scott, William Shinn, Edgar Thomson. Edgar;, and Thomas Scott -- helped plan and finance the new mill.  Carnegie himself, flush with commissions from selling railroad securities to European investors, subscribed the largest share ($250,000) of the total capital ($700,000) in the partnership formed on 5 November 1872.  William Shinn, who concurrently served as secretary-treasurer of the steel mill and as vice president of the Allegheny Valley Railroad, imported the railroad's system of cost accounting.  Before cost accounting, Carnegie wrote, "we were moles burrowing in the dark."  Cost accounting revealed "what each man was doing, who saved material, who wasted it, and who produced the best results."⁴²

 Although construction crews broke ground at the 106-acre site eleven miles up the Monongahela River from Pittsburgh in April 13 1873, that year's panic upended the mill's financing and halted the work.  The panic also undid the mesh of railroad financing, pushing Tom Scott to the verge of bankruptcy and probably contributing to the death of J. Edgar Thomson in May 1874.  To get the project back on track during that summer 1874 Holley and Carnegie met in London with Junius S. Morgan, the international banker, to secure a $400,000 bond issue.  The mill finally began full operation in September 1875, producing that month just over 1,200 tons of steel rails.  Two months later, facing especially stiff competition from the established Cambria, Pennsylvania, Joliet, and North Chicago mills, Carnegie knew that the new mill was a trump card.  "Having faith in our ability to mfr. cheaper than others I do not fear the result of a sharp fight," he wrote to William Shinn.⁴³  The mill would indeed be a fitting tribute to the railroad president and to the essential linkage between railroads and steel mills.  Comprehending the plant's stunning financial success -- the startup month's profits at $11,000 represented 19 percent annual rate of return on capital, and annual profits in 1880 at $1,625,000 topped the mill's entire first cost -- requires inquiry into the mill's design.⁴⁴

 INSERT Figure I.9 Edgar Thomson Bessemer Converters with Holley Bottom

 Holley compressed a full decade of experience into his design for the plant, his ninth since Troy.  Its twin six-ton converters (inside diameter 6 feet, height 15 feet) featured his patented detachable bottom, which sped the replacing of refractory brick exactly where the Bessemer blast was most corrosive.  Every eight blows, nearly twice each working day, the spent bottom was unbolted and a fresh one attached; the converter itself stayed hot (see Figure I.9).  Pig iron melted in three cupolas reached the converters via two twelve-ton tilting ladles.  Two independent blowing engines, each with twin twenty-ton, twenty-foot-diameter flywheels, translated the expansive power of steam into a powerful blast of air.  Steam from twenty cylindrical boilers each five feet across and fifteen feet tall ("a particularly excellent and imposing feature of the plant," boasted Holley) powered the whole.  Notably, the rail mill and the converting mill each cost roughly $200,000.  "From the very start," wrote one observer, "Holley was convinced that the Bessemer process always meant blast-furnaces, blooming-mills, and rolling-mills."⁴⁵

 INSERT Figure I.10 Edgar Thomson Steel Works (Plan of 1873)

 Whereas Holley had previously been forced to fit Bessemer mills into preexisting plant layouts, for the Edgar Thomson Works "the buildings were made to fit the transportation." (see Figure I.10)  Holley, said one colleague, "began at the beginning with them, taking a clean sheet of paper, drawing on it first the railroad-tracks, and then placing the buildings and the contents of each building with prime regard to the facile handling of material; so that the whole became a body, shaped by its bones and muscles, rather than a box, into which bones and muscles had to be packed."⁴⁶  The transportation arteries included the Monongahela River, which linked the plant to the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, and the Baltimore & Ohio and the Pennsylvania railroads running adjacent to the plant.  Once raw materials arrived, Holley's design expedited their flow through the works.  "As the cheap transportation of supplies of products in process of manufacture, and of products to market, is a feature of the first importance," Holley noted, "these works were laid out, not with a view of making the buildings artistically parallel with the existing roads or with each other, but of laying down convenient railroads with easy curves."  "Coal is dumped from the mine-cars, standing upon the elevated track ... directly upon the floors of the producer and boiler-houses.  Coke and pig iron are delivered to the stock-yard with equal facility.  The finishing end of the rail-mill is accommodated on both sides by low-level wide-gauge railways. (...)  There is also a complete system of 30-inch railways for internal transportation."  Ingots passed by rail from the converting mill to the rolling mill not directly but in a wide arc, which cleared space for inspecting and sorting merchant bars and for locating the boilers.  "The ingots need some cooling before they can be charged," Holley explained. "The less cooling the steam gets the better."⁴⁷

