Firing Up

Firing Up "Nancy dear," said U.S. Steel's Chairman Ben Fairless, "come on up here with Grandpappy and light your furnace." Before a crowd of 200 Big Steel officials, families and friends, Fairless' red-haired seven-year-old granddaughter touched an oil torch to a 6-ft. fuse, which began to sputter like a Fourth of July sparkler. Inside a giant blast furnace, the fuse ignited a stack of oil-soaked railroad ties, which in turn set fire to a charge of coke and started the furnace. A few minutes later, Nancy's sister Carol, 5, touched a button which fired a rocket through a plug in an open hearth furnace already going, and 250 tons of flaming, molten steel poured into a massive ladle. Thus last week, less than two years after groundbreaking (TIME, March 12, 1951), U.S. Steel's $450 million Fairless Works in Morrisville, Pa., went into operation.

In the tradition of the steel industry, the Fairless Works' first furnaces were given feminine names--"Nancy" and "Carol" for the granddaughters and "Hazel" for Ben Fairless' wife. Explained Fairless: "A blast furnace is always known as a lady and is named for one--not be cause the furnace is a thing of shapely beauty, exactly, but because it is inclined, at best, to be somewhat temperamental."

More than 4,000 contracting firms in 27 states had a hand in supplying materials and equipment for Big Steel's new plant; 10,000 construction workers labored on the 3,900-acre site. The Fairless Works, part of the steel industry's more than $3 billion post-Korea expansion program, has 75 miles of railroad track, 20 miles of improved roads, 30 miles of sewers, and a water-treating plant which will handle 254 million gals. of water daily, enough for a city about the size of Washington, D.C. Nearby, 20,000 new housing units are sprouting from the rich Bucks County farmland (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS).

When the Fairless Works is in full production next summer, its annual capacity will be 1,800,000 tons of steel, nearly 2% of the U.S. total and a big step toward easing the shortage (see above). By that time Ben Fairless expects the new plant to be performing such tricks as rolling a sheet of steel 4 ft. wide at a speed of 80 m.p.h., fastest in history.

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