(bright music) - [Narrator] You know, Pittsburgh has a busy and brilliant history of manufacturing all sorts of goods.

Most famously, of course, we were the Steel City where giant mills churned out tons and tons of the metal that changed the world.

We've also been renowned historically as a center of glass making, boat building, food processing, and a wide variety of industries that help make the modern world.

- A whole industrial revolution coming out of here basically.

- [Narrator] We don't manufacture as much as we once did, but we haven't given up.

- When I tell people that I work for US Steel, they say, "Oh, is US Steel still here in Pittsburgh?"

- [Narrator] We still create some of the things that made us great.

- [Worker] We make a lot of things here.

- [Narrator] We found new ways of making valuable products from some of our most trusty materials.

- I mean, it's a little bit more high tech, but you're still making something.

- [Narrator] We've made a name for ourselves in robotics and other types of manufacturing with higher technologies.

- We have a long heritage of doing business and manufacturing products in southwestern Pennsylvania.

- [Narrator] Many of us take great pride in the things we've made.

- It comes from our grandparents and parents and great grandparents that came over here and decided they were gonna make a life here.

And part of that making a life was doing a job and doing it as best you could.

- [Narrator] So we're going to consider some history and look at a few factories around the area where products are still coming off the lines.

- There's a lot of great companies in Pittsburgh that make a lot of great things, and we're just proud to be one of those companies.

- [Narrator] We're going to call this program "Things We've Made" and we're going to say it's part one because we obviously can't include all of the items manufactured in Western Pennsylvania and we hope to make more programs like this.

- Whatever you make, it has a little bit of you in it, you know what I mean?

- [Narrator] Major funding for "Things We've Made" was provided by the Buhl Foundation serving Southwestern Pennsylvania since 1927.

When the first European soldiers and settlers came to Western Pennsylvania in the mid 18th century, this was wild country.

They knew they would have to make things here.

Some historians believed that British soldiers early on at Fort Pitt may have set up a small brewery to make beer, one of our first local products.

Now in Lawrenceville on Liberty Avenue near 34th Street, the Pittsburgh Brewing Company makes our most famous local beers.

- Our main brews are Iron City, and IC Light, and Augustiner.

I mean, that's the focus of our brands and I think we do a great job with all three of 'em.

- [Narrator] Joe Piccirilli has been the young owner and president of Pittsburgh Brewing since 1995.

- Well, I think, you know, there's not many regional breweries left in the country.

There's only a few, you know, we're one of 'em.

And I think that's attributable to the great workforce and the pride and tradition that goes back 142 years.

(country music) ♪ Knowing how to make a living ♪ ♪ But not forgetting how to live ♪ - [Narrator] This beloved local company has survived hardships from prohibition, to greedy former owners, to beer drinkers who too often are influenced by national advertising.

But assistant brewmaster, Mark Davis, says the employees here have been crucial.

- We have great loyal people that's been here 20, 30 years.

At one time we used to have 600, 700 people work at the brewery.

- [Narrator] The 300 or so folks who work here now are in a number of buildings, some of them pretty old, but brewmaster Mike Carotta says the age of the buildings doesn't affect the beer.

- The equipment that you use definitely does have a influence on it, and a lot of brewers refer to it as the house character, and it has to do something to do with the equipment that you have and how you process it.

- We were founded in 1861 back at the start of the Civil War.

- Two guys, Frauenheim and Vilsack, they started this brewery and back then there was roughly 200 breweries in the city of Pittsburgh alone.

- Sometime around 1900, they all consolidated into one large one and it then became known as the Pittsburgh Brewing Company.

- We were very innovative over the years.

The first brewery to come out with the snap top can with Alco in 1962, first brewery to put printed signs, the Steeler team cans back in the '70s, sold like hot cakes all throughout the city.

- Beer is made from hops and malt and other ingredients.

- [Mike] Everybody makes beer from barley, malt, hops, yeast, and water.

Now, typical American beer will also add some corn in there, which kind of reduces the heaviness out of it and makes it more drinkable.

- [Narrator] Eventually the liquid is pumped into giant stainless steel kettles where it will cook and where hops will be added for flavor.

- [Mike] You end up with a liquid that isn't quite beer.

You're actually cooking a solution that you're, what you're going to do is later on give to the yeast and the yeast through fermentation produces the beer.

And each brew that we make comes out at 600 barrels.

600 barrels would be roughly 18,000 gallons of finished products, and that will give us about 1200 half barrels or about 10,000 cases of 12 ounce bottles or cans.

♪ Hey ♪ - [Narrator] They used to have TV ads that pumped up Pittsburgh.

♪ Hey, gimme an IC Light ♪ ♪ An IC Light ♪ - Well, I still like the, "Gimme an IC Light."

That's my favorite jingle.

(both humming) So I want people to sing where they go into the beer distributor, this way they'll buy Iron City and IC Light Beer.

♪ Hey, give me an IC Light ♪ ♪ An IC Light ♪ - So if we didn't have the great people of Pittsburgh, we would've been out of business 50 years ago.

- Years ago when I was in college, all the guys from Pittsburgh, that's all they would drink would be Iron City.

They didn't want anything else.

You brought something else to the room and that, and they would turn it down.

They had to have their Iron City in that.

- [Mike] I mean, people know Iron City.

I mean, it's a great name in the city.

- [Narrator] Well, you don't have to go far out of the city to find the source of all these bottles.

Heading north along Route 8, you'll see a set of factories along the left side of the road.

- This is Glenshaw Glass, and we make glass bottles.

- [Narrator] Every bottle is important around here says job change supervisor, Tony Hughes.

- [Tony] Even though it's just a beer bottle and it's not a fancy wine bottle, it doesn't matter.

It's a local business, and we were given the opportunity to supply it locally.

- [Narrator] Glenshaw Glass started making bottles back in 1895, just across the road from the current plant, which opened in 1900.

