Word: steel
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Kaiser out-inferno Dante. When a pipelike lance stabs the molten iron with a Mach 2 jet of high-pressure oxygen, the cauldrons burst into a maelstrom of 3,000° metal, boiling noxious smoke and spewing fireworks. The process not only enables steelmen to cook a batch of steel in 40 minutes instead of six to ten hours in an open-hearth furnace but produces metal with fewer strength-sapping impurities as well...
...production bugs stymied its use until recently. The ordinary method of casting is to pour the metal into ingot molds to harden, strip away the mold, reheat the ingot and roll it into semifinished shapes. Continuous casting eliminates these cumbersome steps. A ladle atop a tower pours white-hot steel into a 2-to-4-ft-deep oscillatfhg copper-lined mold. As the mold bottom is withdrawn, an unbroken billet of barely crusted steel creeps down through cooling water sprays and over rollers to burners, which slice it, still red-hot, into handy lengths. The technique has cut production costs...
...AUTOMATED ROLLING MILLS. In the most widely used of steel's new bag of tricks, everything in a half mile of machinery is computer-controlled. At hotstrip mills, such as Inland Steel's at Indiana Harbor near Chicago, a serpent-like tongue of red-hot steel is shot at up to 44 m.p.h. through rollers that squeeze it out from 32 to 3,560 ft. and thin it from ten inches to less than one inch in four minutes. At the end of the line, a coiling machine rolls the steel spaghetti into a compact bundle. This automated...
Battling back against market inroads by aluminum, plastics and concrete, steelmen are also pushing thinner but stronger wire cable, lighter structural girders, even tinless cans coated with resins. Having upped its research staff from 274 to 700 persons, Bethlehem Steel in the last year has brought out a corrosion-resistant sheet steel cheaper than some alloys, devised a plastic coating to protect suspension-bridge cables from the weather. U.S. Steel has just introduced a spiral nail which not only fastens lumber more securely but provides up to 29% more nails per pound than the smooth-shank variety. And Crucible Steel...
Thus, despite its problems with cheap foreign imports and its heavy dependence for sales on one market-autos take 20% of steel shipments-the steel industry is increasingly confident that technology can rescue its fortunes...