nia. The industry grew over the years until the Civil War, when the shift from iron to steel took place. Steam engines made it possible to build massive factories capable of producing larger quantities of product, and over the years the industry became completely, vertically integrated. In 1901, under the management genius of such visionaries as J. Pier- pont Morgan and Elbert H. Gary, the United States Steel Corporation was formed as the largest industrial corporation on the planet. At that time its capitalization was $1.4 billion and the company controlled more than 60 percent of the American market. Both it and the industry it dom- inated continued to be major contributors to the nation's economy until after World War II, when union labor costs and aging technology con- spired to send the domestic steel industry into a long, inexorable decline that ultimately resulted in its death. At the same time, steel manufac- turing facilities began to appear offshore in countries like Korea and China, where labor costs were extremely low, technology was more mod- ern, and product quality was high. Combined with a dramatic decline in transportation costs, these offshore advantages resulted in the decline and fall of the American steel industry. In the early 1970s a consolidation Downloaded from Digital Engineering Library @ McGraw-Hill (www.digitalengineeringlibrary.com) Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved. Any use is subject to the Terms of Use as given at the website. Telecom Market Segments Telecom Market Segments and buy-down of the industry began; by 1975, American steel production had declined by 37 percent. Even so, the industry still employed 500,000 workers at very high union scale wages. By the late 1980s, domestic steel production had rebounded, but the number of workers had declined dra- matically. Furthermore, the nature of the product had changed radically: Instead of producing enormous lots of traditional steel products such as building materials, the foundries turned out small v