Pickled Snake's Tongue

In U. S. industrial history Chairman Tom Mercer Girdler of Republic Steel Corp. will ever have a place as the man who kept Little Steel from being unionized by C. I. O. in 1937. Tom Girdler hopes never to be in such a position again and one good way to forestall it is to make his $364,000,000 company less dependent upon labor. Since this is also the path of progressive technology, Tom Girdler found double delight last week in formally opening what Republic claims is the world's largest, fastest and most mechanized continuous strip steel mill. A 21-acre pile in Cleveland's desolate Cuyahoga River valley, the new $15,000,000 plant can turn out 70,000 gross tons of steel a month, but it employs a maximum of 2,000 men. And under last week's slim demand for steel, the mill operated smoothly with scarcely a man in sight for a quarter-mile at a stretch.

Strip steel (steel rolled into plates and sheets instead of steel in ingot form) is used in an ever-increasing variety of products--tanks, freight cars, automobiles, beer barrels, stoves, refrigerators, signs. Republic's new mill is designed for "tailor-made" production to meet the special demands of each customer. Raw steel arrives at the plant in slabs as long as 16 feet, as thick as six inches, as heavy as eight tons. Shoved into three furnaces at the beginning of the production line, the slabs are cooked to a white-hot 2250DEG. Then, with a thud that echoes the whole length of the plant, a slab slides from the furnaces' fiery maw onto the world's widest roller table--98 inches. Under the direction of a few men pushing buttons, it whizzes down the table considerably faster than Glenn Cunningham runs the mile. Whisssh, with a scream of scalding steam as cold water plays on it to wash off ash and scale, it dives under the first of ten "stands"-- gigantic sets of rollers each as high as a three-story house and weighing as much as 450 tons apiece. As steam billows in a cloud, the writhing slab flattens out under these successive squeezes until it is a hundred-yard ribbon, as flexible as a snake's tongue and as red.

Rippling down the long steel roller table in a shimmer of heat, it comes to the transfer table. If the strip is destined for such heavy duty as steel tanks, it is merely sheared into sections, left to cool. If it is to go into more specialized uses, such as automobile fenders, its processing has barely begun. Shooting down the roller table at 24 m.p.h., it plunges into a slot, is caught by a set of rollers in a circle and, in a red mist it coils itself into a spool, is deposited on a moving belt ready for "pickling." This is the trade's name for a brief bath in acid to wash off all scale before the sheet steel is cold-rolled under more huge "stands'' to give it proper thinness and finally annealed in another furnace to give it proper ductility and resilience.

To perform these complex functions, Republic's new mill relies chiefly on 1,420 electric motors, all of them so integrated and automatic that a few master switches control everything. To the charge that mills of this type reduce employment, Tom Girdler last week made the standard answer: "The number of men required to run the mill itself represents only a small fraction of the employment made possible by the mill."

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