My older brother and I always had schemes on the go to make a few dollars. We picked huckleberries, cut and sold firewood, and even sold seeds door to door, to name just a few of our projects. It wasn't, however, until the age of 13 that I made my first major deal.
There was a jam factory in Nelson where we had just moved. Adjacent to it was a garage with used trucks for sale. We had a large apple orchard but no way to get the apples to market. I talked the owner of the jam factory into giving me a contract for 30 tons of apples at $5.00 per ton delivered. I then went to the garage owner and bought a truck for $125.00 on the basis that the money from the apples would be paid directly to him. My eldest brother had to come and collect the truck because I was too young to drive, but now we could deliver our produce and firewood directly to the doors of our customers. Perhaps it was this entrepreneurial experience in my youth, nurtured by my father, that laid the foundation for my later successes.
I guess you could say that I helped reshape the world's steel industries. I didn't start out to do that. I was just trying to create a better product at a better price, but the outcome was revolutionary.
My education prepared me for a career in metallurgy. One of my first jobs was to "soup up" the electric arc furnaces in a Vancouver steel manufacturing plant. Gaining a detailed knowledge of these furnaces, which are better than blast furnaces at melting scrap steel, stood me in good stead when I ventured out on my own. After that company went bankrupt, I got another job building and operating an electric arc furnace plant to cast ingots--large bars of steel that are created by pouring the refined, molten steel into moulds. When management rejected my proposal to locate a plant in Edmonton, the heart of the burgeoning oil industry, I quit and decided to build the plant myself.
With several partners I managed to raise the capital and within nine months the plant was built. But I was bothered by certain aspects of the traditional steel-making process. It seemed to me that rolling steel ingots to lengthen them was expensive and inefficient, so I began to investigate continuous casting.
We installed one of the first commercially successful continuous casting plants. Then, by combining continuous casting with the use of enhanced electric arc furnaces and cheap scrap metal, I was able to sell my steel at well below the price being charged by the large integrated mills.
This new process, referred to as mini-mill steel manufacturing, not only allowed smaller regional mills to become cost effective but, by replacing the dirty coke ovens and blast furnaces, as well as recycling scrap steel, my manufacturing process had clear environmental benefits. If you visit my mini-mill steel plant, I can explain how the process works