Basic open hearth furnace (Carnegie 1880s)

Half-football-field-sized brick-lattice regenerative furnace, three-hundred-ton tap per day, the standard process for steel for the first hundred years.

After that, Andrew Carnegie came up with the basic open hearth, which is what you'll learn if you read George Linnert's 1960s welding manuals. We don't have basic open hearth steel today — everything's basic oxygen [furnace]. But I might as well spend the last little while talking about how to make steel. Carnegie in the 1880s — Andrew Carnegie was the richest man in the world. He was richer than Bill Gates in adjusted dollars. He got rich on steel — the railroads, making steel for them. Evidently he was worth a hundred million dollars then, which is more than a hundred billion dollars today.