 The efficient flow of heat itself preoccupied Holley's engineering mind.  Why burn extra coal, he reasoned, when a white-hot blast went up the chimney from the Bessemer converter?  At Troy and Harrisburg, Holley had experimented with schemes to capture this wasted heat but had not hit upon a satisfactory solution.⁴⁸  In 1879 he devised for the Edgar Thomson works an ingenious heat exchanger that used the converters' white-hot blast to preheat incoming air for the cupola furnaces that in turn melted pig iron for the converters.  Holley revamped the hot-blast stove design of Brown, Bailey, and Dixon, tripling the exchanger's heating-surface and air-passage areas.⁴⁹  Including the internal piping, floor plates, and 27,000 fire bricks, the exchanger weighed over 200 tons and required four 15-inch I-beam trusses for support.  An array of butterfly valves directed cold air into the twin heat exchangers (one for each converter) and returned hot air to any of the three cupola furnaces.  Such an arrangement -- in effect, a continuous feedback loop of heat circulating between the converters and the cupola furnaces -- began transforming the Edgar Thomson's Bessemer mill from a batch to continuous process.

 A fully continuous Bessemer process was soon realized by William R. Jones.  "Captain" Jones had been seasoned by 25 years of making iron and steel at Crane & Thomas, Port Richmond, and Cambria, and everywhere he had been he had shown an uncommon ability to inspire loyalty and production in equally impressive measures.  When he was hired by Carnegie, on Holley's advice, to superintend the new Edgar Thomson works, a select crew of 200 followed him from Cambria Iron.  His appreciation of the shop-floor realities of steelmaking made him an early if unsuccessful advocate of the eight-hour work day.  Furthermore, until his tragic death in a blast furnace accident of 1889, Jones contributed a string of key inventions including an improvement on Holley's detachable converter bottom as well as a novel "straightener" that smoothly and accurately curved hot rails.  His most notable and notorious invention -- the subject of patent litigation for years -- was his .: patented metal mixer;, which made the Bessemer process into a continuous process  From the pioneering days at Troy onward, bars of pig iron were remelted in cupola furnaces then fed to the converters (Figure I.11a).  After 1882, to quicken throughput as well as to cut fuel and labor costs, the Edgar Thomson's cupola furnaces were bypassed altogether and molten pig iron flowed directly from blast furnace to converter.  With this "direct" method, however, the converters operated unpredictably owing to small variations in the pig iron (Figure I.11b).  If for instance silicon (or carbon) was high the converters overheated; if it was low the converter could chill solid.  To achieve chemical control over the production process, the mill was forced to double its staff of chemists as well as employ "special men ... in the Bessemer department at high salaries" to judge and correct these troublesome variations.⁵⁰

 INSERT Figure I.11 Edgar Thomson Steel Works (Jones Mixer of 1887)

 Difficulties in controlling the converters persisted until the summer of 1887 when Captain Jones installed his first metal mixer.  Situated between the blast furnaces and the converters, the huge firebrick vessel temporarily held and mixed together up to 100 tons of molten pig iron; as needed, 10 ton charges were tapped to fill the converters (Figure I.11c).  With the direct process, iron charged to the converters had varied as much as two percent in silicon content; with the Jones mixer in place, the variation dropped to only a few tenths of a percent.  The chemical stabilization worked wonders.  "The Bessemer operations at once assumed the uniform character prevailing at the time when cupolas were used," stated James Gayley, superintendent of the Edgar Thomson's blast furnaces.  "The extra men that had to be employed previously were dispensed with, the quality of the steel was much improved, [and] the waste of steel in chill heats ... was brought back to normal amount."⁵¹

