Excerpt from The Romance of Steel: The Story of a Thousand Millionaires This book is the first popular history of our greatest American industry. The wonderful story of steel is here told in such a way that those who have no technical knowledge of steel making may enjoy and appreciate the miracles that have been accomplished. First, it is a story of the electric expansion of a business from bankruptcy to billions. It is an American story of self help - of the unprivileged men who climbed from poverty to the commercial supremacy of the world. And also it is a biography of that most useful of all metals - the structural metal of modern civilisation. Now that the iron and steel business has passed into the hands of more than sixty thousand stockholders, there has come a demand for a popular book on the subject, which shall be not only picturesque, but accurate and instructive as well. Therefore, while I have written these pages after the manner of fiction, the facts have been gathered from the highest author ities. Fully nine-tenths of the material has been obtained at first hand, either from the Steel Kings themselves or from original documents. The book is, in fact, the result of a two years' study of the American iron and steel business, made on the spot, and with the assistance of many experts. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.