Fifty years will have passed at the end of this week since the beginning of coke production in Slovakia, for which the Košice steelmakers were responsible. Our cokery staff produced the first coke on December 12, 1965 in large-capacity coke-oven battery no. 1. That was a historic moment for the whole Košice Region, and an important milestone in the development of steel production in Slovakia. In the fifty years since then the steelmakers have produced 84.7 million tonnes of coke, the principal use of which is in the making of molten iron in the blast furnaces of U. S. Steel Košice.