Uniform Pig

Since starting in business 24 years ago, the Carrier Corp. and its corporate predecessors have set up air-conditioning outfits in establishments ranging from hamburger stands to textile mills, from racehorse stables in Ceylon to a copper mine in Arizona, from a gorilla's cage in Ringling Bros, circus to Texas hotels and Manhattan department stores.

Last week it started another job that may lead 62-year-old Board Chairman Willis Haviland Carrier and his company, largest in the business, into an entirely new field. Already air conditioning is an important factor in the textile industry, which uses controlled humidity to keep threads from breaking on high speed looms. Air conditioning's new job is to improve pig iron.

In Woodward Iron Co.'s plant near Birmingham, Ala., a huge centrifugal refrigerating machine is being installed alongside a giant dehumidifier cased in concrete. This installation, first of its kind, is being hooked up, not to any building but to Woodward's fiery blast furnaces where the 57-year-old company can turn out enough iron (annual capacity 450,000 tons) to make it the second largest Southern merchant producer ("merchants" produce pig iron for sale to foundries, mills).

Pig iron makers have tried for years to turn out a uniform quality iron. Till now this has depended on the varying accuracy with which blast furnace attendants, watching the flame through peepholes, regulate the forced flow of air whose moisture was at the mercy of the weather. With the new Carrier outfit, already proved experimentally, no flame regulation will be necessary; it can condense an average of some 20 tons of water out of Birmingham Valley's smoky atmosphere daily, feed air of constant low humidity into the furnace. If successful, the new air-conditioning trick will remove one more human element from smelting, make pig of new uniformity.

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