The Samuel M. Felton Collection

Extract

In the Bulletin of the American Iron and Steel Association for January 30,1889, there appears the obituary notice and a biographical sketch of the late Samuel M. Felton, one of the founders of the iron and steel industry of this country, whose collection of industrial literature has just been presented by his family to our Society. As the Bulletin remarks, “it was a remarkable era in our industrial history which produced such men and they were themselves remarkable men. There were giants in the land in those days.” Mr. Felton at the time of his death was president of the Pennsylvania Steel Company and had been its head from its organization in 1865. This was the company which first made a commercial success of the manufacture of Bessemer steel rails.