the proudest feather of an eagle's wing.
The furnaces and hammers of the old armorers could never have solved this
problem. The steel pen belongs to our age of mighty machinery. It could
not have existed in any other age. The demand for the instrument, and the
means of supplying it, came together.

The commercial importance of the steel pen was first manifested to our
senses a year or two ago at Sheffield. We had witnessed all the curious
processes of _converting_ iron into steel, by saturating it with carbon in
the converting furnace; of _tilting_ the bars so converted into a harder
substance, under the thousand hammers that shake the waters of the Sheaf
and the Don: of _casting_ the steel thus converted and tilted into ingots
of higher purity; and, finally, of _milling_, by which the most perfect
development of the material is acquired, under enormous rollers. About two
miles from the metropolis of steel, over whose head hangs a canopy of
smoke through which the broad moors of the distance sometimes reveal
themselves, there is a solitary mill where the tilting and rolling
processes are carried to great perfection. The din of the large tilts is
heard half a mile off. Our ears tingle, our legs tremble, when we stand
close to their operation of beating bars of steel into the greatest
possible density; for the whole building vibrates as the workmen swing
before them in suspended baskets, and shift the bar at every movement of
these hammers of the Titans. We pass onward to the more quiet _rolling_
department. The bar that has been tilted into the most perfect
compactness, has now to acquire the utmost possible tenuity. A large area
is occupied by furnaces and rollers. The bar of steel is dragged out of
the furnace at almost a white heat. There are two men at each roller. It
is passed through the first pair, and its squareness is instantly
elongated and widened into flatness; rapidly through a second pair, and a
third, and a fourth, and a fifth. The bar is becoming a sheet of steel.
Thinner and thinner it becomes, until it would seem that the workmen can
scarcely manage the fragile substance. It has spread out like a morsel of
gold under the beater's hammer, into an enormous leaf. The least
attenuated sheet is only the hundredth part of an inch in thickness; some
sheets are made as thin as the two-hundredth part of an inch. And for what
purpose is this result of the labors of so many workmen, of such vast and
complicated ma