 In the American context, then, mature Bessemer technology reflected systematic design to maximize the production of steel rails.  Holley's integrated design provided for the rapid flow of large amounts of raw materials and finished products, and his heat exchanger introduced the concept of continuous flow.  With the Jones mixer Bessemer steelmaking became a continuous process by design.  "The Jones process consists in a continuous operation," Gayley observed.  "This receiving vessel [the mixer] after being once filled is kept filled, or practically so, and ... the withdrawals are balanced by new charges, which in itself has the element of continuity provided for."⁵²

 It is a commonplace that the Edgar Thomson works became a prototype for the mass production of Bessemer steel rails.  Its design inspired a new plant at the North Chicago Rolling Mill Company among others.  Holley just inked in new dimensions on the Edgar Thomson's blueprints for Vulcan Iron. Louis);'s Bessemer mill at St. Louis.  As Carnegie phrased the achievement, "a perfect mill is the road to wealth."⁵³  Railroads, as we have seen, were a dominant force in forming the structure and shaping the technology of the Bessemer steel industry.  The technological knowledge that grew up with the Bessemer industry, a new chemically oriented metallurgy, also bore the direct stamp of the railroads.

26. R. W. Raymond, ed., Memorial of Alexander Lyman Holley, C.E. LL.D. (New York: AIME, 1884), 71.
27. Although Pennsylvania Steel may have experimented with basic Bessemer steel in 1884, only one American firm, Pottstown Iron in the early 1890s, is known to have manufactured significant amounts of basic Bessemer or Thomas steel; see K. C. Barraclough, Steelmaking: 1850-1900 (London: Institute of Metals, 1990), 234-35, 239-41.
28. See C. Knick Harley, "Oligopoly Agreement and the Timing of American Railroad Construction," Journal of Economic History 42 (Dec. 1982): 797-823.
29. Alexander L. Holley, A Treatise on Ordnance and Armor (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1865), quote 104.  Holley's early career can be traced in his letters (1851-61) in ALH, and in McHugh, Alexander Holley and the Makers of Steel.
30. James Dredge, "Sir Henry Bessemer," ASME Transactions 19 (1898): 881-964, quote 939.  For Holley's copartnership with Winslow and Griswold, see A. L. Holley to John A. Griswold, 25 Apr. 1866, and A. L. Holley to John A. Griswold, 25 Apr. 1866, 2: 4, JAG.
31. Leland Stanford and Charlie Crocker were born in Troy, while Theodore D. Judah was raised in Troy, attended the Troy School of Technology, and learned railroad engineering on the Troy and Schenectady road; see Williams, A Great and Shining Road, 29, 38, 51.  Around 1864 Troy was primarily a center for re-rolling rails, along with Worcester, Elmira, Buffalo, Cleveland, Indianapolis and Chicago; Kenneth Warren, The American Steel Industry, 1850-1970: A Geographic Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), 26, 89-91.
32. Winslow & Griswold to A. H. Holley 29 Apr. 1867; A. H. Holley to Mrs. A. H. Holley 9 May 1867, AHH.
33. Raymond, Memorial of Alexander Lyman Holley, quote 71; Robert W. Hunt, "The Original Bessemer Steel Plant at Troy," ASME Trans. 6 (1885): 61-70, on 69; Hunt, "History," 204, 214.
34. Metz and Sayenga, "Role of John Fritz," 15.
