1 From yet another machine came tens of thousands of steel burs to fit upon these bolts.
2 There was a row of brick furnaces, shining white through every crack with the molten steel inside.
3 One of these men told Jurgis that he had sharpened three thousand pieces of steel a day for thirteen years.
4 First he went to the steel mill and the harvester works, and found that his places there had been filled long ago.
5 They went through the blast furnaces, through rolling mills where bars of steel were tossed about and chopped like bits of cheese.
6 After the first meal nearly all the steel knives had been missing, and now every Negro had one, ground to a fine point, hidden in his boots.
7 By and by they came to the place where steel rails were made; and Jurgis heard a toot behind him, and jumped out of the way of a car with a white-hot ingot upon it, the size of a man's body.
8 There was a sudden crash and the car came to a halt, and the ingot toppled out upon a moving platform, where steel fingers and arms seized hold of it, punching it and prodding it into place, and hurrying it into the grip of huge rollers.
9 This was done by a single boy, who stood with eyes and thought centered upon it, and fingers flying so fast that the sounds of the bits of steel striking upon each other was like the music of an express train as one hears it in a sleeping car at night.
10 Where Jurgis worked there was a machine which cut and stamped a certain piece of steel about two square inches in size; the pieces came tumbling out upon a tray, and all that human hands had to do was to pile them in regular rows, and change the trays at intervals.
11 In the next room were wonderful machines that ate up long steel rods by slow stages, cutting them off, seizing the pieces, stamping heads upon them, grinding them and polishing them, threading them, and finally dropping them into a basket, all ready to bolt the harvesters together.
12 Near by him men sat bending over whirling grindstones, putting the finishing touches to the steel knives of the reaper; picking them out of a basket with the right hand, pressing first one side and then the other against the stone and finally dropping them with the left hand into another basket.