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 $133,420, and payed for
 labor $23,100, yielding a product valued at $172,080.

 In 1860 returns were made of 13 steel-making
 establishments, of which 9 were in Pennsylvania,
 2 in New York, and 2 in New Jersey. Their total
 capital amounted to $1,640,000. The number of
 hands was 748, and the cost of labor $308,736. The
 materials used cost $805,174, and produced 11,838
 tons of steel, valued at $1,778,240, an average
 of $150 per ton. (13)

 In 1960, by way of contrast, more than 99

million short tons of steel ingots were produced. The

steel industry had a capacity to produce 148,571,000

short tons of ingots, and steel was fashioned into a

myriad of products.14 Pig iron production for all of

1863, at the height of the Civil War, would have

occupied domestic facilities in 1954 for five days,

and total steel output would have taken less than one

hour to produce.15

 Whatever else the economy of 1860 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


 13Ibid., pp. cxcil-cxcvi. Emphasis added.

 14U.S. Department of Interior, Bureau of Mines,
Minerals Yearbook, 1960, I (Washington, D.C.: Government
Printing Office, 1961), p. 598.

 15Earl Morgan Richards, The Iron Ore Outlook of
the United States (Lewisburg, Pennsylvania: Buckness
University Press, 1954), pp. 8-9.