Daniel N. Jones
Daniel N. Jones was among the
group of machinists trained by Hopkin Thomas who went on to achieve marked
success. Little has been located to date on his early life. He was born ca.
1833 and came to the Lehigh Crane Iron Company, probably in the early 1850s.
From there he went to the Cambria Iron Company where he rose to the position of
superintendent.
Founded in 1852, the Cambria Iron
Company of Johnstown made an important contribution to American industrialism -
it is considered one of the greatest of the early modern iron and steel works.
Forerunner of Bethlehem Steel Company, United States Steel Corporation, and
other late 19th and 20th century steel companies, the Cambria plant became a
model for the industry. In the late 1800s Johnstown attracted the best and
brightest minds in the industry, notably William Kelly, George and John Fritz,
Daniel J. Morrell, Robert W. Hunt, William R. Jones, and Alexander Holley.
These men advanced iron and steel technology through invention and industrial
design in Johnstown, work which was widely copied by other iron and steel
companies1.
Soon
after the Cambria Iron Company established its first Bessemer plant in 1869,
Johnstown became one of the nation's leading iron and steel producers, and, by
the mid-1870s, was the leading producer of iron and steel rail in the United
States. Led by Daniel J. Morrell, the president of Cambria Iron, and Daniel N.
Jones, the chief engineer, the company expanded its iron production with the
introduction of two additional blast furnaces. The two furnaces were the
largest in the area and nearly identical in size to the impressive Lucy No. 2
(1878) and Edgar Thomson "A" (1880), two of Andrew Carnegie's blast
furnaces in Pittsburgh. Each furnace measured 75' in height and contained a
bosh 20' In diameter, with a hearth 8' in diameter. Capped with a single bell,
both furnaces were manually charged. Each produced 600 tons of Bessemer iron
per week2.
With the death of George Fritz,
in August of 1873, Daniel N. Jones was appointed superintendent of Cambria. Daniel N. Jones had learned his trade
at the Lehigh Crane Iron Works in Catasauqua where he was trained under Hopkin
Thomas3.
Under
the direction of Daniel Jones, who had succeeded his brother, Captain William R.
Jones, as chief engineer, Cambria Iron's new blast furnaces received carefully
controlled amounts of ore, limestone, and coke. The composition of ore used in
the furnaces in which Bessemer metal was produced consisted of one-half
Springfield limonite ore (averaging 50 percent iron), and one-half Lake superior
specu1ar ore (containing 60 to 66 percent iron). Interestingly, the native
spathic ore, which was self-fluxing, was not used in the production of Bessemer
metal, but it appears to have been used for other grades of metal, such as wrought
iron. Two years after Cambria Iron put it into blast, engineer Alexander Holley
declared that the Furnace No. 5 was "uniformly successful in its
performance, which is largely due to its excellent management on chemical
principles, and partly, of course, due to its construction."2
At a date uncertain, Jones left
the Cambria Works and joined with William Jackson Palmer, a wealthy
industrialist whose railroad interests had brought him to Colorado. Palmer
envisioned "an integrated industrial complex based on steel
manufacturing" in which all necessary resources were controlled by one
company. In 1879, as Palmer's railroads were expanding, he noted the demand for
steel for rails was high in Colorado. This prompted him to construct Colorado
Coal and Iron Company's steel mill south of Pueblo. His dream became a reality
for his successors when, in 1892, CC&I merged with the Colorado Fuel
Company to form Colorado Fuel and Iron. This company became Colorado's largest
employer and dominated industry around the state for decades.4
Daniel N. Jones, was appointed
general superintendent of the steel works of the Colorado Coal and Iron
Company, at Pueblo.
Jones died on December 10, 1888, aged about 55 years5.
Sources:
1. Wikipedia, Cambria Iron Company
2. Cambria Iron Company, Blast
Furnaces No. 5 & 6, Historic
American Engineering Record No. PA-109-F, Dept. of the Interior, Washington, DC.
3. History of
Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, A. Warner &
Co., Chicago, Ill., 1889, William
Richard Jones biography, pp 284 – 285.
4. Wikipedia, Colorado Coal and Iron
Company.
5.Swank, James M., American Iron and
Steel Association, Statistics
of the American and Foreign Iron Trades, Iron and Steel Necrology, 1888
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