Cast with Style: Nineteenth-Century Cast-Iron Stoves

2005 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-24
Author(s):  
tammis kane groft

Cast With Style: Nineteenth-Century Cast-Iron Stoves During the nineteenth century Albany and Troy, New York manufacturers were considered to be among the largest producers of cast-iron stoves in the world. Stoves made in these two upstate New York cities were renowned for their fine-quality castings and innovations in technology and design. The strategic location of Albany and Troy, located nine miles apart on opposite banks of the Hudson River, afforded easy and inexpensive transportation of raw materials to the foundries, and finished stoves to worldwide markets. Cast-iron stove making reached its highest artistic achievement and technological advancements between 1840 and 1870. Flask casting and the advent of the cupola furnace permitted more elaborate designs and finer-quality castings. Stove designers borrowed freely from architectural and cabinet-makers design books, a process that resulted in the use of Greek, Roman, Egyptian and Rococo revival motifs; patriotic symbols, and lavish floral designs, all reflecting current taste and sentiment Stove types produced included Franklin, box, dumb, base-burner, parlor, cook stoves and ranges and parlor cook stoves. However, the stoves that attracted the most attention and helped to secure the reputation of Albany and Troy, as innovators in technological and decorative designs were the column parlor stoves produced during the 1830s and 1840s. These stoves were a focal point for a Victorian parlor because the overall designs incorporated current tastes in architecture, furniture and other decorative arts. The decline of the stove industry in Albany and Troy began slowly after the Civil War, when companies went back into full production and glutted the market. Also, new deposits of iron ore were discovered in the Great Lakes region, and entrepreneurs were quick to see the potential of large western markets and began building foundries in Chicago and Detroit. As the century closed, the demands for iron were shifting toward steel.

Author(s):  
Robert B. Gordon

Salisbury ironmakers throve by selling wrought iron rather then cast iron through the first half of the nineteenth century. Their finery forges and puddling works converted nearly all of the pig produced by the district’s furnaces to bar iron or forged products. However, by the 1860s, when the district’s ironmasters were smelting up to 11,800 tons of pig iron per year, they converted little of it to wrought iron. The demise of the forges left just one principal product, cast iron used mainly for railroad car wheels. Milo Barnum and Leonard Richardson had started making railroad castings in 1840. When Milo Barnum retired in 1852, his son W. H. Barnum took his place in the partnership with Richardson. The partners expanded the business by acquiring the Beckley and Forbes furnaces in 1858 and 1862, respectively, from the Adam family in East Canaan. Upon Leonard Richardson’s death, Barnum and the Richardson heirs reconstituted the business as the Barnum-Richardson Company, the firm that gradually gained control of all mines and blast furnaces in the northwest, except for the Kent furnace. A new railway facilitated the Barnum-Richardson operations. Dedicated residents of the northwest, in the face of much skepticism, raised the capital needed to build the Connecticut Western Railroad from Hartford to State Line, where it joined with the Dutchess & Columbia line running to Beacon, New York. Salisbury residents eagerly awaited its 1871 completion: they wanted to be rid of the heavy ore wagons that kept their roads a rness passing from Ore Hill to the furnaces in East Canaan. The Connecticut Western passed through Winsted, traversed difficult terrain in Norfolk, and crossed the Housatonic Railroad at Canaan, where the two companies built a handsome union station . Railroad enthusiasm also led residents in the northwest to propose impractical schemes. The Shepaug Railroad had been completed in 1872 from Danbury to Litchfield. A correspondent writing to the Connecticut Western News that year proposed extension into the Salisbury district.