The folks at Glenshaw Glass have survived fires, floods, and financial fluctuations over the years, but the bottles keep on coming.

The process starts at the back of the building where raw materials are unloaded and where Theresa Rupret travels back and forth on the gathering cart.

- Just like anyone.

(laughs) I'm a mixer.

I put the raw materials into the bin that go into the tank.

We have various recipes around here that tells me how much I need to put in if I forget, but I do it every day and it's just something I can do it in my sleep.

- [Narrator] The bins she loads go up into the tanks or furnaces, which are often under the supervision of Tony Benaglio.

- You actually, we run the furnaces around 2,800 degrees and they run around the clock.

But right now we have three active furnaces.

We have one that's shut down.

- [Narrator] Tony monitors all three from the computer room.

- Pretty much just set what you need the temperature for the certain tonnages on each furnace and this thing will add or subtract gas to maintain that temperature.

- [Narrator] The glowing glass is cut into pieces called gobs.

- [Tony] Yeah, it comes out feeders where the glass goes into the machine and most machines have 16 molds on 'em and they come out and drop the tube.

They have to be hot enough so you can form 'em, but hard enough so that they don't collapse after that.

It goes through like, a thousand degree change within a few minutes.

- [Narrator] The bottles are pushed into the lehr, spelled L-E-H-R, a kind of oven and cooling space.

- They're in the lehr to be tempered.

It's a gradual cooling process.

It takes this lehr in particular is 35 minutes.

- [Narrator] Ron Simonetti was at one of the lehrs and Jan Otway was busy at another inspecting.

- I never knew there was so much involved with the glass 'til I started here.

These ones are not filled up, so we have to throw those away.

- We may change the finish to go from this twist off to a pry off.

- I used to be a barmaid at one time.

I used to open them beer bottles that had chips in 'em and they'd blow all over you.

So now that I'm working here, I want good bottles going out.

- Now I got a little situation I gotta take care of here.

Something got jammed up in the back.

There's a little space, the bottle then passes through a lot of different inspection equipment where we lose the bad ones.

- [Narrator] So how many good ones in a day?

- This shop here makes, probably makes 18,000 an hour.

When you got two shops alone doing roughly 40,000 an hour, you do the math.

- [Tony] Over a million and a half bottles every day comes out of Glenshaw.

- It's looking good now.

- [Teresa] You know, we take pride in what we do.

- [Tony] When you first start here, you look at every bottle you see on the store shelf.

- We have a G that we put a square around that we stamp on the bottom of each bottle that we make.

- I go in the grocery store and yeah, we made this one.

- [Tony] You look for it, absolutely.

- My parents used to live in Michigan.

I go up there.

Yep, we made that one.

(laughs) - [Tony] If you don't take the pride into what you do today, it won't be here tomorrow.

- [Ron] We're actually a small bottle maker in the industry.

There's several other plants that are bigger than us.

I quite frankly don't know where all the bottles go.

- [Narrator] Well, some Glenshaw Glass goes to Kentucky to hold whiskey.

We don't have any major distilleries in Pennsylvania now, but there's lots of rye whiskey in our past.

Even a violent local tax protest called the Whiskey Rebellion.

Bill Boucher is an amateur historian from Elizabeth, PA. - And there were a lot of farmers that had their small distilleries and of course there was some larger ones.

Whiskey was a very big part of the culture and the life of these people because that was the cash crop.

The farmers would distill it and trade it for just about everything.

- [Narrator] It became known as Monongahela rye, sometimes Youghiogheny rye, and you can still find some remnants of that industry.

For instance, near Scottdale, there's the village known as the West Overton Museums, including the Old Farm Rye Whiskey Distillery established by Abraham Overholt.

His success here allowed him to expand and build the large Overholt Distillery, now in ruins, at Broadford near Connellsville, but there were other distilleries like this around the Pittsburgh area.

And until prohibition, Western Pennsylvania produced more whiskey than any other part of the country.

- [Bill] The Monongahela Rye whiskey was quite famous.

In fact, they still distill it somewhere.

Maybe it's in Kentucky, Old Overholt, you could still buy that, but was quite popular.

- [Narrator] In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Western Pennsylvania was also the place to get a boat if you were heading west.

Bill Boucher also knows a bit about local boat building, especially in Elizabeth where he sometimes reenacts the character of John Walker, one of the great local boat builders.

- The boat building here, like the boat building in Brownsville and the boat building in Pittsburgh was part of a major industry at the time.

Here, you know, in the West.

This is where you came to get your boat.

This is where you embarked from.

- [Narrator] Well, here on land at the Senator John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center, David Howles is director of the museum division.

- As best we can tell, the earliest map that shows a boatyard is produced in 1804.

It shows clearly a huge boatyard, pretty close to a place called Souks Run, which is today about the Mon and the Liberty Bridge.

Well, first they built flat boats and flat boats were essentially a raft with four sides, then came along the keel boat and that was a boat that could go up and down river, bot how it got upriver was via a sail or people with poles pushing it.

Then the ocean going schooners were built here.

What happened, the people would fill the boat up with whiskey, float it down to New Orleans, fit it with sails, sail it up to New York City, sell the whiskey, sell the boat, and take a horse back.

- [Narrator] In the year 2003, a group of national re-enactors came to Elizabeth to celebrate the bicentennial of one of the most famous boats ever built in Western Pennsylvania.

The keelboat for what would become the Lewis and Clark expedition.

Bill and his brother Barry Boucher convinced them to come here.

- Here in Elizabeth, we've always held the tradition that the Lewis and Clark expedition boats were built here.

We've always saw the importance of this link with John Walker and Lewis and Clark and early boat building.

In a way, it would promote this town and it's a beautiful little town.

- [Narrator] Meanwhile, David Hallis and his colleagues at the History Center say that Lewis' letters give us the real scoop on the boat that was probably built in Pittsburgh.

