valued at £3,482,184. In addition 7,344,786 tons, or about half as much as was mined in Great Britain, were imported, 78.5% of it from Spain. The most important British ore deposit is the Lower Cleveland bed of oolitic siderite in the Middle Lias, near Middlesborough. It is from 10 to 17 ft. thick, and its ore contains about 30% of iron.
56. Geographical Distribution of the British Works.—Most of the British iron works lie in and near the important coal-fields in Scotland between the mouth of the Clyde and the Forth, in Cleveland and Durham, in Cumberland and Lancashire, in south Yorkshire, Derbyshire, and Lincolnshire, in Staffordshire and Northamptonshire, and in south Wales in spite of its lack of ore.
The most important group is that of Cleveland and Durham, which makes about one-third of all the British pig iron. It has the great Cleveland ore bed and the excellent Durham coal near tidewater at Middlesbrough. The most important seat of the manufacture of cutlery and the finer kinds of steel is at Sheffield.
57. The United States have great deposits of ore in many different places. The rich beds near Lake Superior, chiefly red haematite, yielding at present about 55% of iron, are thought to contain between 112 and 2 billion tons, and the red and brown haematites of the southern states about 10 billion tons. The middle states, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, are known to have many great deposits of rich magnetite, which supplied a very large proportion of the American ores till the discovery of the very cheaply mined ores of Lake Superior. In 1906 these latter formed 80% of the American production, and the southern states supplied about 13% of it, while the rich deposits of the middle states are husbanded in accordance with the law that ore bodies are drawn on in the order of their apparent profitableness.
The most important American iron-making district is in and about Pittsburg, to whose cheap coal the rich Lake Superior ores are brought nearly 1000 m., about four-fifths of the distance in the large ore steamers of the Great Lakes. Chicago, nearer to the Lake ores, though rather far from the Pittsburg coal-field, is a very important centre for rail-making for the railroads of the western states. Ohio, the Lake Erie end of New York State, eastern Pennsylvania and Maryland have very important works, the ore for which comes in part from Lake Superior and in part from Pennsylvania, New York and Cuba, and the fuel from Pennsylvania and its neighbourhood. Tennessee and Alabama in the south rely on southern ore and fuel.
58. Germany gets about two-thirds of her total ore supply from the great Jurassic “Minette” ore deposit of Luxemburg and Lorraine, which reaches also into France and Belgium. In spite of its containing only about 36% of iron, this deposit is of very great value because of its great size, and of the consequent small cost of mining. It stretches through an area of about 8 m. wide and 40 m. long, and in some places it is nearly 60 ft. thick. There are valuable deposits also in Siegerland and in many other parts of the country.
59. Sweden has abundant, rich and very pure iron ores, but her lack of coal has restricted her iron manufacture chiefly to the very purest and best classes of iron and steel, in making which her thrifty and intelligent people have developed very rare skill. The magnetite ore bodies which supply this industry lie in a band about 180 m. long, reaching from a little north of Stockholm westerly toward the Norwegian frontier, between the latitudes 59° and 61° N. In Swedish Lapland, near the Arctic circle, are the great Gellivara, Kirunavara and Luossavara magnetite beds, among the largest in Europe. From these beds, which in some parts are about 300 ft. thick, much ore is sent to Germany and Great Britain.
60. Other Countries.—Spain has large, rich and pure iron ore beds, near both her northern and her southern sea coast. She exports about 90% of all the iron ore which she mines, most of it to England. France draws most of her iron ore from her own part of the great Minette ore deposit, and from those parts of it which were taken from her when she lost Alsace and Lorraine. Russia’s most valuable ore deposit is the very large and easily mined one of Krivoi Rog in the south, from which comes about half of the Russian iron ore. It is near the Donetz coal-field, the largest in Europe. There are also important ore beds in the Urals, near the border of Finland, and at the south of Moscow. In Austria-Hungary, besides the famous Styrian Erzberg, with its siderite ore bed about 450 ft. thick, there are cheaply mined but poor and impure ores near Prague, and important ore beds in both northern and southern Hungary. Algeria, Canada, Cuba and India have valuable ore bodies.
