It will become evident that the collection of machinery, buildings, and equipment necessary to produce these guns in the short space of time required and at the rate of production stipulated, was an enormous task in itself. It required the production of vast quantities of raw materials and the congregating in one place of large numbers of men capable of undertaking the exceedingly intricate mechanical processes of manufacture. The success of this plan and its carrying out is due largely to the loyalty of the manufacturers who unselfishly came forward early in 1917 and agreed at the request of the Ordnance Department to turn over their plants, lock, stock, and barrel, to the requirements of the department; agreed also to undertake the manufacture of products totally unfamiliar to them; agreed likewise to lend all of their organizing ability and great material resources to the success of the plants which the United States found necessary to build in the creation of a new art, in new locations and in an extent theretofore undreamed of. THE MAKING OF A BIG GUN. Steel, of course, and steel in some of its finest forms is the basis of gun manufacture. The word "steel" for the purpose of producing guns means much more than is ordinarily carried by the word in its everyday and most commonly accepted use. Only steel of the very highest quality is suitable for gun manufacture, as was indicated previously when attention was directed to the complete reliance which the operating crews must place in their guns and the severity of the uses to which the big guns are put. Let us take a hasty trip through a big gun plant, watching the processes through which is finally evolved from the raw materials one of our hardy and efficient big guns. Entering an open-hearth furnace building at one of our big gun plants, we find two large furnaces in which the raw materials are charged. Each of these furnaces is 75 feet long and 15 feet wide, and in them in a shallow bath or pool lies the molten steel. The pool is about 33 feet long by 12 feet wide and approximately 2½ feet deep. This pool, or "bath" as it is termed, weighs approximately 60 tons and is composed of pig iron and well-selected scrap steel from previous operations. The furnace is at all times during the operation of melting these raw materials in the bath kept at such a high temperature that the eye may not look within at the molten mass without being protected with blue glass or smoked glass, exactly as when looking at the noonday sun. The eye can see nothing in the atmosphere of the bath in which the steel is being melted and refined because the temperature is so exceedingly high that it gives a light as white as that of the sun.