The railroad industry could not have grown as large as it did without steel. The first rails were made of iron. But iron rails were not strong enough to support heavy trains running at high speeds. Railroad executives wanted to replace them with steel rails because steel was ten or fif times stronger and lasted twenty times longer. Before the 1870’s, however, steel was too expensive to be widely used. It was made by a slow and expensive process of heating, stirring, and reheating iron ore.
Then the inventor Henry Bessemer discovered that directing a blast of air at melted iron in a furnace would burn out the impurities that made the iron brittle (易碎的). As the air shot through the furnace, the bubbling metal would erupt in showers of sparks. When the fire cooled, the metal had been changed, or converted, to steel. The Bessemer Converter made possible the mass production of steel. Now three to five tons of iron could be changed into steel in a mater of minutes.
Just when the demand for more and more steel developed, prospectors, discovered huge new deposits of iron ore in the Mesabi Range, a 120-mile-long region in Minnesota near Lake Superior. The Mesabi deposits were so near the suce that they could be mined with steam shovels.
Barges and steamers carded the iron ore through Lake Superior to depots (车站) on the southern shores of Lake Michigan and Lake Erie. With dizzying speed, Gary, Indiana, and Toledo, Youngstown, and Cleveland, Ohio, became major steel-manufacturing centers. Pittsburgh was the greatest steel city of all.
Steel was the basic building material of the industrial age. Production skyrocketed from sy-seven thousand tons in 1870 to over eleven million tons in 1900.
It can be inferred from the passage that the mass production of steel caused ______.