- In 1803, we know that there is a boat builder that built the keel boat for the Lewis and Clark expedition, and this guy happened to be a drunk.

- [David] Well, Meriweather Lewis came to Elizabeth in 1803 to pick up a boat that my character John Walker built for him.

- [Barry] And the tradition is in Elizabeth that he built the keel boat.

But we know John Walker wasn't a drunk.

- [David] I don't know, I think maybe that, maybe a foreman might have been the drunken boat builder.

- [Narrator] The re-enactors are led by Scott Mandrell, who portrays Meriweather Lewis and the beautiful recreated keelboat built in St. Charles, Missouri, left Elizabeth on August 31st, 2003.

Unlike the original, this replica also has a motor.

- Really the greatest amount of information we have with regard to what the boat physically looked like is based upon good scholarship and primarily the drawings that Clark had made over the winter of 1803, '04.

- [Narrator] By the time these re-enactors got their boat to Pittsburgh, the History Center had hired another replica of the Lewis and Clark keelboat, and so we had two.

- They're fighting for the boat building lead of the 18th century and the 19th century.

It's the pride of boat building.

- [Barry] Well, I like the debate, and it's been a good thing for Elizabeth.

It's been a lot of fun.

We just wanted to be sure that that what we told, you know, our folks was accurate.

- [David] We might have lost a battle along the way, but I think we won the war.

- We've all been scratching our head and trying to figure out why everyone's so excited about being the home of the drunk boat builder.

- [Narrator] Maybe it's just our ancient appreciation for whiskey and boat building.

- [David] Once the steamboat came, it changed boat building here, but then when the railroad came that ended.

- [Narrator] Oh, the railroads changed everything and a Scottish immigrant named Andrew Carnegie changed the city forever when he decided that steel rails would be better than iron ones.

And in Braddock, Pennsylvania, he built a new steel mill named for the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad.

- Well, it's the Edgar Thompson Works and it's famous because it was Andrew Carnegie's first mill.

It's where he started his steel empire in 1875.

US Steel was born in 1901 and so it's been US Steel ever since.

The name's changed, the USX and back again, but we're still US Steel, we always will be.

- [Narrator] In the 20th century, steel became the signature of our city, brought incredible wealth and amazing amounts of work to this region.

- [Announcer] Every night is 4th of July when the Bessemers go into action and here's your action.

Roman candles lancing the blackness of the night.

(jaunty music) - [Narrator] The steel industry underwent a devastating decline in the 1980s, but a few local steel companies have survived and US Steel still produces the amazing metal and what they now call the Mon Valley Works where Ray Terza is general manager.

- The Mon Valley Works as it is today, is three separate individual plants.

The Clarendon Works, which we make over 12,000 tons of metallurgical coke every day.

The Edgar Thompson Works, which we make slabs and the Urban Works, which we make high quality sheet steel for the automotive, appliance, and a lot of other metal industries.

- [Narrator] Lou Jack is what they call a continuous improvement coordinator and he sometimes shows people around the Edgar Thompson Works.

- Behind me, our number one and number two blast furnace.

The process starts there with raw material in the blast furnace.

It's smelted into iron.

- [Narrator] The blast furnaces are up on a platform so the ladle cars can be underneath when the molten iron is ready.

- We make the iron.

Right now we're casting, we opened a tap hole.

We'll cast for two to three hours, empty the furnace off.

The bright stuff is the iron coming down that iron runner going into those 200 ton ladles.

So that furnace to me is like a breathing, living thing.

This is a 24 hour process too.

We don't shut down.

- That iron is then taken to the steel shop, which we call the basic oxygen process or BOP shop.

- This is the BOP shop.

We take approximately 400,000 pound of iron to the skimmer, skim off the slag off the top of it, try to make it as clean as possible for quality.

- [Narrator] The iron will be poured into a huge vessel that's already been loaded with scrap steel.

Once all the ingredients are inside, an oxygen lance will be inserted and chemical reactions will occur.

- It's a basic oxygen process.

Basic refers to our refractory oxygen, of course, because we blow oxygen into that vessel.

The sparks, that's just a little bit of the bad stuff leaving the furnace.

Years ago it used to take them six to eight hours to make a hundred ton of steel and now we're making 250 ton of steel in about 35 minutes.

From there it goes to a couple other finishing facilities, the LMF Ladle Metallurgical Facility or vacuum degas it to remove gases and carbon.

From there, it goes to the caster.

- [Roy] The dual strand continuous caster we have at Edgar Thompson, we cast 250 ton heats every 30 minutes into high quality slabs.

- [Worker] Always here about eight and a half inches thick.

That's what we make, slabs of steel.

We make the best slabs of steel though I gotta say that.

- [Narrator] The slabs are then transported to the Irvin Works in West Mifflin where the steel is reheated in a huge furnace.

The slabs slide out and go through a long series of rollers that reduce the thickness of the metal.

It becomes a bright ribbon that will eventually be rolled into a hot band coil that's cleaned in what's called the pickling process then goes on to a cold mill that makes the steel even thinner until it meets the customer's specifications.

That whole thing is a complicated and awesome process.

- Yeah, you take pride in it.

Sometimes it's hard, but you still take pride in it.

- Hey, the work's hard, but it's getting easier and more technology.

What surprises me is the fact that people don't realize we're still here.

We produce something close to the 2.8 million slab tons a year here and that's an awful lot of steel.

- [Narrator] Well, we've also made an awful lot of stuff with steel, including toys.

We met Bill Kinlin and Anne Madeross from the Heinz History Center one day because they know about the large corporate collection of Wolverine Toys originally made on the North Side.

In 1997, some 500 of these toys, most made of sheet metal were given to the historical society.

They're in storage now and they're all in excellent shape.

- Well, now that's the great thing about the collection.

They're in pretty pristine condition because they were factory samples or prototype things so they didn't get played with very much.

They didn't get beat up.

