It wasn’t hard to see that America’s steel industry was in distress long before Black Monday

EDITOR:

In the mid to late 1950s, I worked for Republic Steel in Cleveland, first in the cold strip mill, and later in the “research” center in Independence. Among the topics discussed by the employees of the research center was the general situation in the steel industry. Below is what I remember from those times.

At the end of World War II, the high grade hematite iron ores of Minnesota’s Mesabi range that the Midwestern mills, Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. among them, were using, had run out. The low grade taconite ores were what was left. The major steel companies were working on means to concentrate the iron oxides in taconite. The sticking point was sintering the concentrates cheaply, so they could be shipped down the lakes to the mills. At the time, U.S. Steel was running a series of magazine ads bragging about how they were working toward that end, and that success was imminent. However, something went wrong. A consortium of Republic Steel and ARMCO Steel of Middletown, Ohio, succeeded first. The company that shipped taconite pellets to Midwestern mills was the Reserve Mining Company.

Subsequent events showed that U.S. Steel’s attention shifted away from the Midwest. The Fairless Works in Maryland utilized ore from Labrador and from Venezuela. Although Austria’s LD (for Linze Donau, Linze on the Danube River) basic oxygen furnaces were already appearing on the scene, U.S. Steel elected to stay with the basic open hearth process. In fact, there was a report about 1959 that they were trying to find a way around the Austrian patents at their Monroeville research laboratory by modifying the Bessemer cupola for the bottom blowing of pure oxygen instead of air through the molten iron. Obviously, it didn’t work. They were called QBOFs.

Republic Steel decided to go with the Austrian BOFs, and built two of them at the Warren plant. (One of them was put out of commission by a fire at the oxygen plant, maybe resulting from a failure to keep it squeaky clean.) My father, F.E. (Hank) Stephens, was chief combustion engineer of Republic Steel at the time, and oversaw their construction. He also had redesigned the blast furnace in a way that radically increased its production of raw iron.

Where was Sheet & Tube? I know that they were still using Bessemer converters in 1960. I saw them in use through the window of an Erie Railroad passenger car. Bessemer steel has a serious major flaw. The high nitrogen content makes it quite brittle at low temperatures. The Bessemer process had been obsolete for 60 years. It strikes me that, unless radical action was taken, the mill’s demise had been telegraphed since WWII.

JEROME K. STEPHENS

Warren