Olivier C. A. BISANTI

 
Who hasn't heard about Jules Verne? For contemporary readers, he was a writer who was sometimes introduced as a visionary, sometimes as an outdated author, even a little "kitsch". But it was his positivist perception of science and technology, which he was the first to be use directly in a narrative structure, that distinguished Jules Verne in the history of French literature. Born in 1828, his literary career proceeded almost entirely in the nineteenth century of the Industrial revolution. But, impassioned as he was with the inventions of the future, Jules Verne was not less worried about contemporary history, marked by the European upheavals and the emergence of the United States of America. Nothing astonishing in the fact that his work concerned, directly or indirectly, the iron and steel industry.
 

Jules Verne, 1828-1905. >

 
Jules Verne's chronology
 

Born on February 8th, 1828 in Nantes in a well to do family, which counted ship-owners and navigators, Jules Verne was a sedentary writer, after an attempt at boarding a boat as a ship's boy at eleven years of age (he was caught up with by his father at Painboeuf. This was just before his departure for India) he lived between Paris, Crotoy where he settled down in 1866, Amiens that he left in 1892 and where he took municipal responsibilities (on a clearly "leftist" radical list) and successive pleasure boats on which he made his imagination work. Up until his death on March 24th 1905 at Amiens, he had written eighty novels and news items, some great popular geographical works as well as plays, which were in fact his earliest sources of notoriety. But his celebrity became apparent with the novels of the "extraordinary travels" cycle:

1862 - Five weeks in a balloon.
1864 - The adventures of Captain Hatteras.
1864 - Voyage to the Centre of the Earth.
1865 - From the Earth to the Moon.
1867 - Captain Grant's children.
1869 - Twenty thousand leagues under the sea.
1873 - Around the world in 80 days.
1874 - Mystery Island.
1876 - Michel Strogoff.
1877 - The Black Indies.
1878 - A fifteen year old captain.
1879 - The tribulations of a Chinaman in China.
1879 - The Begum's 500 millions.
1882 - The Green Ray.
1883 - Obstinate Keraban.
1884 - The Archipelago on fire.
1885 - Mathias Sandorf.
1886 - Robur the Conqueror.
1888 - Two years on holiday.
1892 - Carpathes Castle. 1895 - The Island with a Propeller.
1896 - Face to the flag.
1898 - Superb Orenoque.
1904 A Drama in Livonie.
1904 - Master of the World.

Among the twenty-four novels enumerated above, considered as his principal books, almost all mention inventions or recent discoveries, machines or fabulous weapons. Steel reigns in this primitive technology. However, at least three of these novels have a more singular incidence on the steel industry.

 
The steel of The Nautilus
 

In "Twenty thousand leagues under the sea", it was actually the submarine "Nautilus" that was the principal character. The characters of Aronnax, of "Conseil, (Advise), his faithful servant" and of Ned Land the harpooner, prisoners on board (once escaped, they told us this story). They are only the fragile supports for this formidable machine propelled by electricity and which Jules Verne 'felt' the role that it would play in industry. As for its creator, the captain Nemo ("Nobody" in Latin), he was an Indian patriot revolted against the British invader. His motivations and origins were at the same time too mysterious and too dated for his character to leave us any thing else other than the prototype of a rebel.

Let us interest ourselves more in the machine, 70 meters long with a diameter of 8 meters, of which Jules Verne reveals ("some figures" to us in chapter XIII. That it consisted of a double concentric hull of sheet steel 5 centimetres thick, coffered by "T" sections which gave it "the rigidity of a solid block".

(*) Let us remember that the greatest known oceanic depth is located in the Pacific (the Marianne pit) at approximately 11.300 meters.

This rigidity was to be put to hard test in the novel: apart from the initial collision with an American frigate, which The Nautilus opened like a tin can; it faced the ice of an ice-floe, then an armoured ship which attacked it with cannons. It even dived under sixteen thousand meters of water into a pit in the depths of the Sargasso Sea, which subjected it to a pressure of 1.600 atmospheres!

Let's think for a moment about these values. Contemporary submarines are mostly made out of steel, (the thick hull of the ex-Soviet ALFA was however made out of titanium) with a thickness in the area of 60 to 80 millimetres, in weldable grades with yield stresses reaching 1000 MPa. The normal sailing depth for these ships was reached at six hundred meters (more in the event of an emergency). The steel of which the Nautilus was made would thus greatly interest contemporary arsenals! But the unrealistic figures of Twenty Thousand Leagues didn't take anything away from the pleasant and picturesque story.