- [Anne] I love these toys because they're great window on American life and on childhood.

- I sort of like the ones that have kind of an ingenious mechanism.

This is a wind up xylophone.

It was called the Xylotone.

The songs were recorded if you wanted to say that on a bunch of cutout discs.

And this mechanism followed the bumps on the disc and this maestro would tap out the tune.

- The whole beginning of Wolverine is really tied to sand toys and beach toys.

- This is the Wolverine Sand Crane.

It's an automatic sand toy.

You pour sand into this funnel, it trickles down through this little chute.

It starts filling up this hopper and as this hopper fills, this tilts up and releases.

- [Narrator] The Wolverine Supply and Manufacturing Company was founded in 1903 by a man from Michigan, B.F. Bain, as a tool and die company.

One of its customers, the Sand Toy Company of Pittsburgh went bankrupt and as a settlement, Wolverine got all its dies and patents for toys.

Soon Wolverine was making more money on toys than tools and dies, and by 1913, Mr. Bain had built a toy factory.

The building's still there on the North Side on Western Avenue with a great ghost sign, "Toys" up at the top.

Wolverine had Pittsburghers making toys until around 1970 when new owners moved the business to Arkansas.

But they gave these toys to Pittsburgh.

- [Anne] Wolverine did a whole series of these transportation pull toys.

They're a lot of fun.

- This is called the airplane carrier.

It's a pull toy.

It just rolls on the floor.

- And I love all the little pieces.

You know, the picture on the box is so great.

So it's kind of your complete outdoor gardening set.

- [Bill] And down in this drawer we have a couple more examples.

- My personal favorite in the Wolverine line of toys are the appliances.

- This is a backyard barbecue.

It's pretty much all metal except for the little plastic chicken here.

This spins around.

- [Anne] And this one's got all these little foods kind of in the metal decoration on the door.

- [Narrator] It seems as though they have everything.

- Kitchen sink.

- [Narrator] But Anne and Bill touch the toys only with gloves on.

They wouldn't wind any of them or let us play with them.

- A lot of 'em aren't in working order, but we try to really keep, treat them carefully because we're trying to preserve them and not harm them.

So playing with them is actually sort of out of the question.

- [Narrator] Okay, so one Sunday evening we went to see the Wolverine toys that Terry Maury has collected from flea markets, antique stores and off the internet.

- And actually this bus here was the bus that got me started.

I saw this on the shelf and I looked at it and saw it had Pittsburgh on it and I never knew anything about the Wolverine Toy Company.

I thought, well, I need to have that bus.

Once I got that bus, it was a search that's still never ending.

Now some of them are more rare and they're very hard to find even on eBay.

But this is sort of reminiscent of Kennywood 'cause it's sort of like a roller coaster ride.

They're so ingenious the way they function and the mechanisms that make them work.

And I'm a mechanical engineer and it just, you know, just suits me as the ideal collection.

And I actually never counted them or even cataloged them.

I really haven't done a lot of research on them.

I just sort of collect them because I like them.

Actually, the company is still in business making toys, not as Wolverine, but it's called Today's Kids in Arkansas.

And they still make toys, but in my mind they're not as cool as these.

This is called the Magic Auto Race.

It's kind of ingenious the way it works.

You simply turn this crank and the cars run down the track.

No batteries required and it's kind of surprising, I don't remember ever having a Wolverine toy when I was a kid.

And they were sold nationwide, not just in Pittsburgh and they were sold worldwide actually.

The fact that they're from Pittsburgh and I live in Pittsburgh, I consider myself a Pittsburgher at this point and that's what makes 'em so attractive.

Rather than collecting any other toy manufacturer's toys, because these are from Pittsburgh.

- [Narrator] Sometimes the city does matter, even in the 19th century, the word Pittsburgh could mean quality.

Jeff Gilbert is the vice president of PPG, which originally was a company called Pittsburgh Plate Glass.

- It became the first commercially successful plate glass company in 1883.

And it resulted from a partnership between a railroad executive John Pitcairn and a riverboat captain who was kind of flamboyant named Ford.

And the two of them put their assets together and located the plant here at Creighton, where it's operated continuously for 120 years.

- [Narrator] PPG now manufactures automobile windshields here and also makes many colorful industrial coatings not far away at its plant in Springdale, but these are just two of its many factories now located around the world.

But actually Pittsburgh Plate Glass had begun diversifying its product lines in the 19th century.

- We got into the paint business and we got into the chemical business and in the mid 1950s we got into the fiberglass business.

So we thought it appropriate in the late 1960s to change the name to PPG industry so it would be less focused on plate glass.

- [Narrator] So the company is now a global enterprise, but it's kept the city's name in its line of Pittsburgh paints also now more than a hundred years old.

But even before the original Pittsburgh Plate Glass got started, 19th century Pittsburgh attracted many inventors and entrepreneurs like George Westinghouse.

Ed Reese, who is executive director of the George Westinghouse Museum can tell you about this man who changed the world with products made in Pittsburgh.

- Well, George Westinghouse came to Pittsburgh originally to have two of his early inventions manufactured.

This was the town to come to if you wanted something made out of iron or steel.

It was a fast growing industrial town.

- [Narrator] It became the town where Westinghouse started some 60 different companies, many of them in huge buildings in the Turtle Creek Valley.

- [Ed] We have located an old industrial movie film of Westinghouse.

George Westinghouse had it made for the Louisiana purchase exposition in St. Louis in 1904.

So we have these great old Westinghouse scenes in the factories, you know, showing steam hammers and then and forging steel and just scores of women winding coils down here in East Pittsburgh.

So everything that was manufactured here in the Westinghouse Valley was extremely important for electrifying the world.

So we have all these great old industrial films, including panoramic view of the Westinghouse Valley because they actually had a movie camera mounted on a train.

It went down the valley and showing the various plants.

- [Narrator] The filmmakers also show inside Westinghouse Air Brake in 1904.

