As I became acquainted with the manufacture of iron I was greatly surprised to find that the cost of each of the various processes was unknown.  Inquiries made of the leading manufacturers of Pittsburgh proved this.  It was a lump business, and until stock was taken and the books balanced at the end of the year, the manufacturers were in total ignorance of results.  I heard of men who thought their business at the end of the year would show a loss and had found a profit, and vice-versa.  I felt as if we were moles burrowing in the dark, and this to me was intolerable.  I insisted upon such a system of weighing and accounting being introduced throughout our works as would enable us to know what our cost was for each process and especially what each man was doing, who saved material, who wasted it, and who produced the best results.

To arrive at this was a much more difficult task than one would imagine.  Every manager in the mills was naturally against the new system.  Years were required before an accurate system was obtained, but eventually, by the aid of many clerks and the introduction of weighing scales at various points in the mill, we began to know not only what every department was doing, but what each one of the many men working at the furnaces was doing, and thus to compare one with another.  One of the chief sources of success in manufacturing is the introduction and strict maintenance of a perfect system of accounting so that responsibility for money or materials can be brought home to every man.  Owners who, in the office, would not trust a clerk with five dollars without having a check upon him, were supplying tons of material daily to men in the mills without exacting an account of their stewardship by weighing what each returned in the finished form.

The Siemens Gas Furnace had been used to some extent in Great Britain for heating steel and iron, but it was supposed to be too expensive.  I well remember the criticisms made by older heads among the Pittsburgh manufacturers about the extravagant expenditure we were making upon these new-fangled furnaces.  But in the heating of great masses of material, almost half the waste could sometimes be saved by using the new furnaces.  The expenditure would have been justified, even if it had been doubled.  Yet it was many years before we were followed in this new departure; and in some of those years the margin of profit was so small that the most of it was made up from the savings derived from the adoption of the improved furnaces.

Our strict system of accounting enabled us to detect the great waste possible in heating large masses of iron.  This improvement revealed to us a valuable man in a clerk, William Borntraeger, a distant relative of Mr. Kloman, who came from Germany.  He surprised us one day by presenting a detailed statement showing results for a period, which seemed incredible.  All the needed labor in preparing this statement he had performed at night unasked and unknown to us.  The form adapted was uniquely original.  Needless to say, William soon became superintendent of the works and later a partner, and the poor German lad died a millionaire.  He well deserved his fortune.