Author(s):  
Richard Haw

John Roebling was one of the nineteenth century’s most brilliant engineers, ingenious inventors, successful manufacturers, and fascinating personalities. Raised in a German backwater amid the war-torn chaos of the Napoleonic Wars, he immigrated to the United States in 1831, where he became wealthy and acclaimed, eventually receiving a carte-blanche contract to build one of the nineteenth century’s most stupendous and daring works of engineering: a gigantic suspension bridge to span the East River between New York and Brooklyn. In between, he thought, wrote, and worked tirelessly. He dug canals and surveyed railroads; he planned communities and founded new industries. Horace Greeley called him “a model immigrant”; generations later, F. Scott Fitzgerald worked on a script for the movie version of his life. Like his finest creations, Roebling was held together by a delicate balance of countervailing forces. On the surface, his life was exemplary and his accomplishments legion. As an immigrant and employer, he was respected throughout the world. As an engineer, his works profoundly altered the physical landscape of America. He was a voracious reader, a fervent abolitionist, and an engaged social commentator. His understanding of the natural world, however, bordered on the occult, and his opinions about medicine are best described as medieval. For a man of science and great self-certainty, he was also remarkably quick to seize on a whole host of fads and foolish trends. Yet Roebling spun these strands together. Throughout his life, he believed in the moral application of science and technology, that bridges—along with other great works of connection, the Atlantic cable, the Transcontinental Railroad—could help bring people together, erase divisions, and heal wounds. Like Walt Whitman, Roebling was deeply committed to the creation of a more perfect union, forged from the raw materials of the continent. John Roebling was a complex, deeply divided, yet undoubtedly influential figure, and his biography illuminates not only his works but also the world of nineteenth-century America. Roebling’s engineering feats are well known, but the man himself is not; for alongside the drama of large-scale construction lies an equally rich drama of intellectual and social development and crisis, one that mirrored and reflected the great forces, trials, and failures of the American nineteenth century.


Author(s):  
P.I. Loboda ◽  
Younes Razaz ◽  
S. Grishchenko

Purpose. To substantiate the efficiency of processing hematite raw materials at the Krivoy Rog Mining and Processing Plant of Oxidized Ores using the direct reduction technology itmk3®. Metodology. Analysis of the results of the itmk3® direct restoration technology developed by Kobe Steel Ltd., Japan and Hares Engineering GmbX, Austria, with a view to using it to process Krivbass hematite ores into granulated iron (so-called “nuggets”). Findings. The involvement in the production of hematite ores (oxidized quartzite) of Krivbass with high iron content, but with low magnetic properties for their processing into granular cast iron is grounded. Originality. The use of itmk3® direct reduction technology from Kobe Steel Ltd., Japan and Hares Engineering GmbH, Austria for the processing of Krivbass hematite ores into granular cast iron is justified for the first time. Practical value. The efficiency of the use of hematite ores (oxidized quartzite) has been substantiated, which can significantly reduce the costs in the mining cycle for the economical production of metallurgical products.


2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 719-779
Author(s):  
David Gutkin

H. Lawrence Freeman's “Negro Jazz Grand Opera,” Voodoo, was premiered in 1928 in Manhattan's Broadway district. Its reception bespoke competing, racially charged values that underpinned the idea of the “modern” in the 1920s. The white press critiqued the opera for its allegedly anxiety-ridden indebtedness to nineteenth-century European conventions, while the black press hailed it as the pathbreaking work of a “pioneer composer.” Taking the reception history of Voodoo as a starting point, this article shows how Freeman's lifelong project, the creation of what he would call “Negro Grand Opera,” mediated between disparate and sometimes apparently irreconcilable figurations of the modern that spanned the late nineteenth century through the interwar years: Wagnerism, uplift ideology, primitivism, and popular music (including, but not limited to, jazz). I focus on Freeman's inheritance of a worldview that could be called progressivist, evolutionist, or, to borrow a term from Wilson Moses, civilizationist. I then trace the complex relationship between this mode of imagining modernity and subsequent versions of modernism that Freeman engaged with during the first decades of the twentieth century. Through readings of Freeman's aesthetic manifestos and his stylistically syncretic musical corpus I show how ideas about race inflected the process by which the qualitatively modern slips out of joint with temporal modernity. The most substantial musical analysis examines leitmotivic transformations that play out across Freeman's jazz opera American Romance (1924–29): lions become subways; Mississippi becomes New York; and jazz, like modernity itself, keeps metamorphosing. A concluding section considers a broader set of questions concerning the historiography of modernism and modernity.


1982 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 329-333
Author(s):  
Rashid Aziz

The book under review is a concise but fairly in-depth study of the prospects for export diversification from the Less Developed Countries (henceforth labeled as LDCs) particularly to Developed Countries (henceforth labeled as OCs). Given the multiple problems faced by the LOCs in exporting to the OCs - protectionist policies with regards to manufactured exports, volatility of prices obtained for raw material exports, etc. - the study analyses the potential for following an intermediate route. The important issues in the export of semi -processed and wholly processed raw materials are discussed. 111ese issues range from the problems and potentials for the location of processing facilities in the LOCs to the formulation of appropriate policies to encourage an export of processed goods rather than raw materials. Such policies will be useful both in solving the balance of-payments problems of the LDCs and in attaining the goal of the Lima Declaration and Plan of Action on Industrial Development and Co-operation, that called for 2S percent of world industrial production to be located in the LOCs by the year 2000.


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