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Pittsburgh and steel
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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