Bethlehem Steel: The Ferris Wheel Axle, Gray Beams and a Pension Collapse

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Augustus Wolle founded the Saucona Iron Company in Pennsylvania in 1857; it became the Bethlehem Iron Company in 1861 and rolled its first rails in 1863. When the rail market saturated in the 1880s, Navy Lieutenant William Jaques, back from touring European arms makers including Joseph Whitworth's works in Manchester, steered Bethlehem toward armor. John Fritz and Russell Davenport built the first heavy forging plant in the U.S., and in 1887 Bethlehem won armor and forging contracts for the battleships USS Texas and USS Maine. In 1893 it forged the 45.5-foot steel axle of the first Ferris wheel at the Chicago World's Fair, then the largest single piece of steel ever made.

Charles M. Schwab, former president of U.S. Steel, bought Bethlehem in 1901 and formed Bethlehem Steel Corporation in 1904. U.S. Steel had turned down Henry Grey's mill for rolling one-piece wide-flange beams, and Schwab bet the company on it from 1908, supplying steel for the Waldorf Astoria, Rockefeller Center, the Golden Gate Bridge and Hoover Dam. In World War II, president Eugene Grace promised Franklin D. Roosevelt a ship a day; 15 shipyards and about 180,000 workers built 1,121 ships. Bethlehem later lost the 1967 World Trade Center steel contract, fell behind on continuous casting and mini-mills, lost $1.5 billion in 1982, filed for Chapter 11 in 2001 and was liquidated by 2003.

• Gimbels department store in New York was the first major job for the new beams, using 12,000 tons.
• In 1960 Bethlehem's Venezuelan iron profits for one year equaled all the taxes it had paid Venezuela over the previous decade, and Brazil kept about 4 percent of manganese export income.
• From 1949 to 1952 the Lackawanna, New York plant rolled uranium fuel rods for the government, and workers were not fully told the hazards.
• Underfunded pension promises led to the Hollyfield case and, at the time, the largest pension bailout in U.S. history by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation.
• The idle Bethlehem plant became the SteelStacks arts campus beside a casino whose 2007 builders struggled to source 16,000 tons of steel.