I could go on this way for quite a while, explaining one point after another, and still it would be only the most important and necessary ones. We haven’t said a word about the workers yet, about their training, or the complicated calculation of their wages. We also still haven’t said a word about the calculations, the responsibilities of the management, who not only have to organize the work procedure but also have to simultaneously keep an eye on the world markets, who have to see to it that they don’t buy at too high a price and that they always get enough orders to keep the plant running at full capacity, who have to ensure that the stock is never too great, because that costs interest, and never too small, so that the most urgent orders can be filled quickly.
If you now know how infinitely much there would be to say, to ask about all of this, and if you remember that we only have twenty minutes for our conversation, then you will see that there is no point running ahead in our seven-league boots, and that we should rather take our time at a few, individual stations. I suggest we start with the hall where the casting is done. What is brass? Brass is an alloy of copper and zinc. Some of you will surely know the difference between a compound and an alloy. Two elements must always form a chemical compound in a specific manner according to their atomic weights. You learn about it in school as Dalton’s Law. They can be alloyed physically by smelting them in very different proportions. The average proportion of copper and zinc in brass is sixty-three parts copper to thirty-seven zinc for the plates, and fifty-eight to forty-two for the rods. So there are different kinds of brass, and very different kinds are cast in the individual ovens, of which there are twenty-three in all. Which kind depends on the orders that have been received at the time. But it is not as if copper and zinc are simply weighed out in specific proportions and then poured into the ovens. If one were to proceed like that, a very poor, irregular brass would be the result. Zinc melts at about 600 °C and copper only at about 1100 °C. The solid bits of copper would swim around for a long time in the liquid zinc and would then, when they finally began to melt, dissolve only very irregularly in it. Therefore a balancing, as it were, mediating mass is added, namely old brass waste. It melts at about 900 °C, and thus makes the melting process constant. Not very long ago, such a casting could not be heavier than thirty kilograms. However, in the new ovens that the Brass Works put into operation in 1920, blocks of up to 600 kilograms can be produced. When the casting is done, the receptacles — they are called coquilles — that contain the blocks open, like a book, and one can see the brass inside. It is not, however, yellow and shiny but unsightly; there is a black, pitted skin from the casting process covering it, and that first needs to be scraped off. Then each block gets marked with its own special symbol, indicating what combination of metals the brass has and from which oven it came. Before it can be further processed, the casting is tested in the laboratory, not only for its purity but for its strength, ductility, hardness, elasticity, et cetera. For all these tests, there are special devices, among them a so-called tensile testing machine, which utilizes its 40,000 kilogram weight to test the plates or tubes. It is only in the laboratory that one can see how different the interiors of the individual kinds of brass look, because each of them presents a different image under the microscope depending on whether it was cast, or hard-rolled, or heated after its rolling.
Now the brass is there. But the immense work process is only just beginning. The massive blocks, the heavy cylinders that come from the foundry must be transformed into millimeter-thin sheets, fine-as-a-hair threads, narrow bands. These manufactured products, which are very long, naturally demand to be processed in much bigger rooms than the products of normal mechanical workshops. Years ago, the situation was remedied by building one factory hall next to the other when needed. But during the course of the war, the Brass Works started enlarging and transforming its entire operation, and it was clear from the start that the entire rolling process had to be housed in a single, great hall. And in the year 1920, the 215-meter-long rolling-mill hall was inaugurated. The history of its construction was a long chain of difficulties. Wherever the ground was probed for its suitability to support such a big building and the enormous load created by the machines, groundwater was discovered, and in the end, nothing could be done except anchor all the iron posts and all the machines’ bases in deep, extra-thickly sealed concrete troughs. Thus every single press, every single rolling mill had to have its own, very exact, unchangeable spot in the blueprints even before the hall was built. In addition, because no above ground electric lines could be tolerated due to the danger they posed to operations, a blueprint for the distribution of electric cables had to be worked out from the start. A blueprint for the distribution of electric cables at the same site, and for the same Brass Works, where 150 years earlier the operations had been powered by charcoal made by charcoal burners in the kilns around Eberswalde.
If we now enter the rolling-mill hall, we must take our leave of the beautiful, bright flames of the smelting furnaces and the golden mountains of brass waste. It gets grayer and more monotonous. All the more strange and lively, therefore, is what we see disappearing into the machines and then gliding out of the machines, transformed. There are the hydraulic presses, which seize hold of a short, massive brass cylinder with a pressure of more than 1,000 metric tons and then release a bundle of glowing tubes, as soft as an animal’s viscera, at the other end. Outside, at the mouth, workers stand already waiting for them with tongs, and stretch them the entire length of a ten- to fifteen-meter-long trough like a canal. After that, they are put in a corrosive bath in which they are cleaned; and here at these corrosion machines, as in a few other places, one can still see the old manual operation next to the new automatic one and make comparisons. Some of you have heard talk of rationalization. This is the technical escalation of the work process, which is thereby made cheaper through savings in the workforce and work time. The bigger and more modern a workplace is, the better it can be used to gauge what rationalization means. In the Brass Works there are now thirty ovens, or muffle furnaces as they are called, to reheat the metal that has cooled in the rollers, and two workers are needed to service these thirty ovens, whereas in the old factory no less than twenty-eight were employed for fifteen ovens. These muffle furnaces are necessary because the rods and plates get very hard in the rolling process and, to soften them up again, they need to be constantly reheated so that they can continue to be formed. Perhaps you can get an idea of the rollers, which are staggered in three rows behind one another, when I tell you that just one of them cost 500,000 marks and that it took eight weeks to set it up.
If you ever have the opportunity to see this Brass Works or a similar gigantic enterprise, then you must first have a good night’s sleep, keep your eyes open, and, especially, have no fear. That is necessary because otherwise you would stumble over the tracks and workpieces that cover the floor of the hall; you would have no eye for the work and instead would constantly look up in case one of the ton blocks, which are being swung through the air by cranes, was about to fall on your head; you would see only an impenetrable linkage, a network that seems to flicker, and not the clear, sharp division of the hall, where every worker has his specific place and every machine has, in a way, its own small office, from which the manager, with his eye on the automatic electricity, pressure, and temperature gauges, directs it. But if you then step outside, your head spinning from so much noise, so many great impressions, some understood and some not, and think that now you are in open nature, which has nothing to do with the labor and the racket going on inside, then the factory guide, who hopefully will explain everything to you as clearly and in as much detail as he did to me, will tell you that a large part of this countryside depends on the fate of the factory. Because this fate is closely tied to transportation. The Brass Works could not have become what it is without the now aging Finow Canal and without the new, modern Hohenzollern Canal, on which freight barges bring its raw materials, copper from Chile and Africa and brass waste from German factories, and export its products to India, China, Australia, et cetera, via Hamburg. The land between the Brass Works and the Hohenzollern Canal is still open. Yet, because nowadays industries spread out in ten years as much as they used to in a hundred, it is possible that later one of you, when he enters the Brass Works as a visitor, a worker, or an engineer, will step into new halls and factories that are mirrored in the water of the Hohenzollern Canal.