35. Testimony of the Kelly brothers' workmen collected in 1857 for the patent interference case against Bessemer confirms that Kelly experimented in 1847 and again in 1851 with blowing air into molten iron and that he claimed to have invented a new process, but the testimony denies that he achieved a workable process.  See State of Kentucky, Lyon County, Interference. William Kelly vs. Henry Bessemer 13 Apr. 1857, 1: 28 Patent Suit Kelly vs. Bessemer 1857, AISI; and Misa, s.v. "William Kelly," American National Biography (Oxford University Press/American Council of Learned Societies, forthcoming).  For discussion of the Kelly-Bessemer controversy, see Misa, "Controversy and Closure in Technological Change: Constructing 'Steel,'" in Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law, eds., Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnology (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1992), 109-39.  For an analysis of Kelly's experiments, see Misa, "Science, Technology and Industrial Structure,"  4-11, 27-29; and Robert B. Gordon, "The 'Kelly' Converter," Technology and Culture 33 (1992): 769-79.
36. Holley quoted in "The Invention of the Bessemer Process," Engineering 6 (27 Mar. 1896): 414.
37. Continuing legal proceeding beyond the 1866 settlement that set up the Bessemer Association are suggested in A. L. Holley to John A. Griswold, 7 July 1869, 22 Dec. 1869, 2: 4, JAG.
38. For the third and fourth quarters of 1873, the Pneumatic Steel Association issued dividends totalling $36,500 and $20,000; see Pneumatic Steel Association to Executors of John A. Griswold, Z. S. Durfee to Executors of the late John A. Griswold, 27 Jan. 1873, 5: 67, JAG.  In 1888, the cartel tabulated the pounds of raw materials used, the "tons on which apportionment is based", and total tons treated for the eleven member companies (Cambria Iron, Cleveland Rolling Mill, Troy Iron & Steel, North Chicago Rolling Mill, Union Steel, Pennsylvania Steel, St. Louis Ore & Steel, Carnegie Bros., Bethlehem Iron, Lackawanna Iron & Coal, Joliet Steel); see Bessemer Steel Company, Tables listing tonnage of metal converted by Bessemer process, Oct. 1886, April/May 1887, April 1888, 1: 5 Correspondence 1886-87, FWW.  In 1897, the Bessemer Steel Association required a deposit of $5,000, and credited its members at 10¢ per ton shipped; see Bessemer Steel Association to Maryland Steel, 29 Jan. 1897, 17: 5 Maryland Steel General Correspondence 1897, FWW.  For the rail producers cartel active during 1901-1915 see chapter IV.
39. James A. Ward, J. Edgar Thomson: Master of the Pennsylvania (Westport CT: Greenwood, 1980), quote 177; McHugh, Holley, 211-32; Joseph F. Wall, Andrew Carnegie (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 309-11, 229.  $600,000 was about one third the total capitalization; see Steven W. Usselman, "Running the Machine: The Management of Technological Innovation on American Railroads, 1860-1910," (PhD diss., University of Delaware, 1985), 89-97.
40. If the Pennsylvania Railroad officers only knew of the competing mills' lower cost for rails, wrote Andrew Carnegie, "surely the further development of Penna Steel Co could be checked.  It is absurd for that company to spend more money to make more rails in that territory.  Bethlehem and Scranton can each beat her in cost and [Cambria] can send rails to seaboard past her at a profit."  See Andrew Carnegie to William Shinn, 29 Mar. 1879, volume 4, ACLC.  Still, the link between railroad and steel mill endured.  "As you know ... the Pennsylvania [Railroad] people as a rule buy rails from the concerns located on their lines, and which they control, including the Pennsylvania Steel Co., and the Maryland Steel Co."; A. Johnston to C. M. Schwab, 20 May 1907, 2: 33, AJ.