- [Ed] It's my understanding today that overall half the brakes in all the railroads and all the trains in the country today are still made by Westinghouse Air Brake.

Now they've changed their name to Wabtec, but they're still the Westinghouse air brake system.

- [Narrator] Wabtec still builds air brake systems that stop trains with compressed air.

Greg Davies is president and CEO here.

- George Westinghouse really was a genius and the system that he designed is still fundamentally the brake system that's used everywhere in the world today.

I mean, we've made progress, but essentially the same concepts are in use as he invented back in, you know, whatever it was, 1869.

- Well, we're making the, this is a control valve for the air brake on a locomotive.

- We make air compressors here.

- I make the 30 CDW brake valve.

- We machine the crank case, the cylinder and the cylinder heads.

This is just one part of the braking system on the trains.

- It's a combination of components put together.

This entire unit is what stops the locomotive train.

- [Narrator] Many Pittsburgh products have become known around the world, including food products developed in the 19th century by Henry John Heinz.

Heinz and his employees and many of their descendants revolutionized food processing.

In 2003, several of the oldest Heinz factories were being converted into condominiums.

While the nearby newer buildings still full of bustling production lines were all sold by Heinz to the Del Monte company in 2002.

Production manager Chuck Robitison says their two main products are still the same.

- We make soups and baby foods.

Really, I guess on average, we produce about seven different products here a day.

Our plant is the largest manufacturer of private label soups in the country.

- Right now in this process we're dumping 740 pounds of mushrooms into the kettle.

- [Chuck] I tell people that really this plant is like a big kitchen at home, it's just on a much larger scale.

- At the same time, there's 1,467 pounds of cream base being added through a stainless steel piping system.

- And our cook, Bill Davis, his job is to make sure that all of those ingredients get combined in the correct proportions.

- [Bill] Just about there.

- And that the finished quality of that finished batch of soup meets our specifications.

We also make baby foods, we prepare all the ingredients and all those ingredients get combined into a big kettle.

It gets piped directly into the filling machine.

We fill about 980 jars a minute and sometimes it's hard to even see 'em go by and they go into what we call the thermal process or the sterilizer.

We put labels on the jars and then they go into what we call the case packer and we send it on its way and hopefully it goes to everybody's kitchen.

- [Narrator] These aren't the only local products that hope to end up in a kitchen.

Out in Washington County near Canonsburg, there's a small plant where All-Clad metal crafters make some of their most famous products.

- We make pots and pans.

- There's a lot of people that live in this area aren't even aware that All-Clad is manufactured here.

- Even people that live in Canonsburg (laughs) still can't believe that the cookware is made here.

- You know, we're kind of a hidden secret here in Western Pennsylvania.

- [Narrator] The secret actually started several decades ago.

The director of logistics and customer service here, Chris Ulum, can tell you some history.

- Well, back in 1968, my father, who was a metallurgist, teamed up with Allegheny Ludlum and Alcoa to help create uses for their materials.

- [Narrator] They came up with the idea of combining different layers of metals, which led to better pots and pans says chief financial officer, Frank Johnston.

- What Mr. Ulum realized that if he combined both the virtues of stainless and aluminum, he'd have a vessel that distributed to heat evenly and a cooking surface that would not interact.

The aluminum core transmits the heat up the sides of the pan, not just across the bottom of the pan.

- [Narrator] Finding multi-layered metals here was no surprise for All-Clad's CEO Peter Cameron when he came here in 1998.

- What would you expect Pittsburgh to have?

A metal based technology that would be, you know, better than you'd find most of the rest of the country.

- [Chuck] We have two businesses here.

The first one makes the actual raw material to make All-Clad cookware and it's called Clad Metals.

- [Chris] Now the secret is rolling dissimilar metals such as stainless to aluminum and under with heat and pressure through a rolling mill.

- [Chuck] So we make the raw material in a square and punch a circle out of it.

That circle we refer to as the blank.

- 99% of what we do goes to All-Clad, formed into various sizes of cookware and it's formed on a hydro form press.

The chamber of the press comes down over the blank and the forming die comes up and forms the basic shell of the cookware.

The shell is then trimmed.

- The machines over there, that's where it trims around the edges after they come off the press.

- Then the pan is taken over to a highlight machine, which puts a reflective starburst finish on the inside, which brings out the jewelry appearance on the inside of the pan.

It's then buffed and polished on the outside.

- The girls check 'em for any abnormalities, nicks, cuts, pits, anything like that.

And then.

- They go to the riveter, the riveters rivet on the handles.

From the riveter, they go to the inspecting tables, which they clean, inspect for scratches, dents.

From that point they go to the boxer, which she packs up the box, sends it down to the skid stacker and stacks it on a skid and that's pretty much it.

(laughs) - [Narrator] Not far from All-Clad in McMurray, Pennsylvania, there's a great little restaurant called the Classroom, a 1907 one room schoolhouse where owner and chef Chuck Davis has been cooking things up since 1993.

- The fellows from All-Clad, they came up for lunch a few times and then they started coming in on a regular basis.

- [Chuck] I would loosely describe that as the All-Clad cafeteria or executive dining room.

- The gentlemen at All-Clad gave me a pan, a saute skillet one day and asked me if I would mind trying it out for 'em and then letting 'em know what I thought of it.

- [Chuck] The fact of the matter is we take a lot of things to his restaurant for testing.

- They said basically what they wanted was not only use it over and over and over again, but he said, do whatever you normally do to any other pan.

- Here, dear.

- [Mike] And because the relationship we have with him is so good, he's very honest and candid.

- [Chuck] No matter what you do, just do it and try to beat it up as much as possible.

- [Mike] And Chuck is very helpful in helping us develop products.

- [Chuck] I guess they were figuring that in a commercial kitchen, even though this is a small one, it's gonna get more use than what they could reproduce it at the factory.

