Schuylkill Valley Paper - The Rock-Drill Applied to Opening the Tapping-Hole of a Blast-Furnace

Devices for saving labor in immediate connection with the operation of the iron blast-furnace have received comparatively little attention. Machines for hoisting and blowing, always employed in some form, have been improved; but charging, tapping, casting and handling the pig-iron in the beds are still performed chiefly by manual labor. At almost all furnaces, filling is done with the handbarrow of twenty-five years ago; and it is only recently that, here and there, chills have been employed in the cast-house instead of the usual sand-beds, to lessen the labor of handling the pig, as well as to secure its greater purity. The manual labor of opening and closing the tapping-hole has