Pittsburgh and steel
Ore from Minnesota, coal from Appalachia, met here
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Steel is iron with a carefully controlled carbon content, and until the 1850s it was too expensive to make for anything but tools and weapons. The geology from two earlier entries in this timeline meets here: Precambrian iron ore and coal from the Carboniferous swamp forests, both laid down hundreds of millions of years before anyone could use them. U.S. Steel became, in 1901, the first company in the world valued at over a billion dollars. The Homestead strike of 1892 ended in armed battle between workers and Pinkerton agents, and set American organised labour back by decades.
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Pittsburgh lay where iron ore from Lake Superior could meet coal from Appalachia. The city became the centre of American steel, and the United States passed Britain as the world's largest producer. The steel became skyscrapers, railways and bridges.
Sources
- Misa, A Nation of Steel (1995)
- Krause, The Battle for Homestead 1880–1892 (1992)
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