The Scranton Iron Furnaces | Hacker News Reader

The Scranton Iron Furnaces

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109 pointsPaulHoule25 comments

I was in Scranton for a wedding earlier this year and along with visiting the Iron Furnaces, we also stopped by the Anthracite Heritage Museum [0] because we were looking for something else to do on a lazy Friday. It was interesting to learn a bunch about historic coal mining practices and people but the real surprise was about halfway through the museum the topic changed to textiles -- including some massive Jacquard looms and reels of punch cards. [1] I don't have my own photos handy, but this photo a loom from the museum with the "tape" of punch cards hiding behind the threads in the top right of the photo.

[0] http://www.anthracitemuseum.org/explore/anthracite-museum/

[1] https://uncoveringpa.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Anthraci...

From a report on the cultures and politics around the Anthracite Coal Mines at the turn of the 19th century, which is linked below and is probably the most fascinating piece of journalism I have ever read:

> Why the Mills Have Come to the Coal Regions

The factory inspector will tell you, “The mills locate in Anthracite because they all employ girls, and girl labor is cheaper here than anywhere else.” A glance at a “textile” map of Pennsylvania will show that wherever there are miners, there cluster mills that employ “cheap girl labor.”

Besides silk and hosiery a local feminine industry is the manufacture of the fuses or “squibs” which are used in coal blasting. The statistics of the nine counties of Anthracite count up 11,216 “females” employed in them, 2,403 between 12 and 16 years of age.

The perjury certificate prevails for the girls, as well as the boys, and I estimate that 90 percent of the 11,216 females are girls who have not yet reached womanhood. They work ten hours a day, and the majority stand all of that time, having a chance to sit only in the noon hour. This brings on a characteristic lameness in the girls during their first year at the mill. The report of the Secretary of Internal Affairs of the State places the “average daily wage of children between the ages of 13 and 16” employed in the manufacturing of underwear at 47 cents, in hosiery mills at 46 cents.

https://wynninghistory.com/2021/03/27/children-of-the-coal-s...

My dyslexic ass read this as scantron.

I would absolutely refer to 7th grade as a 'scantron iron furnace'.

That's funny. I read it that way too.

> The iron ore reserves near Scranton began to be depleted by the end of the 19th century.

Something mentioned in the book "The Toaster Project" (where a guy tries to build an electric toaster from scratch) is that high-grade ore basically doesn't exist any more, and you now need to process a ton of ore to extract a few kilograms of metal.

(Just something to keep in mind if you ever find yourself in a position of having to rebuild civilization after being trapped in stone for 5,000 years.)

Would it be viable to mine the remnants of civilization? Would a garbage dump or the ruins of a 20th century skyscraper be a viable source of iron?

All over your town, drivers work day in and day out harvesting scrap metal on garbage pickup days.

There would be plenty of metal to work with, but sources of heat hotter or denser than charcoal will make working the metal difficult.

Precisely.

Collapsed skyscrapers absolutely would be a good source of steel.

Depending on the apocalypse, there would also be a good argument for intentionally collapsing any skyscrapers that were still standing, as depressing as that is. An unmaintained skyscraper will be shedding glass panels fairly frequently, and once the window glass is gone it will start accumulating rainwater and corroding the structural steel. Uncontrolled collapses also have a risk of knocking down neighboring buildings. Walking through a downtown area 50 years after it was depopulated would be fairly dangerous. You would want crews stripping empty buildings and knocking them down asap.

Not to mention large cities are located at ports where you're going to want to operate anyway, once civilization is rebuilt enough to engage in ocean freight again.

Or you'd have to dive, like in Waterworld, because every former coastal port is under water.

It depends on the scale. I still like the idea of harvesting bog iron and smelting in a homemade bloomery.

Was that book perhaps referring to copper ore? Even low grade iron ores like taconite contain a double digit percentage of iron:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taconite

I would start digging where there had been a scrapyard or a garbage dump or landfill.

Why not following railroad tracks?

Good one. I would expect those to be gone pretty early on though, there is just too much tonnage there. Same for scrap yards, harbors and so on. By the time things get desperate you'll have to expend a lot of effort. On the plus side, mining garbage will probably turn up a lot of other useful elements.

That claim is highly exaggerated. I work in Steel industry so can maybe shine a bit of background here.

I'm not sure what would be considered historically "high grade" but modern high grade ore is 62 to 65% Fe see for example here (first google result for Iron Ore Benchmark price https://www.marketindex.com.au/iron-ore).

There are very large reserves of this stuff in places like Brazil and Australia it is not exactly a finite resource.

Lower quality ore is also traded. There is a 58% Fe benchmark price as well.

You buy ore in one of two formats "lump" or "fines" (https://www.metalbulletin.com/Article/3811904/Iron-ore-prici...)

Lump is considered to be the premium product and is generally +8mm sized product - think of it like pebbles. You can charge lump directly into a modern blast furnace.

The other product fines is more like dirt than pebbles and needs to be agglomerated either via pelletization (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelletizing) or sintering (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sintering)

A well run modern blast furance typically operates in region between 1,300 to 1,600 kg of ore per Tonne of iron produced. This is far and away from "ton of ore to extract a few kilograms of metal".

I think maybe confusion is that there is high demand for ore. Iron Ore is considered by countries like China etc as a key strategic resource and keep their own internal stockpiles. Supply ships (bulk carriers) are booked months ahead of time). So while average citizen can't go into a store and buy a handful of ore to make his own toaster that's very different from saying the stuff doesn't exist.

Yesterday I went to Scranton for a comic book convention and saw something remarkable next door and found it was this.

Probably because my grandfather worked in the Eastern PA coal industry in the 1930s, it struck me that they refer to at least 13 different owners or investors by name, but the article says almost nothing about the thousands of workers the company employed.

If you're in this region, a visit to Bethlehem Steel is worth a detour: https://www.steelstacks.org/about/what-is-steelstacks/

Much of the steel for the Golden Gate Bridge came from here.

H.L. Mencken visited for the Bach choir:

"I once came so near going dry in Pennsylvania, and in the very midst of a huge fleet of illicit breweries, that the memory of it still makes me shiver. This was at Bethlehem in the Lehigh Valley, in 1924. I had gone to the place with my publisher, Alfred Knopf, to hear the celebrated Bach Choir, and we were astounded after the first day's sessions to discover that not a drop of malt liquor was to be had in the local pubs. This seemed strange and unfriendly, for it is well known to every musicologist that the divine music of old Johann Sebastian cannot be digested without the aid of its natural solvent."

(he found his beer, behind closed doors ...)

Abandoned stuff is always so cool. My favorite continues to be this exploration of the abandoned power plant and tunnel under Niagara Falls:

https://freaktography.com/canadian-niagara-power-william-b-r...

Along a trail in the southwest corner of the Angeles National Forest there's a piece of T-rail stuck in the ground [1]. A closer look reveals the words "Scranton steel" and "'78" [2]. Funny to go for a hike outside Los Angeles and find a 143 year old piece of metal from PA.

[1] https://photos.app.goo.gl/TTD2b8xqU8ZiDaS96

[2] https://photos.app.goo.gl/MWr9pCqFsMaXVYiJ6

I grew up near scranton and never heard of these before. Was an interesting read.

Likewise, I must have driven past them a few dozen times without even knowing!

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