IN a dingy laboratory in the yard of a steelworking company at at Los Angeles, California, lies a 380-pound ingot of pure steel. It is the most remarkable piece of steel in the world, for it never saw coke or coal; never went through a Bessemer converter or open hearth process; in fact its production quite upset all the established methods of making the most-used metal of the present century.

Behind the ingot is the mysterious furnace in which it was made, and the story of the making of the ingot reads like a romance-a romance of iron and oil and lime and firebrick, with the persistent student of steel as its hero, the elusive spirit of discovery its heroine.

All his life long John Potter has been connected with steel in some one of its many forms. Finally, when he came to Los Angeles fresh from an eastern blast furnace, he had so clear an idea of the new method that he succeeded in impressing its worth on three or four men of means on the coast, and was told by them to go ahead; if he made good there would be plenty of money to finance his discovery. He went ahead, he made good, and now he has backing running into the millions; the company is a close corporation, and the building of a large furnace at either San Pedro or San Francisco is promised at an early date.

Potter's idea was that of an oil blast furnace; his finished apparatus is an oilblast furnace, and this is the way he has worked it up to success:

He began with a little two-by-four bake oven, down in the laboratory, and immediately succeeded in making small pieces of steel of the size of a fifty-cent piece. He has some of them now, lying beside his 380-pound ingot, just to show that his idea has been right all the time.

But the little furnace could do nothing practical. Then he erected a big, upright affair, out of brick and steel rails, lined with firebrick. Into it he turned his jet of oil and produced a chunk of steel so refractory that he had to take down every brick in the new furnace to get it out. This would not do, so the inventor picked over the slag and the waste, studied the piece of steel he had made, and built another furnace.

This one was not so satisfactory as the other two, so he tore it down, studied a bit more-and built still another furnace.

This was bigger and hotter than any of the others. So simple it was that one could look through a chink in the bricks. and see the liquid metal, white hot, sweating out of the iron ore and trickling

down to the lake at the bottom of the furnace, incidentally knocking the old blast furnace idea all to flinders in a minute.

In the center of Potter's furnace, when he is ready to make a "run" of steel, he piles the crude iron ore, and a mixture. of lime and asphaltum. The propor

COURTESY LOS ANGELES EXAMINER.

THE STEEL INGOT POTTER PRODUCED.

tions of this mixture are the whole secret, and it is guarded well, for no man but John Potter, he who discovered it, knows the formula, and he is not telling it, not even to the men who are backing him in the great game for millions.

When this composite mass is all piled up, a jet of crude oil is turned on and lighted. With a terrific heat-up to 3,200

degrees and further if possible-the whole is fluxed, and the resultant steel flows down into a lake in the bottom of the furnace, thence to be drawn off into puddles, outside the brick wall.

With this last furnace, when the ore was all smelted and the furnace had cooled off, there was an 1,100 pound chunk of pure steel in the bottom. The inventor did not have to study this; he had found that for which he had been seeking for half his life, and he had but one more step to take in the perfection of the new steel. He had demonstrated that he could produce the steel; next he puddled a bit and put it through the rolls of the miniature steel works where he is employed, and found it came out in good shape.

But his main idea, and the thing for which he was working most assiduously, was to get the steel so hot in its liquid form that it would run out of the furnace into molds. The main trouble he found was with his oil burners. Their heat was variable; sometimes it varied so much that the whole mass of flux and ore would solidify on him when almost at the melting point. He ran up and down the gamut of oil burners, east and west -and at last did the only thing left to him-made his own.

With a burner capable of generating the terrific heat to which this mixture of ores had to be exposed to get the desired results, the fire brick melted, and he had to go to work to find brick which would resist the heat the burner threw upon them. After much searching, after try

ing practically every known fire brick, he found one that suited his needs, and he started in on his last furnace. This was built, not by him, but to his order, for those who stood behind holding the purse strings were convinced that he had won the great fight, had uncovered a secret such as had not been found in a decade.

Into this new furnace, built almost entirely of firebrick, so great was the volume of heat to which resistance must be offered, was put the mixture of iron ore, asphaltum and lime, the proportions of which Potter alone knows. The oil was turned into the blast and lighted, and then, as evening fell, the inventor went home, leaving the plant in charge of a workman who had been employed around the steel plants of the East. To him he gave the final admonition that if he got a lump of steel by morning he would also get a new suit of clothes.

Some time during the small hours, along toward the dawn of a new day, the heat became intense enough to do its own work. The steel began to trickle down the bed of the furnace, together with the slag. When the bath became large

enough the man knocked out a plug and let the white-hot liquid run into a mold which had been arranged for it. It seemed so much like slag, and had been so easily obtained, that he did not bother to look at it closely; in fact, he already thought he had lost the suit of clothes.

Then, in the morning, back came the inventor, John Potter. By the time he arrived the mold was cool enough to be opened, and when he was told that it was full of slag, he struck it with a hammer to see. Instead of the soft, crunching sound the waste matter would have made, he got the clear ring of steel. Without opening the mold the inventor drew from his pocket a check book, signed a thin blue slip of paper and handed it to the workman. It was for a suit of clothes.