The Nautilus was built by its future crew, gathered and taught by Nemo on a small deserted island. They started by using pieces from various sources, both to mislay any spying and to select the best suppliers. Thus "its keel was forged in Le Creusot, its propeller shaft by PEN & Co of London, the sheets of plate for its hull at Leard's of Liverpool, (...) its machinery by Krupp in Prussia, its ram (the formidable "boat opener") in the workshops of Motala in Sweden (...)". Jules Verne finally revealed that its construction cost two million including its fittings ("eleven hundred and twenty-five francs per barrel") and five million with the works of art and the collections which it contained. Nemo, who had cut himself off from the world, could not give up culture and thus embarked a collection of objects whose value exceeded that of his ship. Then, as a base of support is always needed, Nemo found an island under which he exploited a colliery, which grew under the sea "like the collieries of Newcastle"...

 
The "Catalan furnace" of l'Ile Mystérieuse
 

In "Mystery Island", which followed five years after "Twenty Thousand Leagues" Nemo and his Nautilus reappeared, the crew of a balloon was shipwrecked on a desert island, which the incorrigibly patriotic Americans, baptised "(Abraham) Lincoln Island ". One of the passengers (a scientist named Cyrus SMITH) proved to have a marvellous ingeniousness. His knowledge gave the shipwrecked men the possibility of make the steel for the tools which they were missing, and provided Jules Verne with a pretext for a little metal industry lesson:

"The following day, April 21st, Cyrus Smith, accompanied by Harbert, went to seek the grounds on which he had already found ore samples. He found the deposit at ground level, almost at the source of a creek, at the base of one of those buttresses of the North East. This ore, very rich in iron, enclosed in the rock lode, was perfectly appropriate for the mode of reduction that the engineer intended to employ, i.e. the Catalan method, but simplified, as it would be used in Corsica. The real Catalan method required the construction of furnaces and crucibles, in which the ore and coal, layered alternately, are transformed and reduced. But Cyrus Smith claimed to economise these constructions, and wanted to form quite simply, with the ore and the coal, a cubic mass in the centre of which he would direct wind from his bellows.

It was the process employed, undoubtedly, by Tubal-Caïn and the first metallurgists of the world. However, that which had succeeded with Adam's grandsons, which still gave good results in regions rich in ore and fuel, could do nothing but succeed under the circumstances in which the colonists of Lincoln Island found themselves..

The engineer proceeded. The bellows of sealskins were fitted at the end with refractory clay pipes. These had been manufactured beforehand in the pottery furnace, which was built close to the ore heap. Moved by a mechanism, which consisted of a frame, fibre cords and counterweights, it launched into the mass an air provision which, whilst raising the temperature, also contributed to the chemical transformation which would give pure iron.

As well as the ore, the coal was collected, without many problems, not far away, on the ground's surface. The ore was firstly broken into small pieces, the impurities which soiled its surface were then removed by hand. The coal and ore were laid out in heaps and in successive layers, - as the charcoal burner does with the wood he wants to carbonise. In this way, with the air projected by the blower, coal was transformed into carbonic acid, then into carbon monoxide, charged with reducing the iron oxide, i.e. to give off oxygen.

The operation was difficult. All the patience and all the ingeniousness of the settlers was needed to manage it; but finally it succeeded. The final result was an iron magnifying glass, reduced to a sponge state, which they had to shingle and weld, i.e. to forge, so as to drive out the liquefied rocky matter. It was obvious that a hammer was missing for these impromptu blacksmiths. But, in the end, they found themselves in the same conditions as the first metallurgist had been, and they did what he had done. The first magnifying glass, fixed on a stick, was used as a hammer to forge the second on a granite anvil. A coarse metal was obtained, but which could be used.

At last, after many efforts, and much tiredness, on April 25th, several iron bars were forged, and transformed into tools, grips, clippers, peaks, pickaxes, etc. Pencroff and Nab declared them as being true jewels. But this metal, it was not in its pure iron state that it could render services, it was especially in its steel state. However, steel is a combination of coal and iron which one, either obtains from cast iron, by taking out the excess coal, or from iron, by adding to it the coal that it is missing. The first option is obtained by decarburising the cast iron, which gives natural or puddled steel; the second option, produced by carburising the iron, gives carburised steel. It was this latter one which Cyrus Smith preferably had to manufacture, since it included iron in its pure state. He succeeded by heating the metal with a powdered coal in a crucible made out of refractory earth. Then he worked this steel, which was malleable in both the hot and cold state, with a hammer. Nab and Pencroff, skilfully directed, made the iron for the axes, which, when heated till red, and plunged abruptly in cold water, acquired an excellent hardening. Other instruments, coarsely worked, it goes without saying, were manufactured in this way, plane blades, axes, hatchets, bands of steel which were transformed into saws, carpenter's scissors, then, pickaxes, shovels, hammers, nails, etc.