- Actually, I got to say, they are better than the rest I ever used.

- Our cookware is expensive and people are willing to pay that price because of the quality and the way it performs.

- [Worker] And we want it to be the best.

It keeps our job going, makes me a paycheck.

- [Mike] And so you've got a great work ethic here.

You've got people who take pride in what they're doing.

- [Worker] Because we know we're doing a good job.

A lot of people's buying this stuff.

If we wasn't, we wouldn't have had this company.

- [Mike] You know, we're proud to continue the heritage of iron metal working here in Western Pennsylvania.

- [Narrator] That local heritage of making high quality products has also attracted manufacturers from elsewhere.

Near Mount Pleasant, PA, there is a 700 acre complex known as Sony Technology Center Pittsburgh.

Since 1990, this place has concentrated on one principal activity.

- We make televisions.

- We make direct view televisions, we make projection televisions, we make LCD televisions.

We make the biggest TVs that you can find.

- [Narrator] This is a very unusual sort of factory and the center's president, Chuck Gregory, will tell you so.

- We're a vertically integrated television manufacturing operation.

And what I mean by vertically integrated, across the street at American Video Glass we're actually making from sand, television glass, which is then constructed into a CRT cathode ray tube, which is then assembled into a television and shipped to dealers all throughout North America.

- [Narrator] It's impressive.

And for some TVs, the story does start in that factory across the street, a separate division of Sony called American Video Glass.

- What we make is television glass.

The front piece that you see is called a panel and the back piece is called a funnel.

- [Narrator] This is one of the most modern automated glass factories in the world and its environmental safety coordinator, Rich Walker, knows how it works.

- What we do is we bring in several raw materials, primarily sand, and we send the sand pneumatically into our tank.

- And it's very hot in there.

It's over 1600 degrees Celsius so it doesn't take long for the materials to melt.

- [Narrator] Ron Gallagher is what's called a panel melting specialist.

He tends this furnace and the molten glass inside.

- It's approximately 36 inches deep.

It runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

We make, it's called a gob.

- [Rob] The gob anywhere from 900 to 1,000 degrees C. - [Narrator] Pressing that 110 pound gob into the panel mold involves mechanical and robotic devices and humans to monitor at all.

- [Chuck] From the press, the panel funnel will go into a lehr.

The lehr is a cooling of it.

It allows us now to touch the glass at the other end.

They inspect it, look for obviously quality, any type of defects.

- [Narrator] Then they send most of this glass across the street to the main plant.

- [Ron] They take the stuff we make, they take the panel and funnel.

It goes through a screening process, they coat it, insert an aperture grill, marry the two, panel and funnel together, insert an electronic gun.

- [Ed] Over here we assemble 36 inch television sets.

They'll take the the CRT off of the line and they will put it into what we call a Beznet and attach all the components to it and then we'll do the adjustments on it, put a rear cover on it and put it in a box.

- It's just amazing that we can actually go from, you know, sand and stuff to actually having a picture tube to having a full finished television.

- To think that everything is made right in this local area.

It's really amazing to see how it's made and how it's all put together and it comes out to be a beautiful TV set.

- [Narrator] In addition to these sets with glass picture tubes, the folks here also make other kinds of big screen TVs.

- In this area, we make the rear projection television sets.

- I'm doing the DY wires, which gives the television color.

Without me, there would be no color.

- This is for a 50 inch or LCD TV or our newest TV.

- When you look through it, if you guys stand here and look, it magnifies a little piece of dirt when it gets on that TV can show up to be enormous.

- Western Pennsylvania is known for good workers, manufacturing people.

- The big difference I noticed from Southern California to here was really the work ethic of the people.

- When I was an 18 year old living in this area, I worked at United States Steel at the Homestead Works.

- Charlene, how's it going?

- Oh, just good, Lisa.

Just real good.

- I take great pride in my career here at Sony that I started out as manufacturing stuff and I've worked my way up.

- I think it's wonderful that we have a place like this here that we all have jobs and it's a good product.

- [Chuck] And that's actually what made this region so significant for Sony.

- Everybody puts a little bit of them into each set.

- The manufacturing culture that was born out of steel and other products in this region.

When it leaves here, we really wanted to be proud that we're putting out a product that we feel we've done our 100% best.

- When I buy a new television, I'm extremely picky, and now I own a Sony.

- I have a 48 inch, the surround sound.

- I bought my mom and dad one.

- 53 inch.

- [Ron] People look at a TV and then they see a piece of shiny glass.

But to us, it's a lot more than that.

It's a lot of hard work.

- [Chuck] I don't think we ever want to give up on the importance of creating value to manufacturing.

- [Lisa] It's what we take pride in.

It's ours.

- [Chuck] And I'm very happy that Sony can continue to participate in that in southwestern Pennsylvania.

- The bigger the better, I guess.

At least that's what my husband says.

- [Narrator] Well, sometimes a tiny manufacturer can also have an amazing story.

In Jeanette, Pennsylvania, just behind Zippy's Barbershop there's a building that looks like a garage, totally inconspicuous.

- Pretty much so a lot of the neighbors don't even realize what we do, they just think it is just a old garage here.

- Everybody comes in here, they're always really impressed with what we do in here.

- What we do here, no one else does.

- And we've been in business since 1932 and in this building here for over 60 years.

- [Narrator] It's called the Jensen Manufacturing Company.

- We get a lot of the old, older gentlemen go over here to the barbershop and they're just amazed when they come in here.

- One half of this building is the machine shop and the other half is the sub-assembly and the assembly part of the shop.

- Lately when I speak to some of the people and they'll ask me where you work and whatever and they'll say, oh yeah, I know, I know they were in Jeanette but I didn't think Jensen was still there, you know?

- [Narrator] Tom Jensen Jr. now owns this business and makes a product his father designed.

- Well, we make a a line of miniature steam engines, tabletop steam engines.

- [Worker] They're just small replicas of the steam engine itself.