After a while another ingot was run out, then another and another, until there were four all told. After this first run the furnace was shut down. The experiment, outgrowth of years of trial, was a success. Steel had been made without the double process, a thing unheard of in one of the greatest industries of the New

World. A tremendous saving in time and cost had been accomplished at a stroke.

Three of the big ingots were rolled into bars and cut up. Some pieces were hammered into points; others stood most successfully all physical and chemical. tests. They were as good steel as ever came through Bessemer process from Eastern mills. They are not pig, such as has to be run into a converter and turned into steel, but the real article, made at one process from iron ore which is among the lower grades, and not comparable to that from which the steel workers of Pennsylvania and Ohio draw their supplies.

Potter's idea is not new. It has been tried time and time again before by men who know steel, but they one and all have foundered on one great obstacle. They produced the steel, but the loss was so great during the process-as high as forty per cent in some cases--that they gave it up. The loss in the present methods of making steel is from eight to ten per cent. The loss in the Potter process is, on the average, about six per cent. With better ore than has been used in the working of his furnaces Mr. Potter expects to be able to reduce even this low average; in any event the knocking off of four per cent in the cost of production of steel in the furnace. alone is a matter of millions in the course of a single year.

The inventor is now at work on plans for a plant of furnaces which may be worked singly or as a battery, from each of which when in operation there will flow a continuous stream of molten steel, ready to be sent to the rolling mills. A new industry thus will be born for the Pacific coast, where, though there are large tracts of low-grade iron ore, there has never been a concerted attempt at the establishment of a plant for its utility.

Like the mixture of asphaltum and lime and iron ore with which he fluxes this new furnace, Potter's burner also is a secret. It is a blast, of course, blown in by steam at a high pressure, but blown through a larger hole than the ordinary. burners used under boilers for the generation of steam. John Potter is the only man who knows how this burner is made

-for he made it himself-and he is not talking about it to his dearest friends.

But there, mute witness to the efficacy of those burners and of the flux, that 380 pound ingot of steel lies in the yard of the little steel works, just beside the ruins of the furnace which gave birth to its predecessors, and which rings like an anvil head when struck with a hammer. It is large and heavy, oblong and rough; it looks like any chunk of pig metal, and those who pass it by each day seldom pause to think that it represents. one of the greatest discoveries of this generation, or that it really amounts to anything at all more than the run of scrap iron and brass and steel which cumbers the waste places of every ironworking plant.

The walls of the furnace which Potter built were not thicker than those of the average blast furnace, for at first it seems he did not know how great a heat he was going to be able to generate with his new burners. Afterwards he was compelled to build them considerably thicker, and introduce the jets of burning oil closer to the bottom of the great melting pot than is customary with ordinary oil heaters.

For out and out picturesqueness, Mr. Potter's career, which is largely identified with smelting other than by blast furnaces, rivals that of any of the men who have ridden to prosperity on the crest of the steel wave. He began as a greaser boy in a steel plant at Johnstown. From there he went up and up until he became general manager and superintendent of the Carnegie plant at Homestead, Pennsylvania. For fourteen months he worked in the shipyards near London, England. He helped build, as mechanical engineer, some of the plants of the present steel trust. He assisted in perfecting the first rail table in the United States at Chicago.

Then Mr. Potter went to work for John D. Rockefeller, at Cleveland. While in the employ of the oil king, he had more time to devote to his studies, and there first saw the distant glimmerings which have resulted in his present success. Later he went to California, and there, with a little more leisure time on his hands, has found the golden fleece he sought.

City.

NE of the most remarkable fossil wonders ever unearthed is, at the present time, arousing widespread scientific and popular interest at the Museum of Natural History, in New York This is due to the efforts of Professor Henry F. Osborn, who has placed on exhibition a complete reconstruction of one of the oldest and most extraordinarily formed four-footed creatures that ever trod earth. This ancient animal, hitherto practically unknown to the outside world, called naosarus, or the carniverous fin-back lizard, inhabited the region of Texas in the Permian age, estimated to have been, according to geological reckoning, anywhere from twelve to twenty millions of years ago.

The reproduction of the marvelously constructed body of this prehistoric

reptile, the first example to be seen in the world, is considered a noteworthy contribution to science. The difficult points embodied in its mounting, such as setting, restoring the hundreds of delicate, fragmentary parts in the laboratory, was an up to date and skillful bit of fossil engineering work, accomplished by Chief Preparator Adam Herman, under the direction of Professor Osborn. The skull, and other parts, were found in northwestern Texas a number of years ago by Mr. Chas. H. Sternberg, a collector, and the late Professor E. D. Cope, of Philadelphia, the pioneer fossil explorer and scientist, who, with Professor Marsh, of Yale College, made numerous explorations in the West in 1870 and later, recovering thereby a large number of extinct forms. Professor Cope's great collection, however, from lack of facilities for their proper mounting and exhibition, was stored in the basement of