Craft: An American History

by Glenn Adamson

The puddler’s job is to refine pig iron (hauled over, presumably, by a handler like Schmidt) from the blast furnace into workable wrought iron. Individual “pigs” of the unrefined metal (so named because they have a rounded shape, which could be seen as porcine given sufficient imagination) are melted in a furnace. This liquid mass is then manipulated with a long iron rod, as the puddler pushes bits of pure iron to the bottom, where they gradually accumulate into a mass. The impurities are poured off as waste slag, and the iron is shaped into rough balls, which are hoisted out with tongs. Other workers then refine the metal further by working it with rollers, removing more slag and getting it into a workable flat bar. This is as difficult as it sounds. James J. Davis, a Welsh immigrant who began his work life as a teenage puddler’s assistant in Pittsburgh, recalled the importance of tacit knowledge in his training: “None of us ever went to school and learned the chemistry of it from books. We learned the trick by doing it, standing with our faces in the scorching heat while our hands puddled the metal in its glaring bath.”53 Davis became a union organizer and, later, secretary of labor in the Harding and Coolidge administrations. Even then, he was known as “Puddler Jim.”