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Productivity Growth in Obsolescence: Charcoal Iron Revisited

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

Kris Inwood
Kris Inwood
Affiliation:
The author is Assistant Professor of Economics at St. Mary's University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada B3H 3C3.
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Abstract

The technology of charcoal iron manufacture in late nineteenth-century Canada is examined in this paper. Use of a super-heated and hard-driven furnace blast contributed to a resurgence of production after 1890. A lag in the diffusion of these techniques is explained by the small size of the Canadian market. Contrasts are noted with charcoal iron smelting in several regions of the United States.

Type
Papers Presented at the Forty-fourth Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 45 , Issue 2 , June 1985 , pp. 293 - 298
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1985

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References

1 Inwood, Kris, “The Decline and Rise of Charcoal Iron: The Case of Canada” (Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 1984), chaps. 4, 8.Google Scholar

2 Geological Survey of Canada, Report of Progress (1873–1874), pp. 243–54; Public Archives of Canada, Ottawa, Record Group 87, vol. 18, 1913.Google Scholar

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5 Inwood, “The Decline and Rise,” chaps. 4, 9.Google Scholar

6 Transactions of the American Society of Mining Engineers, 39 (1909), p. 235. The two Quebec furnaces built in 1881 and 1891 are described elsewhere as being “wornout” and “decrepit” in 1908; Public Archives of Nova Scotia, Halifax, Manuscript Group 1, vol. 170/4, pp. 421–22 (Cantley to Wilson, November. 10, 1908).Google Scholar

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9 Inwood, “The Decline and Rise,” pp. 330–31.Google Scholar

10 This evidence is also consistent with the hypothesis that differences in capital among the three plants accounted for the differences in unit costs. However, the hypothesis that capital only was different is not consistent with considerable qualitative evidence of resource quality and technology differences. Economic historians have always regarded the introduction of super-heated blast and hard driving in coke smelting as an important piece of technical change; there seems little reason to take a different view of charcoal smelting.Google Scholar

11 The elasticity of variable costs with respect to scale can be shown to differ from the elasticity of total costs by two ratios: the ratio of variable to total costs and the ratio of the derivatives with respect to scale of variable costs at actual and equilibrium levels of capital. From scattered references to United States charcoal iron cost structures the first ratio is known to have been about. 85. The approximate constancy of capital at the Canadian furnaces over long periods of time suggests that capital was in fact in the region of its equilibrium values and therefore that the second ratio approached 1. See Inwood, “The Decline and Rise,” chap. 9.Google Scholar

12 The output ranges in which the two techniques operated did not overlap in the United States either. Industry trade journals during the 1880s indicate that annual production at preindustrial furnaces seldom surpassed 3,500 tons and that modern furnaces typically produced at a rate approaching 10,000 tons annually. The fact that modern furnaces are never observed to have operated at smaller output levels suggests that it would have been costly for them to do so. Reasons why unit costs may have risen steeply with decreases in output are suggested in Inwood, “The Decline and Rise,” chap. 9.Google Scholar

13 U.S. Bureau of the Census, Compendium of the Tenth Census, 1880, p. 1140.Google Scholar

14 Consumption is domestic production plus net imports recorded in Canada, Trade and Navigation Tables.Google Scholar

15 Temin, Iron and Steel, p. 76.Google Scholar

16 For forest depletion see: Clark, Victor, History of Manufactures in the United States (New York, 1929), vol. 2, pp. 65, 67, 99, 208;Google ScholarWarren, K., The American Steel Industry (Oxford, 1973), p. 22;Google ScholarHogan, W., Economic History of the Iron and Steel Industry in the United States (Lexington, 1971), vol. 1, p. 24. Hunter and Schallenberg and Ault discount the effect of charcoal price variations upon the location of smelting, but Walsh correctly observes that the evidence here is thin.Google ScholarSchallenberg, Richard and Ault, D., “Raw Material Supply and Technological Change,” Technology and Culture, 18, no. 3 (1977), pp. 436–66;Google ScholarHunter, Louis, The Influence of the Market upon Technique,” Journal of Economic and Business History, 1, no. 2 (1929), pp. 241–81;Google ScholarWalsh, William, The Diffusion of Technological Change in the Pennsylvania Pig Iron Industry (New York, 1975), pp. 52–53.Google Scholar For the decline in transportation costs see: Chandler, Alfred D. Jr, “Anthracite Coal and the Beginnings of the Industrial Revolution in the United States,” Business History Review, 46, no. 2 (1972), pp. 141–81;Google ScholarTemin, Iron and Steel, pp. 77–79; Warren, The American Steel Industry, pp. 21–33.Google Scholar For loss of a quality premium see: Gordon, Robert, “Materials for Manufacturing,” Technology and Culture, 24, no. 3 (1983), pp. 602–34;Google ScholarTemin, Iron and Steel, pp. 79–80; Hunter, “The Influence,” pp. 254–65.Google Scholar For technical progress in competing metals see: Fogel, Robert and Engerman, Stanley, “A Model for the Explanation of Industrial Expansion,” Journal of Political Economy, 77, no. 3 (1969), pp. 306–28;Google ScholarWalsh, The Diffusion, pp. 104, 107, 158, 211–13;Google ScholarPaskoff, Paul, Industrial Evolution (Baltimore, 1983), p. 25;Google ScholarWertime, T., The Coming of the Age of Steel (Chicago, 1962);Google ScholarWarren, The American Steel Industry, pp. 21, 108; Hogan, Economic History, pp. 5, 24; Temin, Iron and Steel, p. 214; Schallenberg, “Evolution, Adaptation.”Google Scholar

17 The experience of several regions in which charcoal iron continued to expand during the late nineteenth century is surveyed in Inwood, “The Decline and Rise,” chap. 3.Google Scholar

18 Neu, Irene, “Iron-Ore Mining in the New York Adirondacks,” Explorations in Entrepreneurial History, 3 (1950–1953), pp. 35–43;Google ScholarGordon, “Materials”; Temin, Iron and Steel; Schallenberg, “Evolution, Adaptation.”Google Scholar