They are huge,
pear-shaped retorts, resembling in their action those teakettles which
hang on stands and are poured by being tilted. But a million teakettles
could be lost in one converter, and the boiling water from a million
teakettles, poured into a converter, would be as one single drop of ice
water let fall into a red-hot stove.
In the converters the metalloids--silicon, manganese, and carbon--are
burned out of the iron under a flaming heat which, by means of high air
pressure, is brought to a temperature of about 3400 degrees. It is the
blowing of these converters, and the occasional pouring of them, which
throws the Vesuvian glow upon the skies of Birmingham at night. The heat
they give off is beyond description. Several hundred feet away you feel
it smiting viciously upon your face, and the concrete flooring of the
huge shed in which they stand is so hot as to burn your feet through the
soles of your shoes.
The most elaborate display of fireworks ever devised by Mr. Pain would
be but a poor thing compared with the spectacle presented when a
converter is poured. The whole world glows with golden heat, and is
filled with an explosion of brilliant sparks, and as the molten metal
passes out into the sunlight that light is by contrast so feeble that it
seems almost to cast a shadow over the white-hot vats of iron.
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