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Published: February 11th 2012
Today I visit one of the most important historic sites on the entire trip.
It tells the history of iron smelting in the US.
Iron smelting, as noted earlier, is the reason Birmingham exists.
Before that, however, I wanted some culture.
I found it at the
Birmingham Art Museum.
Birmingham Art Museum
The museum is a relatively small
encyclopedic museum.
I enjoyed it more than the Speed Art museum in Louisville (see
Luminescent Visions) even though they are close to the same size.
Part of the reason was that they have more art that I like, and it was arranged better.
Contemporary work in this museum gets an entire section, while at the Speed it was limited to one corridor.
The other reason was the through explanations.
The work is arranged chronologically.
The panels explain the movements involved, and what each was trying to accomplish.
My visit did have one very frustrating feature.
The museum has a rather old air conditioning system.
They are currently upgrading it.
Due to the inconsistent air quality, most work that is sensitive to the environment was in storage.
Iron smelter at Sloss Furnace
One of two towers where the actual smelting took place.The frustrating part is that the museum staff simply left the empty spaces on the walls (often with captions still attached) instead of replacing the work with something else from the vaults.
I felt I was reading a book with obvious pages torn out.
The museum has one unusual strength: an incredible collection of ceramics.
The objects are mostly distributed through the different areas of the museum; although
African ceramics (which were made as religious objects) and
Wedgewood pottery get their own rooms.
The museum has the largest collection of Wedgewood pottery outside England.
There is also a room dedicated to pueblo pottery, including several by modern craftsman.
The work was good, but the overall creativity level is less than the contemporary work in the Montclair Museum (see
The Birthplace of Modern America).
The museum also has a collection of art
made in Alabama.
Ceramics had an emphasis, along with several large quilts.
The museum, in fact, has one of the largest collection of quilts as artwork in the US.
I did not see many paintings, although they may have all been in storage.
Sloss Furnace
After
Casting shed at Sloss
The shed where iron handlers made the ingots. They traced out the pattern in the sand and then let molten iron flow into it. the Birmingham Art Museum, it was time for the major item of the day,
Sloss Furnace.
Sloss was one of the original pig iron smelters in Birmingham.
They managed to survive the Depression and a wave of industry consolidation, finally closing in 1976.
The city eventually acquired the site intact and turned it into a park.
Sloss is the only iron furnace of any type open to the public.
It represents an entire industry that was crucial to the development of the United States, which makes it an essential stop on a trip like this.
Be warned ahead of time: Visitors that are fans of old machinery will never want to leave this place.
The smelter is a maze of brick buildings and big pipes that initially make no sense.
The park hands out a brochure that tries to explain it all.
I found the display panels next to each of the major buildings much more helpful.
In addition to explaining the machinery, the panels also describe the lives of the people who worked in those buildings.
What becomes apparent very quickly is just how
hazardous it
Air Heating tanks
Tanks used to heat compressed air for the smelter. Waste gas was pumped in and then replaced by fresh air. all was.
As one worker famously put it: “If mules had to do this job instead of men, people would ban it”.
The site consists of a large brick building in the center, surrounded by twenty tall thin iron tanks, with sixteen brick furnaces on the side.
Believe it or not, this complex managed air.
On either side are two large iron towers with a large open warehouse next to them.
These are the actual furnaces.
Understanding it all requires knowledge of the
iron smelting process, so the brochure describes it in detail.
Raw materials were fed into the furnaces from both the top and bottom.
A mixture of pulverized iron ore and limestone was fed in the top.
Carbon coke was fed in the bottom and then blasted with super hot compressed air.
The air would immediately combust the coke, creating carbon monoxide.
The carbon monoxide gas reacted with the mixture falling down the furnace to produce liquid iron and slag.
Slag is lighter than iron, so it floated on top or the liquid iron at the bottom of the furnace.
Gas washer
This device removed coal dust from the furnace waste gas, allowing it to be burned. Each product was drawn out through a separate valve.
The iron was turned into ingots and the slag was turned into other things, including fertilizer.
The furnaces ran continuously, twenty four hours a day.
Raw material was fed into the furnace at exactly the same rate that the final products were drawn out of it.
Until a conveyor system was installed in the 1920s, all of the materials were fed into the furnace by hand!
Imagine shoveling coke into a white-hot furnace, and think of how pleasant that job was.
Even worse, think of the people shoveling in ore at the top.
Despite safety systems, the furnace gave off gas, and much of it was carbon monoxide.
Workers regularly passed out and got injured.
