Homestead and Duquesne

Homestead:

Carnegie bought Homestead Steel Works from the Pittsburgh Steel Company in 1883. After acquiring the plant, he immediately began outfitting the plant to increase production. Firstly, he diversified the products produced by his plants by shifting the focus of Homestead from steel rails to creating beams and plates.¹ The plant was also outfitted with four open hearth furnaces, completed in 1886. The furnaces were modified to use natural gas, simplifying the design and taking advantage of the abundant natural gas in the Pittsburgh area.² Sometime in the mid 1890s, large overhead cranes were installed in the plant to aid in the movement of steel billets.

By 1902, the Carnegie Homestead Works was the largest open hearth shop in the world.³ To achieve this, the plant needed a lot of iron. Homestead was self-sufficient when it came to iron production, but Carnegie continued to look for ways to improve output and save costs, which he found. In a report from William Shinn in 1876 regarding the Edgar Thomson’s first year of operation, the value of scrap metal produced by the plant was estimated to be worth $102,806.25, which was around 5% of the value of the entire company.⁴ Unfortunately, the Bessemer converters couldn’t do anything with the scrap metal. However, the open hearth furnaces at Homestead could. By melting down and reusing the scrap, Carnegie could increase production at the Homestead plant for no additional cost.

The ore yard of a steel plant, similar to the one that would have been at the Duquesne plant

Duquesne:

In 1895, the Carnegie Steel Company set out to build the best blast furnace plant in the nation. The plant, built at Duquesne, would be capable of producing about 220,000 tons of metal per year. That is the equivalent of around 600 tons of iron per day, with competing plants averaging around 300 to 400 tons of daily output.⁵ Standing in the way of this projected output was the uncomfortable truth that production using existing methods had reached its limits. Of course, this wouldn’t stop Carnegie, who sought out new ways to further increase production.

The largest limitation to greater steel output was feeding the furnaces with enough raw material. The men working at the plant could not keep up with the increased demands of the plant, so the mechanization of their jobs was a necessity.⁶ Building upon methods developed at Edgar Thomson and Homestead, the Duquesne plant revolutionized how raw materials were processed. These upgrades became known as the “Duquesne Revolution” and became the model for America’s future ironmaking plants.⁷

The Duquesne Revolution was largely achieved through a redesign of the furnaces’ charging system. The charging system of a blast furnace is the mechanism by which the raw materials are loaded into the furnace. The new charging system used cylindrical buckets which were loaded with the raw materials from the stock house and then transported to the hoist house. Once there, they would be transported up a moving belt to the top of the furnace.⁸ The new charging system was effective. In less than a month after its implementation, the output of Duquesne’s furnace number one set a world record for producing 572 tons of iron in a single day.⁹