The Harris-Ingram Experiment Part 24

After breakfast, served in true American style, the Ingrams glanced at the big morning papers crowded with American news, and wondered why European papers printed so little about the States. Then they retired to their rooms to break the seal of the blue envelope.

George was all attention as his young wife with the flush of health and excitement in her cheeks tore apart the envelope, and stepping to the window for better light, she began to read Reuben Harris's letter.

Paris--

_Dear George and Gertrude_,--

The acc.u.mulation of my fortune, now largely invested in prime securities, has been a surprise and often a burden to me, and with it came, as I now clearly see, great responsibilities.

Money is power, and most people zealously seek it. Many fail to get it, and often those who do succeed, fail to keep it. Wealth unsought comes only to a few, while others, with perhaps hereditary financial instincts, pursue with certainty of success the golden fleece.

My early experiences with poverty, and now with wealth, and my late extensive observations have impressed upon me, as never before, the common brotherhood of mankind. The great problem of our age is the proper administration of wealth, so that the ties of brotherhood may still bind together the rich and poor in harmonious relations. What shall be the laws of acc.u.mulation and distribution? To decide this wisely the discretion of our present and future legislators will be heavily burdened.

The condition of many races is better to-day on the foundations on which society is built, than on the old ones tried and abandoned. What were yesterday's luxuries are to-day's necessities. The poor enjoy to-day what yesterday even the rich could not afford. Mankind always has exhibited great irregularities. In every race some are born with an energy and ability to produce wealth, others not. Invention and discovery have replaced scarcity and dearness with abundance and cheapness. The law of compet.i.tion seems to cheapen comforts and luxuries.

Both labor and capital are organizing, concentrating, competing. The idealist may dream of what is attainable in the future, but our duty is plainly with what is practicable now. My prayer is for wisdom and ability to administer wisely our wealth, during my life-time. I am therefore resolved to act as follows:--

1st. To retain for my family only what will provide modestly for them all. I do not wish to leave much property for my relatives to use prodigally, or to quarrel over.

2nd. I plan not to wait till I die and then leave behind for public purposes money which I cannot take with me. I shall consider myself as an agent, or trustee, in charge of certain surplus funds to be expended in behalf of my poorer brethren.

On our return to America, Mrs. Harris and I will make our wills in accordance with the above. It is our desire that, when you reach home, you both enter at once upon the development of your plans, of a cooperative manufacturing corporation, in accordance with the views which you have so frequently mentioned. In the execution of these plans, you may use, if necessary, five millions. With best wishes for your happiness.

Your father,

Reuben Harris.

The writing of this letter gave Colonel Harris more pleasure than any act of his life; in fact it was for him the beginning of a new life; a life for others.

The reading of the letter also gave George and Gertrude much happiness, for it furnished them abundant means for the execution of their beneficent plans, which had been thoroughly considered by the Harris family. This important letter was returned to the blue envelope and given to Gertrude for safe keeping, and it was agreed to leave for Harrisville next day at 1 o'clock on the Chicago Special.

Among the personals in the Harrisville Sunday paper appeared the following:

Arrived from Europe Sat.u.r.day morning, Mr. and Mrs. George Ingram. It is needless to say that their many friends will give them cordial welcome.

Colonel and Mrs. Reuben Harris, their son and daughter, Alfonso and Lucille, will remain in Europe for several weeks.

This notice, though brief, was of much interest to rich and poor in Harrisville. Society, of course, was interested in the marriage of Gertrude, business men in the return of so skilled a manufacturer as George Ingram, and many workmen, still unemployed, hoped that their old superintendent whom they loved would find or make positions for them.

The continued absence of Colonel Harris the financier aided George Ingram in certain important negotiations which he proceeded quietly to make, viz., the purchase in the suburbs of Harrisville, in fifty parcels, of 4,000 acres of contiguous land, that had both a river and a lake front.

While these purchases were being made, agents were dispatched into several Ohio counties, and more than 20,000 acres of well tested coal lands were secured. When it was learned that all these lands were bought in the name of George Ingram, and paid for in cash, the wisacres of the city began to say, "I told you so; these monopolists having visited England have adopted foreign ideas, and now they have returned to buy and hold our valuable lands." George Ingram was reticent, as most successful business men are, for he gave attention to business. "Talkers are no great doers," wrote Shakespeare.

