As
F.J. Tone says, if the automobile manufacturers were deprived of Niagara
products, the abrasives, aluminum, acetylene for welding and high-speed
tool steel, a factory now turning out five hundred cars a day would be
reduced to one hundred. I have here been chiefly concerned with
electricity as effecting chemical changes in combining or separating
elements, but I must not omit to mention its rapidly extending use as a
source of heat, as in the production and casting of steel. In 1908 there
were only fifty-five tons of steel produced by the electric furnace in
the United States, but by 1918 this had risen to 511,364 tons. And
besides ordinary steel the electric furnace has given us alloys of iron
with the once "rare metals" that have created a new science of
metallurgy.
CHAPTER XIV
METALS, OLD AND NEW
The primitive metallurgist could only make use of such metals as he
found free in nature, that is, such as had not been attacked and
corroded by the ubiquitous oxygen. These were primarily gold or copper,
though possibly some original genius may have happened upon a bit of
meteoric iron and pounded it out into a sword.
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