The Johnstown Horror!!!: or, Valley of Death, being A Complete and Thrilling Account; of the Awful Floods and Their Appalling RuinWalker, James Herbert
History
The Johnstown Horror!!!: or, Valley of Death, being A Complete and Thrilling Account; of the Awful Floods and Their Appalling Ruin
About ten years ago the Cambria Iron Company arranged with Dr. J.H.
Gautier & Sons, of Jersey City, to organize a limited partnership
association under the name of "The Gautier Steel Company, Limited," to
manufacture, at Johnstown, wire and various other forms of merchant
steel. Within less than a mile from the main works extensive mills were
erected and the business soon grew to great proportions. In a few years
so much additional capital was required, owing to the rapidly increasing
business, that Dr. Gautier, then far advanced in life, wished to be
relieved of the cares and duties incident to the growing trade, and the
Cambria Iron Company became the purchaser of his works. "The Gautier
Steel Company, Limited," went out of existence and the works are now
known as the "Gautier Steel Department of Cambria Iron Company."
Description of the Works.
The blast furnaces, steel works and rolling mills of the company are
situated upon what was originally a river flat, where the valley of the
Conemaugh expanded somewhat just below the borough of Johnstown, and now
forming part of Millville Borough. The arrangement of the works has been
necessarily governed by the fact that they have gradually expanded from
the original rolling-mill and four old style blast furnaces to their
present character and capacity of which some idea may be obtained by the
condensed description given below.
The Johnstown furnaces, Nos. 1, 2, 3 and 4, form one complete plant,
with stacks seventy-five feet high, sixteen feet diameter of bosh. Steam
is generated in forty boilers, fired by furnace gas, for eight vertical
direct-acting blowing engines. Nos. 5 and 6 blast furnaces form together
a second plant with stacks seventy-five feet high, nineteen feet
diameter of bosh. No. 5 has iron hot blast stoves and No. 6 has four
Whitwell fire-brick hot blast stoves. The furnaces have together six
blowing engines exactly like those at Nos. 1, 2, 3 and 4 furnaces. The
engines are supplied with steam by thirty-two cylinder boilers.
Marvelous Machinery.
The Bessemer plant was the sixth started in the United States (July,
1871). The main building is 102 feet in width by 165 feet in length. The
cupolas are six in number. Blast is supplied from eight Baker rotary
pressure blowers driven by engines sixteen inches by twenty-four inches,
at 110 revolutions per minute. The cupolas are located on either side of
the main trough, into which they are tapped, and down which the melted
metal is directed into a ten-ton ladle set on a hydraulic weighing
platform, where it is stored until the converters are ready to receive
it. There are two vessels of eight and a half tons capacity each, the
products being distributed by a hydraulic ladle crane. The vessels are
blown by three engines. The Bessemer works are supplied with steam by a
battery of twenty-one tubular boilers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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