The pour was a terrifying spectacle of coordinated heavy-duty violence.
Across the vast reverberatory shed of Kiln Hall Three, the roar of the forced-draft blowers drowned out human speech, reducing commands to wild hand signals and sharp, piercing whistles blown through clenched teeth. Along the overhead iron narrow high walkways, fire tenders held three-ply sheet-iron shields between their chests and the radiant maw of Furnace Two, their faces covered by wire-gauze masks that glowed cherry-red from reflected light. Sixty feet above the stone floor, the heavy timber roof beams and soot-caked iron tie-beams trembled under the sound pressure of twelve roaring draft chimney pipes, shedding flakes of blackened scale into the rising heat haze.
Heat in the lower Salt Ward was an air pressure that pressed against the chest like a lead weight. The air was dry, baked to a very thirsty sixty degrees, and thick with the acrid, metal reek of volatilized sodium borate, calcined lime, and crushed sulfur. Every breath tasted of scorched copper on the back of the throat and set the wet inner skin stinging behind the eyes.
Six men with ten-foot iron tongs guided the massive clay crucible out of the fire maw, the white-hot blasting heat scorching the hair on Len’s exposed knuckles even twenty paces back from the casting pit. The crucible was banded in three-quarter-inch forged iron. It swung from a double-chain crane hoist that groaned under the two-ton load of liquid heat-proof glass. Every single link in the mid-air chains was…