The most frightening case of all was a worker who fell into the furnace at another plant in 1885, and was instantly turned to ash.
Long time residents claim his
ghost haunts the area to this day.
The ore handlers had it easy compared to the people who actually made the ingots.
Ingots were initially made by digging trenches
Coal furnances
These furnances generated the steam needed to run the air compressors. in fine sand in the warehouse behind the furnace.
The pattern was a central trench with branches off the side.
Iron was let out of the furnace at regular intervals into the central trench until the entire system was filled.
People commented that the filled trenches looked like piglets feeding on their mother, hence the name “pig iron”.
After the iron had solidified but was still white hot, workers had to split the branches from the central trench, and break the central portion into ingot-sized pieces.
They then let the ingots cool completely.
These workers were called iron handlers, and they typically lasted only a few years due to the physical demands of the job.
As part of an upgrade in the 1920s, this system was replaced with an ingot casting machine, which poured molten iron into molds from a bucket.
This machine was sold when the plant closed.
The furnace needed super-hot compressed air to combust the carbon coke.
The air plant in the center of the complex produced it.
The system for heating the air was pretty ingenious.
Steam pump
Steam driven air pump at Sloss Furnace Iron smelters give off a lot of waste gas, roughly three tons for every ton of iron produced.
This gas was captured and fed into the tanks next to the central plant.
The tanks are lined with fireproof bricks.
Eventually, the bricks were as hot as the waste gas.
The gas was then let out, and air was pumped in.
The air was heated by the bricks to the right temperature, and then fed to the furnace.
The tanks needed to be cleaned regularly, which was done roughly once a month (so at least one tank was out at all times).
This was also not a job with high life expectancy.
The air, in turn, came from the central building, the air compression plant.
This is the largest building in the complex, and the only one that people are allowed inside.
The first feature people see is a row of steam driven air pumps.
These pumps have enormous flywheels attached to two pistons.
Steam is fed into one piston to drive the flywheels.
The energy is then transferred to the other piston, which
Electric air pump
The electric air pumps that made the steam pumps obsolete pumps air into the heating tanks.
These pumps made an enormous racket while running and people often compared them to living things.
The machines needed constant oiling and maintenance, which was provided by a crew of black laborers.
Behind the steam pumps are their replacements from a 1920s upgrade.
The steam is fed into an electrical generator, which then drives a compressor.
These machines are tiny compared to the steam pumps behind them, and they are much more efficient.
The entire air plant is a maze of pipes, corridors, and machinery.
Shafts of sunlight filter through the windows of the compression plant, and through the pipes of the heating tanks outside.
The whole thing became layers of light and shadow, and a dream to photograph.
I took more photos of this one area than the rest of the plant combined.
Machinery like this was clearly the inspiration for parts of the landmark 1927 movie
Metropolis, which was set in a dystopian machine-dominated future.
The final piece of Sloss concerns the rest of the waste gas.
An
Pipe Maze
A maze of pipes and light beams in the air compressor building. engineer at the plant, James Dovel, had an ingenious insight about the gas that made the plant more efficient.
It consisted of unused carbon monoxide, coke dust, and waste gas.
At high enough temperatures, carbon monoxide will combust due to the missing oxygen atom.
Adding the carbon monoxide to the coal burned to create steam would increase the plant’s efficiency by orders of magnitude.
The only problem was getting rid of the waste gas and coke dust.
Dovel figured out how, by soaking the gas with water.
The waste gas pipe runs to a cylindrical tank that did the washing, followed by a split to both the air heating tanks and the hot water furnaces.
I loved being here as a visitor.
The plant is a maze of ingenious engineering to explore.
When the light is right, it even looks beautiful aesthetically.
There is not enough money in the world that would convince me to work here while it was running, however.
As noted earlier, the work had a very high injury rate, and wages were scandalously low.
Sloss controlled every aspect of its
Former housing
Dilapidated worker housing next to Sloss Furnace workers lives.
Most of the company town near the plant has been torn down, but one house is left as an example.
I’ve seen woodsheds that were better built.
State government ensured that this situation never changed, until it was imposed from outside.
I can’t leave Birmingham without discussing the
tornadoes.
The worst of the storm passed north of the city, so on one level the area felt normal.
Businesses were open, the power was on, and people went about living their lives.
On another level, it’s anything but normal.
The highways leading into town have broken signs in many places, and uprooted trees along the sides.
In one stretch, I passed an area that was nothing but scraggly trees and stumps.
