The Lucy Furnace was out of one trouble and into another, owing to the great variety of ores, limestone, and coke which were then supplied with little or no regard to their component parts.  This state of affairs became intolerable to us.  We finally decided to dispense with the rule-of-thumb-and-intuition manager, and to place a young man in charge of the furnace.  We had a young shipping clerk, Henry M. Curry, who had distinguished himself, and it was resolved to make him manager.

Mr. Phipps had the Lucy Furnace under his special charge.  His daily visits to it saved us from failure there.  Not that the furnace was not doing as well as other furnaces in the West as to money-making, but being so much larger than other furnaces its variations entailed much more serious results.  I am afraid my partner had something to answer for in his Sunday morning visits to the Lucy Furnace when his good father and sister left the house for more devotional duties.  But even if he had gone with them his real earnest prayer could not but have had reference at times to the precarious condition of the Lucy Furnace then absorbing his thoughts.

The next step taken was to find a chemist as Mr. Curry’s assistant and guide.  We found the man in a learned German, Dr. Fricke, and great secrets did the doctor open up to us.  Iron stone from mines that had a high reputation was now found to contain ten, fifteen, and even twenty per cent less iron than it had been credited with.  Mines that hitherto had a poor reputation we found to be now yielding superior ore.  The good was bad and the bad was good, and everything was topsy-turvy.  Nine tenths of all the uncertainties of pig-iron making were dispelled under the burning sun of chemical knowledge.

At a most critical period when it was necessary for the credit of the firm that the blast furnace should make its best product, it had been stopped because an exceedingly rich and pure ore had been substituted for an inferior ore—­an ore which did not yield more than two thirds of the quantity of iron of the other.  The furnace had met with disaster because too much lime had been used to flux this exceptionally pure ironstone.  The very superiority of the materials had involved us in serious losses.

What fools we had been!  But then there was this consolation:  we were not as great fools as our competitors.  It was years after we had taken chemistry to guide us that it was said by the proprietors of some other furnaces that they could not afford to employ a chemist.  Had they known the truth then, they would have known that they could not afford to be without one.  Looking back it seems pardonable to record that we were the first to employ a chemist at blast furnaces—­something our competitors pronounced extravagant.