On May 5th, the first metallurgical period was completed. The blacksmiths returned to their smokestacks, and new work would give them the possibility to learn new qualifications."

Recreating a whole technology on their island, the captivity of the shipwrecked men on Mystery Island was definitely more distracting that that of De Foe's poor Robinson!

 
The paranoiac factory
 

The plot of Jules Verne's most "metallurgical" work, "The Begum's Five Hundred Millions", was simple, even artless. It was about the confrontation of warmonger Germany and idealistic France. The work only scratched England in passing, selfish spectator, interested in the future duel. A French scientist and a German industrialist each inherited half of the fabulous fortune of a princess, the Begum. The two men emigrated to the United States so as to carry out their projects there: the Frenchman wanted to build an ideal city, the German a model arms factory of which the largest piece of artillery would be built and used (in vain) for the destruction of this "Franceville".

After setting up, the work followed the description of the Stahlstadt, the German machine of war. Installed in a semi-desert at the same time as eighteen prefabricated villages, on iron deposits and coalmines, the city-factory was organised in partitioned concentric sectors, surrounded by high walls that were guarded. The periphery was devoted to foundries for small canon and the level of performance and secrecy rose as one approached the centre. It was a stronghold that was at the same time massive and sumptuous, sheltering secret laboratories and the "drawings division". At the head of this formidable machine and its thirty thousand workmen, foremen and engineers, Professor Schultze became in five years "the biggest ironworker and, especially, the largest founder of canons of the two worlds". "You enter the City of Steel only if you have the magic formula, the password, or at least an authorisation duly stamped, signed and initialled". The decor was planted.

In this decor, steel was manufactured according to the method of Onions and Cort, puddling, which preceded the generalisation of the conversion of the liquid cast iron (Bessemer process, invented in 1856) and the Siemens-Martin furnace :

On each side of this long market, two lines of enormous cylindrical columns, as big in diameter as in height as those of Saint-Peter's cathedral in Rome, rose up to the vault of glass which they transpierced. They were the chimneys of as many puddling furnaces built at their bases. There were fifty of them in each line.

At one end, locomotives brought at any time, trains of wagons loaded with cast iron ingots and which came to supply the furnaces. At the other end, empty lines of wagons received and carried the iron that had been transformed into steel. The purpose of the "puddling" operation was to carry out this metamorphosis. Teams of half-naked Cyclops, armed with a long iron hook, occupied themselves with it with celerity.

The cast iron ingots, thrown into a furnace with a slag coating, were initially brought to a high temperature. To obtain iron, this cast iron would have to have been agitated as soon as it became pasty. This iron carbide, was so close to, and yet so distinctly different due to its characteristics, from the real thing. To obtain steel it was necessary to wait until the cast iron was fluid and then be careful to maintain a stronger heat in the furnaces. The puddler then, with the end of his hook, kneaded and rolled the metal mass in all directions; he turned it and returned it in the centre of the flame; then, at the precise moment when it reached, through its mixture with slag, a certain degree of resistance, he divided it into four balls or spongy "loops", which he delivered, one by one, to the assistant forgers.

It was in the axis of the market that the operation continued. Opposite each furnace, a power hammer, put into movement by the vapour of a vertical boiler placed in the chimney itself, occupied a "shingler". Armed by foot in course of boots and sheet arm-bands, protected by a thick leather apron, masked with a metal cloth, this industrial cuirassier picked up at the end of his long tongs, the incandescent loop and beat it with the hammer. Beaten and beaten again by the weight of this enormous mass, it expressed, like a sponge, all the impure matters which it had picked up, amidst a rain of sparks and splinters. The cuirassier returned it to the assistants so that they could put it back into the furnace, and, once reheated, beat it again.

Within the vastness of this monstrous forging mill, it was a continuous movement, cascades of chain belts, the mute blows on the base a continuous hum, red fireworks of spangles, the dazzling of white heated furnaces. In the middle of this growling and rage of controlled matter, man seemed almost like a child.

