Awake: 7:12am Temp 53 sleep 7+02 intermittent rain overnight @ Helena, AL.
Late morning, K & I motor to another area of downtown, Birmingham where we self tour the famous Sloss Furnaces.
Our 1st stop is the Visitor's Center building, which was originally an electrical repair shop & bath house for furnace workmen. After watching a slide show that ran about (14) min covering interviews with the men who ran the furnaces & experienced the work details we were ready to begin our tour. I think maybe a little history using Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, will be helpful in understanding how this giant operation got started.
Colonel James Withers Sloss was one of the founders of Birmingham, helping to promote railroad development & participating in the Pratt Coke and Coal Company; he was also one of the new city's first manufacturers, forming in 1880, his own company, the Sloss Furnace Company. Construction began on 50 acres of land donated for industrial development. A European-born engineer, Hargreaves, was in charge of construction & had been a pupil of Thomas Whitwell, a British inventor who designed the stoves that would supply the hot-air blast for the new furnaces.
Sixty feet high and eighteen feet in diameter, the first blast was initiated in April 1882. 24,000 tons of high quality iron were produced in the first year & in 1883, Sloss iron won a bronze medal for "best pig iron" at the Southern Exposition held at Louisville, Kentucky.
In 1886 Sloss retired and sold the company to a group of investors who reorganized it in 1899 as the Sloss-Sheffield Steel and Iron Company. New blowers were installed in 1902, new boilers in 1906 and 1914 and the furnaces completely rebuilt with modern equipment between 1927 and 1931. Through this aggressive campaign of modernization and expansion, including furnace and mining and quarrying operations all around, Sloss-Sheffield became the second largest seller of pig-iron in the district and among the largest in the world.
With our umbrellas shielding us from the rain, we jumped small puddles & followed the yellow arrows (1.5) blocks toward the heart of the furnace complex. Along the way, there are stainless steel plaques describing what we are seeing; @ our # 2 arrow, we entered the blower building where there are giant machines that pumped the air blast to the hot blast stoves. In the main portion of the building is a row of (8) huge steam engines/air compressors, all built in the early part of the century. They stand more than (30) ft tall & turn flywheels (20) ft in diameter.
Adjacent wings of the building house examples of the machines that made the steam engines obsolete. These turboblowers are centrifugal compressors, driven by steam turbines. Installed between 1949 & 1951, the (2) compact, efficient turboblowers did the work of all (8) of the great steam engines.
Then we followed arrow # 3 to the large paved plaza underneath the Sloss Water Tower. Along one side of the plaza are (6) tall cylindrical hot blast stoves that heated the air pumped by the steam engines or turboblowers. The stoves consist of steel shells, lined with heat-resistant bricks & filled with a tall lattice of brick called: the checkers. Waste gases from the Blast Furnace were burned in the stove to heat the checkers. The gas was then shut off & the air blast was blown through the stoves. The hot checkers heated the air to (1400 degrees F) & large pipes carried the hot air to the blast furnace.
Picture taking with flash was definitely encouraged &, being the dedicated self tour guides that we are, all totaled we spent a good (3) hrs following the (11) marked arrows, climbing up numerous ladders, walking through tunnels, perusing control rooms, etc. We wanted to see it all but quite a few of the hazard areas were blocked with high gates & big locks. My slide show will contain close to (40) heavy metal scenes.
Besides being a museum, Sloss is also used to hold metal arts classes, a barbecue cook-off, an annual Halloween haunted house, Muse of Fire shows and is a concert venue.
En route to our campground in Helena, we stopped @ a Whole Foods grocery store & stocked up on aged cheese. Then, closer to our coach, we stopped & Costco & stocked up on more groceries, especially fish, wild berries, organic milk, veggies & canned peaches.
Dinner: Cod fish, wild rice pilaf & a mixed salad.
Surprise! We got a call on Skype; my brother Don from PA. His video screen was blank for the 1st (4) min but then, in living color, there he was. We talked for about (12) min & then he had to sign off. We were happy to see that his computer & Skype are up & running.
Evening movie: "I want to Live" with Susan Hayward, Simon Oakland, Virginia Vincent, Theodore Bikel, John Marley, etc. Hayward won an Oscar for her gutsy performance as prostitute-crook, Barbara Graham who (according to the film) is framed for murder & goes to the gas chamber. 1958. Based on a true story....this was another tough movie to watch.
Heavy rain accompanies our bed time & beyond.
Lights out: 12:00 midnight.
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