Of course, the making of steel is no new story, but this is wire steel--the high carbon, the tough, the sinewy, the resilient, that must carry in itself as it moves along through these interminable buildings the analytically measured proportions of this or that, which fit it to bear up the traffic of a giant bridge or convey a whisper of telephonic sound or register split seconds in an Elgin timepiece. It is "pig," and ore and "scrap," but just what kind and just how much of "scrap" and ore and "pig," these are subtle questions. It costs a lot of time and money sometimes to answer them. When the thirty-five hundred and odd degrees of heat in the long rows of open hearth furnaces have brought this stubborn mixture to bubbling and seething like a busy kettle of soup--a workman adding a little manganese or other ingredient to the broth now and then, grimy men with long handled steel dippers take out a few thimblefuls from time to time and hurry the sample away to the chemist, who, like a chef, tests the quality and prescribes the seasoning. By and by it is run off, from an opening in the bottom of the furnace into a huge caldron they call a "ladle." A fifty-ton crane conveys it down the long, shadowy building, to halt above a group of tall moulds. A wizard up in the gloom under the roof moves it from mould to mould, a few inches at a time, while the liquid steel is drawn from the bottom into one after another. The moulds are left to cool. [Sidenote: BLOOMS] Its history is now begun. It is an ingot--many ingots--and when removed from the mould is loaded on steel cars and borne away on its journey. When in due course the ingot comes to the "blooming mill" it is fourteen inches thick each way and five feet long. Heated again, it is marched up on a steel rollway, also controlled by a "man higher up," and into the hungry jaws of a machine that, after a series of swallowings, disgorges it at last, shrunken in sheer humility to a diameter of four inches and with a very long face--some forty-eight feet to be exact. And no wonder. In the process it has been kneaded into a dozen different phases of flatness and squareness, and put in a way to profit by the everlasting squeezing and stretching it is to undergo. Now it is a bloom. [Sidenote: BILLETS] Again it is passed on, and from some subterranean blackness you see it rushed out and up to a sort of guillotine that first cuts off the flawy ends, where the impurities accumulated in its ingot state, and sends them to the "scrap" heap, then lops the bloom as a man saws firewood, but a great deal faster, into billets varying from one to four hundred pounds in weight. They are "billets" now, and at last are counted the raw material of wire, even after such an inferno of cooking. A steel loader gathers them up, carries them away in bunches and, by a trick of wire pulling, deposits them on other cars in rows as regular as the pickets on an old fashioned fence. [Sidenote: THROUGH THE ROLLING MILL]