In the converters the metalloids--silicon, manganese, and carbon--are burned out of the iron under a flaming heat which, by means of high air pressure, is brought to a temperature of about 3400 degrees. It is the blowing of these converters, and the occasional pouring of them, which throws the Vesuvian glow upon the skies of Birmingham at night. The heat they give off is beyond description. Several hundred feet away you feel it smiting viciously upon your face, and the concrete flooring of the huge shed in which they stand is so hot as to burn your feet through the soles of your shoes. The most elaborate display of fireworks ever devised by Mr. Pain would be but a poor thing compared with the spectacle presented when a converter is poured. The whole world glows with golden heat, and is filled with an explosion of brilliant sparks, and as the molten metal passes out into the sunlight that light is by contrast so feeble that it seems almost to cast a shadow over the white-hot vats of iron. Next come the tilting open-hearth furnaces, where the iron is subjected to the action of lime at a very high temperature. This removes the phosphorus and leaves a bath of commercially pure iron which is then "teemed" into a hundred-ton ladle, wherein it is treated in such a way as to give it the properties required in the finished steel. What these properties may be, depends, of course, upon the purpose to which the steel is to be put. Rails, for example, must, above all, resist abrasion, and consequently have a higher carbon content than, say, reinforcing bars for concrete work. To obtain various qualities in steel are added carbon, ferro-manganese, or ferro-silicon in proportions differing according to requirements. In the next process steel ingots are made. I lost track of the exact detail of this, but I remember seeing the ingots riding about in their own steel cars, turning to an orange color as they cooled, and I remember seeing them pounded by a hammer that stood up in the air like an elevated railroad station, and I know that pretty soon they got into the blooming mill and were rolled out into "blooms," after which they were handled by a huge contrivance like a thumb and forefinger of steel which--though the blooms weigh five tons apiece--picked them up much as you might pick up a stick of red candy.