The reason why iron is able to serve this unique purpose of conveying life-giving air to all parts of the body is because it rusts so readily.  Oxidation and de-oxidation proceed so quietly that the tenderest cells are fed without injury.  The blood changes from red to blue and vice versa with greater ease and rapidity than in the corresponding alternations of social status in a democracy.  It is because iron is so rustable that it is so useful.  The factories with big scrap-heaps of rusting machinery are making the most money.  The pyramids are the most enduring structures raised by the hand of man, but they have not sheltered so many people in their forty centuries as our skyscrapers that are already rusting.

We have to carry on this eternal conflict against rust because oxygen is the most ubiquitous of the elements and iron can only escape its ardent embraces by hiding away in the center of the earth.  The united elements, known to the chemist as iron oxide and to the outside world as rust, are among the commonest of compounds and their colors, yellow and red like the Spanish flag, are displayed on every mountainside.  From the time of Tubal Cain man has ceaselessly labored to divorce these elements and, having once separated them, to keep them apart so that the iron may be retained in his service.  But here, as usual, man is fighting against nature and his gains, as always, are only temporary.  Sooner or later his vigilance is circumvented and the metal that he has extricated by the fiery furnace returns to its natural affinity.  The flint arrowheads, the bronze spearpoints, the gold ornaments, the wooden idols of prehistoric man are still to be seen in our museums, but his earliest steel swords have long since crumbled into dust.

Every year the blast furnaces of the world release 72,000,000 tons of iron from its oxides and every year a large part, said to be a quarter of that amount, reverts to its primeval forms.  If so, then man after five thousand years of metallurgical industry has barely got three years ahead of nature, and should he cease his efforts for a generation there would be little left to show that man had ever learned to extract iron from its ores.  The old question, “What becomes of all the pins?” may be as well asked of rails, pipes and threshing machines.  The end of all iron is the same.  However many may be its metamorphoses while in the service of man it relapses at last into its original state of oxidation.  To save a pound of iron from corrosion is then as much a benefit to the world as to produce another pound from the ore.  In fact it is of much greater benefit, for it takes four pounds of coal to produce one pound of steel, so whenever a piece of iron is allowed to oxidize it means that four times as much coal must be oxidized in order to replace it.  And the beds of coal will be exhausted before the beds of iron ore.