British Industries; A Series Of General Reviews For Business Men And Students - nouveau livre

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: can place their finished goods f.o.b. from one to two shillings per ton, it costs Staffordshire manufacturers from eight to eleven shillings per ton to get their goods to London and Liverpool, their principal markets. Organization.?The organization of the British iron industry has, like that of all other industries, some characteristics of its own. In a large number of cases the makers of pig-iron are also owners of iron ore and coal mines, makers of coke, and manufacturers of finished iron or steel, or both. In some cases they also own their own railway lines, make their own plant to a greater or less extent, possess their own jetties or harbours, navigate their own ships, and carry on affiliated branches of business. But while there is a tendency to increase the ramifications of such a business so as to make it as far as possible self-contained and self-supporting, there is much less attempted in this direction in Great Britain than there is in the United States, where the individual manufacturers are, in a large number of cases, as self- contained as their country. Such firms as the U.S. Steel Corporation, Jones and Laughlins, the Illinois Steel Co., and others, not only mine their own raw materials, undertake its transport, convert it into pig-iron, and thence into steel girders, etc., but they also have a staff of skilled engineers and architects, who are prepared to submit plans for the structures in which the finished material is to be used, and to superintend their erection. In our own country, we now have several large firms ready to do the same in one branch only?naval architecture. Two of the leading firms in England begin with the mining of the coal and ore, and end with the building of the finished ship. Two others begin with the manufacture of the steel plates, ba...