Pittsburgh: A Meal of Steel and a Taste of Aluminum
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MATERIAL MORSELS Reviews with a materials angle.
Pittsburgh: A Meal of Steel and a Taste of Aluminum Materials Walking Tour Daytime Stroll (see map) [1]–[2]–[3]–[5]–[6]–[7]: ~1.6 miles/~2.6 km With a “Glass” Diversion [4]
In 1749, two French explorers wrote about a point in Western Pennsylvania where three rivers met. They did not know then that these rivers would become famous trading waterways, occupied by Americans who hammered, sweated, and forged to create industrial history: Pittsburgh, the Steel City. Until 1980, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, ruled as the most productive steel-making city in the world. Its major steel production began in 1873 when Andrew Carnegie established Edgar Thompson Works, the first steel mill near Pittsburgh. The city produced steel for famous U.S. structures such as the Brooklyn Bridge and the Empire State Building. However, steel is not the only material that welds Pittsburgh into industrial history. Before steel production, the United States depended on Pittsburgh for glass. At one time, 62 glass factories decorated
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View of “the Point” and downtown Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, from Mt. Washington. Courtesy of Kristin Wilson.
the South Side neighborhood. Aluminum is also an important material in the city’s history. In 1888, 15 years after the birth of steel in Pittsburgh, the Pittsburgh Reduction Co. pioneered the production of aluminum. Later, that company became the Aluminum Company of America, better known as Alcoa. You can see firsthand how these materials contribute to Pittsburgh’s infrastructure and history on a short walking tour of the city, beginning with one of the city’s many bridges, the Smithfield Street Bridge. From downtown Pittsburgh, walk to the foot of Mt. Washington—Pittsburgh’s old Coal Hill—by crossing the Monongahela River via the Smithfield Street Bridge
([1] on the map). This bridge, designed by Austrian engineer Gustav Lindenthal, was built in 1883 and restored in 1995. Made of 13 steel lenticular trusses, steel chords, pier posts, diagonal bars, and other wrought-iron parts with steel rivets, the bridge is Pittsburgh’s oldest. It stretches 1,184 feet and is currently painted its original colors, blue and cream. In 1933, the city reconstructed the downstream deck with aluminum; this Pittsburgh-supplied metal decreased the bridge’s weight by 675 metric tons, and later by another 97 metric tons after a subsequent replacement in 1967. Once over the bridge, step into Station Square [2]. Here, you will find Bessemer Court, named after the 10-ton Bessemer converter, built in 1930, that sits between a lively fountain and the Monongahela River. The converter is a huge, pearshaped, steel and clay container in which steel was synthesized by the Bessemer process, patented by Sir Henry Bessemer in 1856. Until this innovation, metallurgists made steel by heating wrought iron with charcoal for extended periods. Using the Bessemer method, a worker could quickly make tons of steel by blowing air through molten pig iron in a pressurized converter to drive off impurities
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