We continued on our way through the Sloss Furnaces, looking at the smokestacks for the massive boilers that burned the coke to produced the superheated temperatures that broke up the iron ore.

I was curious how these molten iron cars look different compared to various parts of the country. They are of type not seen in Youngstown, Ohio.

Now we get to the exciting part, where the molten iron is emitted from the bowels of the blast furnace. Below, you can see the iron pouring out, with the slag–the waste byproducts from the ore and blasting process, float on top.

Here is the room where the pig iron would spew out into sand molds in the ground, which I still find so primitive, in sort of a Christmas tree shape.

The real reason it was called pig iron is that people thought it looked like a row of piglets nursing on a sow–a long strip of pig iron pouring into larger basins to form ingots.

And to hammer home the point, there was child labor everywhere.