- [Tom] It's a miniature power plant actually what it is.

- [Worker] And they don't move on a wheel and go down the floor anywhere.

They're just stationary and they make something else work.

- It's not a toy, it's an educational piece is what it is.

- I guess you could say, hey, it's a big boys toy, how's that?

(laughs) - It started out as a hobby with my father back in the 1930s when steam was big on the railroads and also big industrially.

About 1933 or '34, he got a large order from FAO Schwartz in New York City for their Christmas holiday business.

So 50 engines, that was really the start of the business and from there on it just kind of grew year by year.

But now we're worldwide 'cause we're on the internet.

- [Narrator] Tom Guy is the foreman here.

His wife Dorita does a thousand things and Tom's brother, Andy Guy does a lot of soldering.

- Actually I'm the machinist, I do all the machining.

- The people you see here today do 99% of the work.

- Andy makes all the parts I do all the assembly.

What we're gonna do first is put some water in the boiler.

- [Dorita] I'll paint an R6 spoke flywheel.

- [Tom] We're gonna pour water into the funnel.

- Actually what I'm doing, I'm silver soldering in our boilers here.

- [Tom] I'll put a safety valve in.

- [Andy] To seal the boiler itself so that it's airtight.

- [Tom] Put the whistle in.

- I am building in an eccentric here.

It's for a reversible engine.

Now we're gonna plug it in.

Just like on the old style locomotives.

- [Andy] And we're gonna wait for about five minutes for it to heat up.

- Some people have 'em just for the fun purpose of them.

Not only for the educational, just for the fun of running them.

- So when little kids come over to the house, oh, we fire it up.

- I have the model 20, one of the more exotic engines, you know, the bigger fly with bigger bore cast iron.

- [Dorita] And they love it.

- Not only the kids but the adults too because you got your eccentrics and you got your reversing levers, you got your cam, you got your flywheel, got your cranks.

- [Narrator] These great little Jensen steam engines obviously also keep alive everyone's memories of Tom Jensen Sr. who worked here 'til he died in 1991.

- [Tom] And he built not only the engines, but he built all the tooling that you see in the plant here.

- [Dorita] And he was a genius for making all the little tools and the dies that we use and the hand presses and stuff to put our pieces together.

- Oh yeah, I worked for him about two years before he passed away.

I learned a lot off of him too in that two years.

I wish I could have worked with him a little bit more.

He always loved it 'cause he told me when he was a boy, he'd always watch the farm equipment in the fields and that's how he got his idea to make these.

He used to always tell me, "Pay attention.

"I ain't always going to be here."

(laughs) - He was the inspiration for all of it.

It is a product that is kept as a family heirloom handed down from generation to generation, so.

- Like I said, it's something that nobody else does.

So I guess my job's pretty unique and I tell you one thing, I've become a darn good solderer over the years.

- [Narrator] You know, the joys and skills you get in a machine shop can be useful in surprising ways.

Over on Washington's Landing, there's a relatively new company that started out in 1992 as Automated Healthcare but is now McKesson Automation.

- We make robots for hospitals.

- They help fill patient orders on a day-to-day basis for all the prescriptions filled in the hospital.

- We have a robot that has bar coded medications that hang on rods.

- This is basically our largest robot.

It's a demonstrator model.

It's full of candy even though it says it's drugs, but I've actually put my daughter in.

- Everything is done in barcode, so your name is a barcode.

- This conveyor scanner reads the label, sees that Maria needs some medication and the robot starts picking it.

The robot actually knows where all these medications are.

A pharmacy would've set up each one of these rods to contain the medication that's needed for that actual pharmacy.

So basically the robot has picked these for this bin.

Dispensing medications to hospital patients is a highly repetitive activity that requires a high degree of accuracy.

- If you look at it, there's nothing there that is really unique.

It's just taking existing technology and making it work for our particular application.

- A robot doesn't have a bad day, a robot doesn't have a rough Monday morning.

- You know, they work all the time without any complaints, days off, things like that.

- [Worker] It's also not bored, it likes doing this.

- [Narrator] Rich Lunak, now president of McKesson Automation Group, has been part of all this since the pharmaceutical robot was just an idea.

- Well, it actually originated in a class project at Carnegie Mellon University and our founder, Sean McDonald, actually was in a class on entrepreneurship and had to write a paper on a new business idea and he was an automation engineer with me at Westinghouse Electric Company and got partnered with the director of pharmacy at Allegheny General Hospital.

And what's their idea?

Automate a hospital pharmacy, and so that's how it all originated.

- This is probably an idea that other people have had, but somebody in Pittsburgh decided to make it.

- [Rich] You know, I like to think that there's something special about Pittsburgh, you know, certainly the blue collar work ethic.

- [Al] Okay, so here's our new control cabinet.

- [Narrator] That's Al Bowers, main engineer on the first robot and now engineering manager.

- I think because we're crossing boundaries between electrical and mechanical and computers, it's difficult to find that mix of skills in other places.

- And also we just have a great academic base.

You know, we've been able to attract the best employees in our industry.

And I think that's a great competitive advantage.

We don't just have good engineering schools.

We have good technical schools also.

Penn Tech, Pittsburgh Tech, all these places train the people that fix this stuff too.

Any piece of equipment that I send outta here has my name on it and it runs.

- I came here with very little experience and I learned a lot and I'm still learning.

- [Worker] Well, I think when any kind of electronics come into the scene, it just makes your people better.

It makes the people in Pittsburgh better.

- [Rich] Well, my father was a steelworker, so I've got the whole steelworker mentality.

You know, you work hard, you get the job done and you move on.

- [Al] We all contribute to making a product that at some level helps people.

- Yeah, it makes you feel good to know that all over the country and now we're moving out actually, out of the country too, that our machines are going out all over and they're helping people out.

- [Worker] It's a system that saves lives eventually.

- [Rich] It's also cool.

