A spring lecture series is offered to the public at the Penn State campus, 2809 Saucon Valley Road in Center Valley. On Feb. 11 Lehigh University Associate Professor and Chair Dr. John K. Smith spoke for an hour about the rise and fall of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation. A mixture of more than 60 students and interested public attended the talk.

Smith complemented his lecture with photos and graphs he has collected about the company. He began with a brief early history of the company and then described in greater detail its successful years.

From the beginning, Bethlehem Steel was fortunate to have strong leadership, a ready supply of labor and to produce products that were in high demand. The company achieved well beyond expected wealth through making armaments during World War I, ship building during World War II and production of steel for highway infrastructure and urban development during the 1950s and 60s.

Then products that competed with steel were developed, such as concrete and plastic. Smith explained that the decline of Bethlehem Steel had more to do with the worldwide drop in steel sales than what has commonly been blamed as the causes; poor management, excessive union benefits and competition from foreign steel makers.

Today, new steel mills are almost totally automated. Steel is produced through steel scrap, which is fed into energy efficient electric furnaces. China is now the biggest customer for American-made steel. Smith believes there was nothing that the executives could have done to prevent the bankruptcy of Bethlehem Steel. No one could have predicted the slow-down in the worldwide demand for steel and the company did not have the ability to switch to the new automatic electric furnaces, which would have required the laying off most of the workforce.

As Bethlehem Steel was building Martin Tower in the late 1960s, the Nucor Corporation began building electric steel mills. Nucor had sales of $19.05 billion in 2013.