The offices of the old Harrisville Iron & Steel Co. had been rented to other parties, so a suite of rooms near by was occupied by George Ingram and his five a.s.sistants. It had leaked out, however, that Ingram had given orders for twenty millions of brick and a large quant.i.ty of structural iron and copper tubes, all to be delivered within four months.

The order for copper tubes puzzled even the wisest in Harrisville. Later, when a thousand laborers were set at work on the river front of his purchase, building extensive foundations, it dawned upon the expectant that a gigantic plant for some purpose was to be erected near Harrisville. Newspaper reporters found it difficult to reach George Ingram, even with a card, which would be returned with the reply "Busy to-day. Please excuse me."

In the meantime Harrisville agreed to create a more available harbor, and to establish dock lines, not less than 500 feet apart, and in three years to dredge the river to a depth of 25 feet for five miles back from the lake.

George Ingram in his own mind had settled three vital points; that Harrisville was one of the most favorable producing and distributing centers in America; that he would so design and build a manufacturing plant as to minimize the cost of production; that he would attempt to harmonize capital and labor. Important provisions of the Company's charter were:

ARTICLE III

The capital stock of this Corporation shall be Five Million Dollars ($5,000,000) to be divided into Five Hundred Thousand Shares at Ten Dollars each, fully paid, and non-a.s.sessable.

ARTICLE VI

The private property of stockholders shall be exempt from any and all debts of this Corporation.

Two thousand of the four thousand acres purchased were set apart for manufacturing purposes. Most of the land sloped gradually, and the surface-water naturally drained into the river. George Ingram's plans for an enormous steel-plant had been most carefully worked out in detail.

Night and day the construction went forward. In eight months the plant was in full operation. He had obtained the latest important labor-saving devices and improved facilities in use throughout America and Europe. The whole was supplemented by the inventions already perfected by his father and himself.

The Harris-Ingram Steel Co. was provided with every modern device that could in any manner contribute economy and rapidity from the time the ores left the s.h.i.+p, till the finished product was loaded for market. All ores and limestone were delivered on a tableland of the same height, and adjacent to a series of several enormous blast-furnaces. The melted iron from the blast-furnaces was tapped into ladles mounted on iron cars, and provided with mechanism for tipping the ladles. The molten iron of the cars was next transferred to improved converters in an adjoining building, constructed entirely of iron. Nearby were the spiegel cupolas.

The greatest possible accuracy was thus attainable in delivering definite quant.i.ties of molten iron into the converter for a given blow, also of spiegeleisen. This was easily accomplished by standing the ladle cars upon scales.

The metal was cast into ingot moulds, standing upon cars, and then transferred to the mould stripper; afterwards the ingots were weighed and sent to the soaking-pit furnaces. After a "wash heat" the ingots, or blooms, entered the rolls, and were drawn and sized in shape to fill orders from every part of the world.

The marvel at the Harris-Ingram Steel Co.'s mills was that electricity, developed in vast quant.i.ties at the coal mines and conveyed on patented copper tubes, furnished all the power, heat, and light used in the entire plant. Electricity hoisted and melted all the ores; it worked Sturtevant fans and blowing engines, which supplied necessary air for cupolas and converters. Electricity furnished all the power requisite to handle innumerable cranes and cars. As easily as a magnet picks up tacks, electricity also handled ingots or finished steel. Five thousand tons of finished steel per day were made and the labor and fuel account had been reduced over one-half.

While the huge steel plant at Harrisville was being constructed, a large force of men were building a conduit to protect copper tubes, from the steel plant to the coal fields. At the mines hundreds of miners were set at work, several shafts were sunk, and tunnels, levels, and winzes were developed.

George Ingram believed that all the force in the world available for man's use was derived from the sun; so he heroically resolved to hitch his wagon, if not to a star, to the mighty sun. With this purpose in view, he had bought the 20,000 acres of coal land. Half of this area was located in Jefferson, Harrison, and Belmont counties on the Ohio River, and thus t.i.tle was secured to vast quant.i.ties of fossil power in the upper coal measures, which ignites quickly and burns with a hot fire. The other 10,000 acres were valuable because nearer to Harrisville. This coal came from lower measures or seams.