(laughs) - [Narrator] Well, if the thought of all that candy in that robot has you craving something sweet, it may be time to head for Westview where this unusual structure sits on the Horseshoe Bend.

- [Jim] The name of this business is Betsy Ann Chocolates and we make high quality gourmet chocolates.

- [Narrator] Jim Paris is president here and stays familiar with his products.

- [Jim] Literally every piece is unique.

- Everybody loves chocolate.

I mean, I don't know hardly anybody, if you offer him a piece of chocolate candy, they won't eat it.

- [Narrator] That's Jim's dad, Harry Paris.

- [Jim] My father was a baker originally, so he's been in the confectionary industry all his life.

- And this place became available when I purchased it from Betsy Ann.

- [Narrator] Yes, there was a Betsy Ann, Betsy Ann Helsel.

- [Harry] That was like, in 1968.

- [Narrator] Since then, things have been busy around here in this long, tasty candy factory.

- This is what we call the enrobing room.

This is where we cover everything in chocolate.

Mr. Paris decorates the chocolate as it goes down the belt.

- She's putting the candy on and it's getting a bottomer and then it goes in here and is covered and I mark it.

It identifies the candy.

So when the girls pack 'em in the back on the line, they put 'em in, they know they look, P. That's a peanut butter.

- This is the kitchen.

This is where we make all the centers and all the fillings of the chocolate.

- [Harry] These are our chocolate covered cherries.

- First of all, we have to stir up the raspberry.

This is for raspberry truffle.

- Chocolate vat.

- [Worker] And we're gonna fill the molds by hand here.

- [Jim] The cherries are placed in a rubber mat.

- [Worker] We're gonna tap it a little bit.

- [Harry] And then I cook a fondant.

- [Worker] Make everything level.

- [Harry] To a temperature and a consistency, and then we funnel it in individually by hand as you see here.

- And then we put 'em on this tray that goes into the cooler.

- Fillings here waiting to be enrobed with chocolate.

- Into the cooler, which is very cool.

- If you ever bite into a cherry and wonder how they get the liquid inside, this is one way.

- As you put one in, you bring one out.

- It goes in solid, then it breaks down into the chocolate.

- It's what we call slamming.

This gets the chocolate out in one full piece.

These are double dark truffles.

- This is the belt here where the candy is cupped.

- They go over to the next department and they get coated again with chocolate.

- [Harry] I started in the bunny room making molds.

- Do you wanna try a truffle?

They're really good.

- This is the packing line where all the boxes are packed.

One pounds, half pounds.

The ladies pack each individual box.

- I eat all day.

- I eat, I eat a lot of candy, and probably more than I wanna admit.

- Do I ever eat it?

(laughs) Certainly, all day long.

- I like peanut butter cups.

Mm, I like them.

(laughs) - I like the double dark truffle.

- I just don't eat a lot at once though.

- Well, actually I like the caramel, the pecan caramel truffles.

- Unless I go on a binge one time, (laughs) once in awhile.

- Yeah, they're the best.

Are we done?

- My favorite chocolate is dark coconut.

- I started here last year and I gained 12 pounds.

So now today I have one piece of chocolate, one a week.

- You know, I'm constantly tasting it.

That's why my pants never keep fitting.

It's always like I have to watch the other things I eat.

- It's almost like eating the peanut butter out of the jar.

- Kinda like being Willy Wonka.

- [Harry] And I definitely like pecan turtles.

- On Friday only, so all week I just, I think, what am I gonna have?

- Goes down the belt, comes around, is wrapped with shrink wrap.

- They make excellent candy here.

I'll have to say that myself.

- The end result of this, people are gonna go home and enjoy it.

- [Worker] Our products are all made right here.

- You create something from nothing.

We have decided that we are going to stay here.

You know, you get a bag of sugar and you make it into a piece of candy and this is where we want to be.

- I love it, it's sweet business.

- [Jim] And you don't have to be big to be the best, you just have to do a good job.

- [Narrator] You know, there's something delicious and somehow satisfying about all these things we've made.

Distinctive things from around here that have had all sorts of impact on our modern world.

- [Mike] I think it's very important that we still make something.

We keep our industrial light in this country.

- [Worker] Manufacturing is Western Pennsylvania.

- [Narrator] At a time when work is too often going elsewhere, it seems wise to pay attention and to celebrate the places and the people who still make things.

- [Worker] They're pretty neat, the things that are made in your own backyard.

- [Bill] When you make something, at least potentially, there's something there to build a legacy on.

- [Narrator] All around us, there are often overlooked buildings where things are being made.

Things that help make this part of the world a place where lots of people want to make a home.

To order a VHS or DVD of "Things We've Made" or any of the other programs in the Pittsburgh History series, Call WQED at 1-800-274-1307.

- Sometimes you like to just choke somebody.

(laughs) - They call me the queen.

I don't know if this is good or bad.

- You just gotta believe me out and make me look good.

- [Worker] I would never make a good actor would I?

- [Rick] For him, we would like another take.

You were excellent.

- Take 55, take 56.

- [Worker] You get to meet a lot of great people like yourself.

- Shrink wrap.

Shrunk wrap.

Shrink wrap.

- They dome that on there.

They look like eyeballs, but I won't say that.

- [Worker] I forgot, (laughs) I should have said, I should have said another good batch.

- We're all beer drinkers here.

- Not that there's anything wrong with that.

- I'm glad I don't do this all the time.

(workers laughing) - No, I was never a boozer.

If you can't have fun, you might as well hang it up.

- [Mike] It was like Samson and Goliath.

- Cut.

- It's David and Goliath.

- David and Goliath.

- David and Goliath.

(both laughing) Samson and Goliath.

- Okay, we're done.

- [Narrator] Major funding for "Things We've Made" was provided by the Buhl Foundation serving Southwestern Pennsylvania since 1927.

(dramatic music) - [Announcer] We are PBS.