41. Andrew Carnegie to R. H. Thurston, 26 Oct. 1888, Folder 1888, RHT.  On the Pennsylvania's managerial reforms, see Charles F. O'Connell, Jr., "The Corps of Engineers and the Rise of Modern Management, 1827-1856," in Merritt Roe Smith, ed., Military Enterprise and Technological Change (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 88-116, on 111-14.  On Carnegie's career with the PRR, see Pennsylvania Railroad General Order no. 10, 21 Nov. 1859, volume 1, ACLC; letters to Enoch Lewis in volumes 1-3, ACLC; and the "farewell address" Andrew Carnegie circular letter to Pittsburgh Division PRR, 28 Mar. 1865, volume 3, ACLC.
42. Wall, Andrew Carnegie, 325-30, 342, 356-58; Joseph D. Weeks, "Biographical Notice of William Powell Shinn," AIME Trans. 21 (1893): 394-400.  "Every manager in the mills was naturally against the new system.  Years were required before an accurate system was obtained," admitted Carnegie in his Autobiography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1920), quote 129-30.
43. Andrew Carnegie to William Shinn, 30 Nov. 1875, volume 4, ACLC; Ward, J. Edgar Thomson, 189-216.
44. For startup production data, see entries in HCW diary.  For the ET's organization, see Carnegie, McCandless & Co., articles of copartnership, 5 Nov. 1872, volume 4, ACLC; and Edgar Thomson Steel Co., Limited, articles of limited partnership, 7 Nov. 1874, volume 4, ACLC.  For background on the ET, see Wall, Andrew Carnegie, 309-11; Arthur Pound, "Two Centuries of Industry: The Rise of Manufactures in Western Pennsylvania," Chap. 21, pp. 8-12,  MS. 1936, MEB papers; P. Barnes, "Note upon the Cost of Construction of the Converting Works of the Edgar Thomson Steel Company," AIME Trans. 6 (1877): 195-96; idem, "Memorandum Relating to the Construction Account of the Rail Mill of the Edgar Thomson Steel Company," ibid. 7 (1878): 77-78.
45. C. E. Dutton, in Raymond, Memorial, quote 29.  Data on the ET converting vessel is from HCW, Nov. 1875-Jan. 1876.
46. Raymond, Memorial, quote 135; A. L. Holley and Lenox Smith, "The Works of the Edgar Thomson Steel Company (Limited)," Engineering 25 (19 Apr. 1878): 295-7.  For Holley's spatial contortions to reconstruct the Bessemer mill at Troy, see Holley's letters to John A. Griswold, 10 Dec. 1868, 18 Jan. 1869, 22 Jan. 1869, 4 Mar. 1869, 2: 4, JAG.
47. A. L. Holley and Lenox Smith, "The Works of the Edgar Thomson Steel Company (Limited)," Engineering 25 (19 Apr. 1878): 295-7.
48. "We find in Harrisburg that boilers over steel furnaces don't make steam enough to pay"; A. L. Holley to John A. Griswold, 22 Jan. 1869, 2: 4, JAG.
49. A. L. Holley, "Cooper's Hot Blast Stove for cupolas, utilizing waste heat from converters, adapted to the Edgar Thomson Steel Works," 29 Sept. 1879, Edgar Thomson drawer, ALH-SI.
50. James Gayley testimony 20 May 1896 in extracts from patent suits Carnegie Steel vs. Cambria Iron and Carnegie Steel vs. Maryland Steel, pp. 1-9; and 6 June 1895, pp. 30-42, quote p. 34, located in 10: 1 Maryland Steel Lawsuits 1893-1910, FWW [hereafter Gayley testimony].  The responsibilities of ET's chemists are detailed in the 1875-80 diary in HCW.
51. Gayley testimony 6 June 1895, p. 36.
52. Gayley testimony 20 May 1896, pp. 8-9.
53. See certain of Holley's drawings for the ET Works that have a second set of dimensions (inked in red) for the Vulcan Iron Works, Folder "Edgar Thomson," ALH-SI; Robert Forsyth, "The Bessemer Plant of the North Chicago Rolling Mill Company at South Chicago," AIME Trans. 12 (1883): 254-74; Andrew Carnegie to William Shinn, 4 Apr. 1879, volume 4, ACLC.