I couldn’t watch TV without seeing a crawl at the bottom listing places to make donations and get help.
The Red Cross was advertising a huge blood drive.
Of course, there were rescue workers everywhere.
Before leaving, I made sure to buy and donate a case of water; people here need
all the help they can get.
Stone Mountain Laser Show
The Devil Went Down to Georgia
The devil admits defeat to a mortal in the fiddle contest. The golden fiddle was the prize. My final event for the night was one of the South’s bigger spectacles.
Stone Mountain is a granite monolith east of Atlanta.
The entire mountain is basically one large rock.
Its north face is nearly vertical.
It contains the world’s largest
relief carving, which is often called the Mount Rushmore of the South.
It’s a tribute to Confederate heroes Jefferson Davis, Robert E Lee, and Stonewall Jackson, shown on horseback.
The carving and surrounding rock becomes the canvas for a
huge laser show on warm weekends, augmented with fireworks and flame effects.
I’ve seen laser shows before, but never on this scale.
The consists of many song sequences, most of which have some relation to Georgia.
It opens with “Georgia on My Mind”, set to scenes from around the state.
This was followed by a tribute to Georgia sports teams.
Roughly a third of the crowd hissed when the Georgia bulldog appeared, and another third hissed at the Georgia Tech yellow jacket.
That was followed by a tribute to Georgia musicians, everyone from James Brown to Outkast (tellingly, the Outkast portion was the only hip-hop during the entire show).
Dixie
Robert E. Lee watches his army get destroyed during the Stone Mountain laser show. The carving is barely visible in the background. Things picked up with “
Devil Went Down to Georgia”.
This famous country fiddle tune by Charlie Daniels tells the story of a contest between the devil and a Georgia farmer as to who could play better.
During the devil’s half of the contest, the mountain was covered in dancing red demons, augmented with flame effects.
During the farmer’s half, the mountain was covered in swirls of green and blue with fireworks.
The mortal won 😊
Three sequences got more crowd response than any other.
The first is the reason the show was created in the first place.
The most mournful version of “
Dixie” ever recorded plays as stars swirl on the mountain.
They trace out the figures on the carving, who then come alive and gallop off to war.
Scenes of battles follow, dissolving to Robert E. Lee slowly trotting across the rock face as all his soldiers turn into tombstones.
The soundtrack now switches to a slowly rising “Battle Hymn of the Republic”.
Lee surrenders to Grant.
He then pulls out his sword, breaks it in half, and drops the pieces on
Heroes
The soldier's homecoming at the end of Heroes. the ground.
The two halves morph into the Union and Confederate states, which merge back into the United States.
The final scene is the three original figures fading back into the rock.
For a northerner, I found it all surprisingly moving.
“Heroes” got an even bigger response.
As one may have guessed, the sequence is a tribute to people in uniform.
The armed forces get the most time, but police and firemen get their due.
At one point, the marines at
Iwo Jima get projected, which dissolves into the firefighters at the World Trade Center.
There is a beautiful section of a young football player who enlists, becomes a jet pilot, and ends up in battle over Afghanistan.
The final scene is a soldier coming home, embraced by his family.
Fireworks exploded over the mountain at this point, and the entire crowd applauded.
The finale of the show is a tribute to the United States.
The crowd started cheering soon after it started.
First, an American flag was projected on the mountain, accompanied by “The Star Spangled Banner”.
It dissolves
Stone Mountain Finale
Fireworks explode over the American Flag at the start of the finale to the laser show. into a tableau of notable people from American history, including George Washington, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King (a Georgia native, it’s worth pointing out).
Tellingly for a northerner, nobody from the Civil War era was included.
Fireworks explode in front of the mountain, and then the flag reappears, with an eagle in front of it.
The eagle takes off, and flies over famous American landscapes, such as the Statue of Liberty and Mount Rushmore.
It then soars over an aircraft carrier and a rocket.
The rocket launches and lands on the moon.
The famous picture of the moon landing with the earth rising in the distance was projected as the fireworks started in earnest.
They go faster and faster until the entire surface of the mountain is lit by explosions.
With that, the show is over.
Someone posted video.
It flickers thanks to the laser refresh rate.
I had dinner tonight at the
Marietta Diner.
It’s a classic neon-lit diner from the 1950s.
It’s one of the few true diners I’ve seen in the South rather
Stone Mountain Finale
Fireworks at the end of the Stone Mountain laser show. than a truck stop.
The food is a bit pricy by diner standards, but it’s quite good.
They are also open very late, which was important by this time of the night.
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