At the Joliet Iron Works, the most dangerous jobs demanded the most manual labor and paid the lowest wages. Men dumped materials into the tops of seventy-foot-tall blast furnaces, where escaping gases could suffocate them and cause falls to the ground or into the molten mixture. Workers called clay busters drilled tap holes at the furnace bottom to release the two thousand eight hundred degree molten iron. Men also transported the molten ore and cleaned the hot machines with little more than aprons for protection. A worker's shoe with a burn hole in the toe shows how close workers came to devastating injuries during the workday, and workers also broke up pig iron in the casting beds.
