We travel today in steel subways, transact our business in steel buildings, and live in apartments and private houses which are made largely of steel.
The steel automobile has long since supplanted the wooden carriage; the steel ship has displaced the iron and wooden vessel.

The American farmer now encloses his lands with steel wire, the Southern planter binds his cotton with steel ties, and modern America could never gather her abundant harvests without her mighty agricultural implements, all of which are made of steel.

Thus it is steel that shelters us, that transports us, that feeds us, and that even clothes us.
This substance is such a commonplace element in our lives that we take it for granted, like air and water and the soil itself; yet the generation that fought the Civil War knew practically nothing of steel.
They were familiar with this metal only as a curiosity or as a material used for the finer kinds of cutlery.

How many Americans realize that steel was used even less in 1865 than aluminum is used today?
Nearly all the men who have made the American Steel Age--such as Carnegie, Phipps, Frick, and Schwab--are still living and some of them are even now extremely active.

Thirty-five years ago steel manufacture was regarded, even in this country, as an almost exclusively British industry.