Pennsylvania in the late 1800s and early 1900s was an unsafe place to work, with a quarter-million recorded industrial calamities a year. So dangerous were the trades, and so gruesome were the accidents, that the chronicling of injuries suffered by workers became its own muckraking genre. A short-lived publication of the Inter¬national Association of Factory Inspectors got some its best stories from the steel industry: In one nightmare narrative, an explosion at a Butler County steel mill forced "streams of hot metal [down] on the workmen, engulfing and literally cooking some of them."
