This discussion draws on over 25 pages of original records and hand-drawn sketches documenting by-products equipment at the Interlake Chicago Coke Plant between 1952 and 1957. The materials include teletype requests and pink carbon memos, field reports from Wilputte Coke Oven Division, correspondence with Roots-Connersville Blower Corporation, and detailed operational data tables. Together, these documents […]
Category: The Archive Speaks
In this series, historian Laura Kessler sits down with retired industry experts to walk through primary documents recovered from the Acme Coke plant. Their conversations illuminate the technical processes, economic pressures, and daily realities of an industry that once powered American steel.
Frank Malloy spent over 35 years working in coke plant operations and by-product recovery. He started as a laborer on the coke side, later moving into technical roles supervising gas cleaning and chemical recovery. Over his career, he worked at facilities in Ohio and Pennsylvania, including Republic Steel and Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel, before transitioning into consulting and historical preservation work.
Martin Zajac is a retired metallurgical engineer who spent decades working in integrated steel plants, specializing in blast furnace operations, sinter plants, and later consulting on modernization projects for coke ovens and gas recovery systems. Known for his wry sense of humor and encyclopedic memory of plant layouts, he brings a seasoned, sometimes skeptical perspective to technical discussions, often punctuating them with anecdotes about how things really worked on the ground.
Laura Kessler is an independent historian and researcher who specializes in documenting the industrial past of the Midwest. She focuses on preserving the human and technical stories of industries that once defined entire regions.
This discussion draws on more than 20 pages of original records documenting the flushing liquor systems at the Interlake Chicago Coke Plant. Sources include detailed inspection reports and repair drawings from ENSPECT, Inc., original Wilputte blueprints, internal correspondence and sketches outlining control system upgrades, capital expenditure authorizations for new pump installations, and an engineering proposal […]
This folder contains 31 pages of memos, reports, and technical notes about the Light Benzol Absorber (LBA) system spanning from 1932 through 1964. Together, these documents trace more than three decades of experimentation, troubleshooting, and incremental improvements in the recovery of benzol and other light oils from coke oven gas. They offer a rare window […]