Hard men however, these puddlers! To knead at arms-length, a metal paste of two hundred kilograms in a torrid temperature, to remain several hours, eyes fixed on the blinding incandescent iron, it was a terrible way of life and it used the men out in ten years

After this description, the last three paragraphs of which, evoke the literary style of ZOLA, Schwartz, the hero (from Alsace, as the intrigue required it) changed workshops. He was always the same implacable German mechanic:

The "small" gallery was not less than a hundred and fifty meters long by sixty-five wide. According to Schwartz, it must have heated at least six hundred crucibles, placed by fours, by eights or by dozens, according to their size, in the side furnaces.

The moulds, which were intended to receive the steel in fusion, were laid out in the axis of the gallery, at the bottom of a median trench. On each side of the trench, a line of rails carried a mobile crane, which, rolled at will and came to carry out, where necessary, the moving of these enormous weights. As in the puddling markets, at one end emerged the railroad that brought the blocks of crucible cast steel, at the other end the railroad which carried the canons coming out of the moulds. Close to each mould, a man armed with an iron stick supervised the temperature of the state of fusion in the crucibles..

The processes that Schwartz had seen implemented elsewhere were carried out here to a singular degree of perfection.

At the proper time to operate a cast, an alarm bell gave the signal to all the fusion supervisors. At once, with an equal and rigorously measured step, workmen of the same size, supporting on their shoulders a horizontal iron bar, came two by two to place themselves in front of each furnace. An officer armed with a whistle, his stopwatch with fractions of a second in hand, went close to the mould, suitably placed near all the furnaces in action. On each side, refractory earth conducts, covered with plate, converged, whilst going down gentle slopes, to a basin in funnel-form, placed directly above the mould. The commander whistled. At once, a crucible, drawn from the fire using tongs, was suspended from the iron bar of the two workmen who had stopped in front of the first furnace. The whistle then began a series of modulations, and the two men, keeping time, came to empty the contents of their crucible into the corresponding conduct. Then they threw into a tank the empty and burning recipient. Without interruption, at exact intervals, so that casting was absolutely regular and constant, the teams from the other furnaces acted successively in the same way..

The precision was so extraordinary, that within a tenth of a second from the last movement, the last crucible was empty and precipitated into the tank. This perfect operation seemed more the result of a blind mechanism rather than that of one hundred human wills.

An inflexible discipline, the force of practice and the power of a musical measurement however made this miracle.

Jules Verne did not forget the mine, and presented to us the Albrecht well where, as in all the mines of the time, they employed children.

A small miner and his mother. Stahlstadt or the myth of Cronos. [engraving by L BENNETT] > >

After this amusing "paranoid-city", one was bored stiff with reading the description of Franceville, the ideal city of the good Doctor Sarrazin, the other heir. Not that any common sense, culture, hygiene, morals, or goodwill was missing there. But one feels that in spite of his enthusiasm, Jules Verne was definitely more impressed by metallurgy. It is understandable.

In spite of its power and its organisation, Paranoid-city would obviously not manage to exterminate Franceville. Morals were safe, it was the unexpected explosion of one of his own shells which killed Herr Schultz in his bunker. His enemy sister recovered the model factory and all was for the best in the Brave New World, delivered from the edifying dichotomy between the Good (Medicine) and the Evil (Metallurgy!). Let us recall that the book was written in 1879, after the war was lost against Prussia.

 
Metallurgy, literature, modernism
 

If Jules Verne occupied a particular place in the culture of metallurgy, he incarnated, in the so-called "industrial revolution", a literature of a new kind. A literature where the technical creations of Man would make a determining place in the history of the world. His work was never explicitly aimed at metaphysics nor sociology. It had nothing to prove, it was not in the service of an argument. It revealed the place of a writer in the world, whose work was one big question to which society must answer so as to make conscientious choices. There is a definition of modernism in literature; the questions change with the times, but the questioning remains. On this aspect, neither Molière nor Jules Verne lost their freshness.

By implementing time and time again steel and its universe, of which we have only evoked the most evident, the literary course of Jules Verne announced the use that could be made of advances in knowledge. Knowledge that the warmongers would use in the twentieth century, and in which steel, as a material of civilisation, would alas occupy a central place.

 
references
 

-Petit ROBERT des noms propres ;
-PREZELIN, " Flottes de Combat ", EMOM 2002 .
-VERNE Jules, " Les cinq cents millions de la Bégum ", Poche 1971 (notice biographique).

NOTE : original pictures are all B/W.

NOTE : Integral text of Jules VERNE's books can be downoladed freely at Bibliothèque Nationale de France.