Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: STEEL "This is the very painting of your fear." " Steel is iron plus carbon and other impurities, plus metallurgists." Prof. Henry M. Howe, in his recent work, " Iron, Steel, and Other Alloys," writes in part as follows: " What are the iron and steel of commerce and industry? Examined under the microscope they prove to be composite o'r granitic substances, intimate mechanical mixtures or conglomerates of microscopic particles of certain quite distinct, well-defined, simple substances, in widely varying proportions. " The chief of these substances are: " i. Pure (or nearly pure) metallic iron 46 called ferrite—soft, weak and very ductile. " 2. A definite iron carbide called cemen- tite, which is harder than glass and nearly as brittle. " Besides these two constituents of prime importance, there are three others of moment: " i. Graphite—unimportant in steel, but important in gray cast iron. " 2. Slag—present in wrought iron. "3. Austenite—hardened steel: steel hardened by sudden cooling from a red heat consists essentially of austenite, a solid solution of carbon in iron of varying degrees of concentration." Steel is usually divided into four general classes; namely, Converted or Cemented Steel, Crucible Cast Steel, Bessemer (acid or basic) Cast Steel, and Open-Hearth (acidor.basic) Cast Steel. Our troubles and complaints come from structural (Bessemer and Open-Hearth) steel. To know .some of the causes for them, it is well occasionally to visit works where steel is made, to investigate modern methods of handling and treating it, and to talk with those whose lives have made them familiar with the ethics and practice of steel producers. It is not easy to-day for the uninformed to get sound, homogeneous, inert structural steel—that is...