38
The number of steel furnaces in the United States
in 1850 was 5> all in Pennsylvania. They employed
a capital of $52,300 and 40 hands, consumed
materials of the value of $133>^20, and payed for
labor $23100, yielding a product valued at $172,080.
In i860 returns were made of 13 steel-making
establishments, of which 9 were in Pennsylvania,
2 in New York, end 2 in New Jersey. Tlieir total
capital amounted to $1,640,000. The number of
hands was 7^8, and the cost of labor $308,736. The
materials used cost $809,17b, and produced 11,838
tons of steel, valued at $1,778,240, an average
of $150 per ton.(13)
In i960, by way of contrast, more than 99
million short tons of steel ingots were produced. The
steel industry had a capacity to produce lb8,571,000
short tons of ingots, and steel was fashioned into a
lb
myriad of products. Pig iron production for all of
I863, at the height of the Civil War, would have
occupied domestic facilities in 195b for five days,
and total steel output would have taken less than one
hour to produce.^
Whatever else the economy of i860 might have
been, it was not an economy based heavily upon metals
nor dependent upon the consumption of great quantities
of mineral fuels. But conditions were particularly
appropriate for the development of what has come to be
called "mass production," a process dependent upon
13
Ibid., pp. cxcil-cxcvi. Emphasis added.
lb
U.S. Department of Interior, Bureau of Mines,
Minerals Yearbook, 1960, I (Washington, D.C.: Government
Printing Office, 1961), p. 598.
15
Earl Morgan Richards, The Iron Ore Outlook of
the United States (Lewisburg, Pennsylvania: Buckness
University Press, 195b), pp. 8-9