61. Richness of Iron Ores.—The American ores now mined are decidedly richer than those of most European countries. To make a ton of pig iron needs only about 1.9 tons of ore in the United States, 2 tons in Sweden and Russia, 2.4 tons in Great Britain and Germany, and about 2.7 tons in France and Belgium, while about 3 tons of the native British ores are needed per ton of pig iron.
62. The general scheme of iron manufacture is shown diagrammatically in fig. 6. To put the iron contained in iron ore into a state in which it can be used as a metal requires essentially, first its deoxidation, and second its separation from the other mineral matter, such as clay, quartz, &c. with which it is found associated. These two things are done simultaneously by heating and melting the ore in contact with coke, charcoal or anthracite, in the iron blast furnace, from which issue intermittently two molten streams, the iron now deoxidized and incidentally carburized by the fuel with which it has been in contact, and the mineral matter, now called “slag.” This crude cast iron, called “pig iron,” may be run from the blast furnace directly into moulds, which give the metal the final shape in which it is to be used in the arts; but it is almost always either remelted, following path 1 of fig. 6, and then cast into castings of cast iron, or converted into wrought iron or steel by purifying it, following path 2.
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| Fig. 6.—General Scheme of Iron Manufacture. |
If it is to follow path 1, the castings into which it is made may be either (a) grey or (b) chilled or (c) malleable. Grey iron castings are made by remelting the pig iron either in a small shaft or “cupola” furnace, or in a reverberatory or “air” furnace, with very little change of chemical composition, and then casting it directly into suitable moulds, usually of either “baked,” i.e. oven-dried, or “green,” i.e. moist undried, sand, but sometimes of iron covered with a refractory coating to protect it from being melted or overheated by the molten cast iron. The general procedure in the manufacture of chilled and of malleable castings has been described in §§ 30 and 31.
If the pig iron is to follow path 2, the purification which converts it into wrought iron or steel consists chiefly in oxidizing and thereby removing its carbon, phosphorus and other impurities, while it is molten, either by means of the oxygen of atmospheric air blown through it as in the Bessemer process, or by the oxygen of iron ore stirred into it as in the puddling and Bell-Krupp processes, or by both together as in the open hearth process.
On its way from the blast furnace to the converter or open hearth furnace the pig iron is often passed through a great reservoir called a “mixer,” which acts also as an equalizer, to lessen the variation in composition of the cast iron, and as a purifier, removing part of the sulphur and silicon.
63. Shaping and Adjusting Processes.—Besides these extraction and purification processes there are those of adjustment and shaping. The adjusting processes adjust either the ultimate composition, e.g. carburizing wrought iron by long heating in contact with charcoal (cementation), or the proximate composition or constitution, as in the hardening, tempering and annealing of steel already described (§§ 28, 29), or both, as in the process of making malleable cast iron (§ 31). The shaping processes include the mechanical ones, such as rolling, forging and wire-drawing, and the remelting ones such as the crucible process of melting wrought iron or steel in crucibles and casting it in ingots for the manufacture of the best kinds of tool steel. Indeed, the remelting of cast iron to make grey iron castings belongs here. This classification, though it helps to give a general idea of the subject, yet like most of its kind cannot be applied rigidly. Thus the crucible process in its American form both carburizes and remelts, and the open hearth process is often used rather for remelting than for purifying.
64. The iron blast furnace, a crude but very efficient piece of apparatus, is an enormous shaft usually about 80 ft. high and 20 ft. wide at its widest part. It is at all times full from top to bottom, somewhat as sketched in figs. 7 and 8, of a solid column of lumps of fuel, ore and limestone, which are charged through a hopper at the top, and descend slowly as the lower end of the column is eaten off through the burning away of its coke by means of very hot air or “blast” blown through
