Returning now to the matter of handling raw materials from the stock piles to the barrows, this, as has already been stated, was at first done exclusively with shovels, but when the introduction of railroad transportation replaced the delivery of the raw materials to the plant by team, it was soon found necessary to elevate the tracks on trestles to facilitate unloading the material from the cars.

The cars were at first of the flat-bottom type, but very soon hopper-bottom cars, the prototypes of those in use to-day, were introduced. For these trestles became absolutely necessary. It was then a short step to install bins underneath these trestles, into which the materials could be dumped directly from the cars, and from which, in turn, they could be drawn directly into filling barrows without hand shoveling.

This eliminated probably fifty per cent. of the labor of filling, and, considering the great returns which the investment in bins pays in the form of labor saved, it is surprising that their introduction was not more rapid, but at the time of the Duquesne revolution many plants which considered themselves modern and well equipped were still handling their raw materials largely or wholly by hand. Since that time, however, the use of bins in large plants has become practically universal.

It will be seen that the order in which we have followed these developments, in the hoisting of the material, in its transportation from the stock house to the furnace, and in its delivery into the means of conveyance in the stock house, is the reverse of their logical order. But this is the way the development actually occurred chronologically, and to consider them in this order is perhaps justified on this account.

In discussing the development of mechanical filling, it is now necessary to revert to the subject of the delivery of the ore, for so large a part of the ore in this country is transported by water, and only during a relatively brief season, that this has had profound influence, not only on the handling of the ore at the ports of receipt, but also at the blast-furnaces, because the machinery which was developed for unloading the boats was found almost equally valuable, with slight modifications, at the blast-furnace also.

The conditions of water transportation imposed two difficulties on this traffic. First, the difficulty of unloading ore from the holds of vessels well below the water line, lifting it to a sufficient elevation and transporting it to a sufficient distance to enable it to be deposited in a stock pile, and, second, the necessity of doing this in the least possible time.

As has so often happened in industrial history, the solution of these difficulties resulted in an eventual benefit of enormous importance to the industry concerned. Less than a generation ago, boats of two or three thousand tons, the largest then in service on the Great Lakes, could be unloaded only by shoveling the ore by hand into tubs, hoisting these with whips, dumping them on the wharf and then wheeling the ore up an incline onto the stock pile. This took vast quantities of labor, and as the men required physical stamina and endurance to stand up under this work there was a limited market from which this labor could be drawn, and as a consequence the supply was always below the demand. This resulted, as it always does in such cases, in making the men to a very high degree arrogant, unreasonable and difficult to manage. This, in conjunction with the high wages it was necessary to pay them, made the unloading process very tedious and expensive.

During the decade beginning 1881, Alexander E. Brown began to apply his brilliant engineering ability to the problem of performing this work mechanically. His efforts met with the highest success, and other engineers, following in the path which he had blazed, developed still further the possibilities of mechanism in such work, so that while in 1885 it took about three days to unload a vessel of three thousand tons, and cost about twenty-five cents per ton, it is now possible to unload vessels with machinery designed for this purpose in a shorter time than their cargo can be spouted into them from bins on the docks at the Upper Lake ports, and at a total cost for labor, power, maintenance, interest and amortization on investment of not over four cents per ton.

In the summer of 1912 a steamer containing something over thirteen thousand tons docked at 1:15 and was unloaded and had cleared for the Upper Lakes at 4:35 on the same afternoon. Three hours and twenty minutes to remove thirteen thousand tons of material! Probably not over twenty-five men all told were employed on the task, so that the labor cost was almost negligible. This was a record at that time, though it may have been beaten since.