George Ingram had made a thorough study of coal, or fossil fuel, its formation and value. The coal of the carboniferous age is derived almost entirely from the family of plants called _Lycopods_, or club mosses, and the ferns, which back in high antiquity attained gigantic size. The microscope has clearly developed this vegetable origin of coal. The great Appalachian and other coal fields are without doubt, the long continued and vigorous forest growths, and subsequent fossilization of the same in the marginal swamps of ancient gulfs or seas.

The agency of transfer for solar energy is the vegetable kingdom. The vegetable cell has the surprising property through the sun's agency of being able to live and multiply itself on air alone. The carbon of carbonic acid, a const.i.tuent of the atmosphere, is so liberated and appropriated, as to become fixed in the forming tissues of plants. Thus the plant is a storer of light and heat, a reservoir of force. It mediates between the sun's energy and the animal life of the world. Thus coal seams are the acc.u.mulations of the sun's energy for thousands of centuries, requiring the patient growth and slow decay of hundreds of immense forests. One secret of the unprecedented late growth of cities is discovered in the steam engine, or the coal which feeds it.

A pound of good coal, used in a good engine, stands for the work of six horses for an hour; a ton of coal for the work of thirteen hundred horses for a day of ten hours; ten thousand tons of coal, used in a day by single lines of railways, stand for the work of thirteen million horses, working ten hours a day. In 1894 the English mines produced 188,277,525 tons of coal. In Great Britain alone, coal does the work of more than a hundred millions of men, and adds proportionately to the fabulously increasing wealth of those fortunate islands.

The Ingrams had solved two important problems, and on their practicable application depended the success of the great Harris-Ingram experiment.

The more important of the two was the unlocking of the sun's stored energy, electricity, at the coal mines. The second was a device for conveying this energy from the mines to the steel plant, and it had been patented to protect it.

Since electricity possibly travels on the surface of wires or metals, the Ingrams patented a valuable device of small corrugated copper tubes, strengthened in the center by steel wires, and thus the carrying capacity of electricity was greatly increased, and the amount of costly copper much decreased. These corrugated tubes enclosed in cheap gla.s.s, and surrounded with oil, were laid in properly prepared conduits of vitrified fire-clay sewer pipes. Without the intervention of the steam engine, by a surprisingly simple process, electrical force was liberated chemically at the mines and transferred for multiple uses at the steel plant.

Expensive coal-freights were thus saved. All the slack coal was utilized, and instead of the waste of nine-tenths of the stored energy of the coal, only one tenth was now lost. To husband properly the fruits of so great a discovery, it was decided not to patent this latter invention, which if disclosed would give too great publicity to the details.

The electrical works at the mines were constructed of safe-steel walls and roof, and so built that the operations of generating electricity directly from coal were conducted in secret in several separate apartments, so that no single operator without the knowledge of all the initiated employees would be able to successfully work the inventions.

The dozen initiated employees had made life long contracts with the company in consideration of liberal and satisfactory rewards. The Harris-Ingram Steel Co. thus equipped began operations.

CHAPTER XXIII

"GOLD MARRIES GOLD"

Alfonso Harris was content to leave his friends to continue their journey, as they were willing that he should return to the Netherlands, or to Amsterdam, where lived the beautiful woman who had won his heart.

Christine de Ruyter cordially welcomed Alfonso back to study art as he expressed it to her on the first evening after his arrival. Alfonso was much in Christine's society, at art exhibits, in carriage drives, and on pleasure boat excursions down the bay. Weeks went by before he could summon courage enough to ask Christine's hand in marriage.

In the game of hearts Alfonso thought himself an able combatant. He had studied Christine in action and in repose, in society, and when alone under his protection at Scheveningen, and at home, and he prided himself that he knew at least one woman thoroughly. She loved art, flowers, music, and fine dress, and was very ambitious. The latter trait was doubtless inbred from her distinguished naval relatives.