The first puddling works were opened in 1839, and Troy was long the centre of the New York iron and steel industry; in 1865 the second Bessemer steel works in the United States were opened here.
In the United States a committee of the American Society of Civil Engineers, appointed to consider the question of rail manufacture in consequence of an increase in the number of rail-failures, issued an interim report in 1907 in which it suggested a range of carbon from 0-55 to 0-65% for the heaviest sections of Bessemer steel flange rails, with a phosphorus maximum of 0.085%; while the specifications of the American Society for Testing Materials, current at the same period, put the carbon limits at o 45 to 0-55%, and the phosphorus limit at o io.
Indeed, the whole German production of acid Bessemer steel in 1899 was at a rate but slightly greater than that here given for one pair of American converters; and three pairs, if this rate were continued, would make almost exactly as much steel as all the sixty-five active British Bessemer converters, acid and basic together, made in 1899.
The Roechling-Rodenhauser furnace is unfitted, by the vulnerability of its interior walls, for receiving charges of cold metal to be melted down, but it is used to good advantage for purifying molten basic Bessemer steel sufficiently to fit it for use in the form of railway rails.
The ore is remarkably free from phosphorus, and is consequently valued for the production of pigiron to be converted into Bessemer steel.
