So the scope of the electric furnace reaches from the costly but comparatively valueless diamond to the cheap but indispensable steel.  As F.J.  Tone says, if the automobile manufacturers were deprived of Niagara products, the abrasives, aluminum, acetylene for welding and high-speed tool steel, a factory now turning out five hundred cars a day would be reduced to one hundred.  I have here been chiefly concerned with electricity as effecting chemical changes in combining or separating elements, but I must not omit to mention its rapidly extending use as a source of heat, as in the production and casting of steel.  In 1908 there were only fifty-five tons of steel produced by the electric furnace in the United States, but by 1918 this had risen to 511,364 tons.  And besides ordinary steel the electric furnace has given us alloys of iron with the once “rare metals” that have created a new science of metallurgy.

CHAPTER XIV

METALS, OLD AND NEW

The primitive metallurgist could only make use of such metals as he found free in nature, that is, such as had not been attacked and corroded by the ubiquitous oxygen.  These were primarily gold or copper, though possibly some original genius may have happened upon a bit of meteoric iron and pounded it out into a sword.  But when man found that the red ocher he had hitherto used only as a cosmetic could be made to yield iron by melting it with charcoal he opened a new era in civilization, though doubtless the ocher artists of that day denounced him as a utilitarian and deplored the decadence of the times.

Iron is one of the most timid of metals.  It has a great disinclination to be alone.  It is also one of the most altruistic of the elements.  It likes almost every other element better than itself.  It has an especial affection for oxygen, and, since this is in both air and water, and these are everywhere, iron is not long without a mate.  The result of this union goes by various names in the mineralogical and chemical worlds, but in common language, which is quite good enough for our purpose, it is called iron rust.

[Illustration:  By courtesy Mineral Foote-Notes.

From Agricola’s “De Re Metallica 1550.”  Primitive furnace for smelting iron ore.]

Not many of us have ever seen iron, the pure metal, soft, ductile and white like silver.  As soon as it is exposed to the air it veils itself with a thin film of rust and becomes black and then red.  For that reason there is practically no iron in the world except what man has made.  It is rarer than gold, than diamonds; we find in the earth no nuggets or crystals of it the size of the fist as we find of these.  But occasionally there fall down upon us out of the clear sky great chunks of it weighing tons.  These meteorites are the mavericks of the universe.  We do not know where they come from or what sun or planet they belonged to.  They are our only visitors from space, and if all the other spheres are like these fragments we know we are alone in the universe.  For they contain rustless iron, and where iron does not rust man cannot live, nor can any other animal or any plant.