State judiciary websites, state offices of Vital Statistics, and a state-by-state guide to obtaining corporate fillings make up the rest of this book. This legal encyclopedia is written in narrative form and arranged topically with citations to statutes, administrative law and cases.
Steel sold for twenty-five cents a pound. The ironmasters mined little coal and baked no coke. Not an ounce of iron had been made in Wheeling, Youngstown, Cleveland, or Chicago--the latter being a fur-trading village, without harbour or railroad. Birmingham, Alabama, was not on the map until two-score years later.
There was not a foot of railroad near Pittsburgh, and not one rail, either of iron or steel, had been produced in any part of the country.
As late as the beginning of the Civil War, what was called a first-class furnace would cost about fifty thousand dollars, employ seventy men, and produce a thousand tons of iron a year.
The business was conducted, not by corporations, but by individual ironmasters, who ruled in a truly feudal way over their small communities. There were no millionaires, and what little money an iron-maker had was liable to become waste paper at any moment by the collapse of a rickety bank.
Four furnaces out of five were haunted by the spectre of debt; and in a bad year, like orscores of furnaces were blown out. The tariff, too, was even more variable than the currency. It was raised and lowered by the fitful gusts of politics untilwhen the Morrill tariff first gave some chance of stability to the unfortunate industry.
With the Civil War came the first large orders and continuous business. Every plant was run night and day. Of the three billion dollars that the war cost the Federal Government, a goodly share went to the iron men.
Uncle Sam was the best customer they had ever known. They had a surplus in the bank, at last--a store of capital which enabled them to do business on a larger scale. When the smoke of battle had cleared away, Captain Eber B. Ward, of Detroit, loomed up as the first of the iron kings, with several millions to his credit and three flourishing plants, in Chicago, Detroit, and Milwaukee.
The marvellous modern expansion of the iron and steel industry was now about to begin. The germ of its stupendous growth lay in the invention of the Bessemer process. This was more than a trade problem. The railroads were using iron rails, which wore out in less than two years.
The largest locomotive of that time would today be considered little more than a toy. There were no skyscrapers and no subways, and stages were practically the only street-cars. Neither wood nor iron was fit for the new uses of the growing republic; and the high cost of steel made it almost as much out of the question as silver.
The greatest need of the world was cheap steel. At this juncture an answer to the universal demand was voiced by the inventive genius of two men--William Kelly, a Pittsburgh Irish-American, and Sir Henry Bessemer, an Englishman of French descent.
They devised a new way to refine iron, which has since been known as the Bessemer process. Their discovery was an entirely new idea and one which at first seemed absurd to every other steel-maker; but within a few years it was universally adopted, revolutionising the iron and steel trade, and providing the world with a cheap and abundant supply of its most useful metal.
It expanded the industry with almost the suddenness of an explosion, and for the first time in the long history of steel-making the steelsmiths were fairly swept off their feet by a flood of riches.
Hundreds of individuals were picked up--by merit, by luck, or by chance--and flung upon the golden thrones of an international empire of steel. Kelly's father was a well-to-do landowner in Pittsburgh, where it is said that he erected the first two brick houses in the city.
At the time when William Kelly began to make iron, he was thirty-six years old--a tall, well-set-up, muscular, energetic man, with blue eyes and close-cropped beard. In inventiveness his brain ranked high; in business ability, low. He had left a commission business and become an iron maker mainly to carry out a process which he had invented, by which larger sugarkettles were to be made.
The "Kelly kettles" became well known among the Southern farmers. He had married Miss Mildred A. Gracy, of Eddyville, and secured the financial backing of his wealthy father-in-law. His iron plant was a fairly good one, close to high-grade ore, and needing the work of about three hundred negro slaves.
Kelly was strongly opposed to slavery, and tried to escape being a slaveholder by importing Chinese. He was the first employer in this country to make this experiment, and found it successful; but international complications prevented him from putting it into practice on a larger scale.
Kelly's first aim was to make good wrought iron, for his kettles and for customers in Cincinnati.As we enter into the three most sacred days of the liturgical year, when Christ entered into His Passion and death, it may be helpful to consider the difference between the Reformed and Catholic conceptions of Christ’s Passion and Atonement.
Seven of the 12 jurors who convicted Ronald B. Smith of murder of a convenience store clerk in Alabama voted to not invoke the death penalty. Unlike other states, Alabama.
A. The states that emerged in core civilizations welded great power over people's lives and came to reinforce the inequalities that first developed with the advent of agriculture.
The god of Muslims is revealed as a tyrant who demands Muslims and all others submit to him. Whereas in the New Testament, Jesus revealed to Christians a God who is a loving Father, who wants us to come to Him via free will.
IOANNES PAULUS PP. II EVANGELIUM VITAE To the Bishops Priests and Deacons Men and Women religious lay Faithful and all People of Good Will on the Value and Inviolability. A collection of scholarly works about individual liberty and free markets. A project of Liberty Fund, Inc. Facsimile PDF MB This is a facsimile or image-based PDF made from scans of the original book.
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