Categories: Metallurgy Steelmaking. Read what you need to know about our industry portal chemeurope. My watch list my. My watch list My saved searches My saved topics My newsletter Register free of charge. Keep logged in. Cookies deactivated. To use all functions of this page, please activate cookies in your browser. Login Register. Additional recommended knowledge. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company. Taipei: Caves Books Ltd. P Vernon, G. McDonnell and A. Schubert, History of the British iron and steel industry from c.
Whittick with P. Combes , 'The Lordship of Canterbury, iron-founding at Buxted, and the continental antecedents of cannon-founding in the Weald' Sussex Archaeological Collections for , Hyde, Technological Change and the British iron industry Princeton , Science Aid.
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Microsoft Internet Explorer 6. Early furnaces were built where these materials were available. Iron is usually found in combination in the form of hematite, the magnetite used at Hopewell, or other iron ores.
Most iron ore was dug in small surface mines. Any substance that contained calcium, like seashells, could be used as a flux, but for most furnaces, limestone was cheap and abundant. American forests were so vast — and bringing in coal so expensive before railroads were built — that early iron plantations like Hopewell made their own fuel.
They slowly burned and carefully built piles of wood to make charcoal , an almost purely carbon fuel that burns with intense heat. The great demand for charcoal meant that early furnaces were sited on woodlands. One other ingredient was needed: air. The Process. Iron plantation life revolved around the always-running, roaring furnace. It shut down usually once a year — to refurbish its inner walls and hearth.
It demanded close attention. Use of coal in smelting started before the Industrial Revolution based on innovations by Sir Clement Clerke and others from , using coal reverberatory furnaces known as cupolas. These were operated by the flames playing on the ore and charcoal or coke mixture, reducing the oxide to metal.
This has the advantage that impurities such as sulfur ash in the coal do not migrate into the metal. This technology was applied to lead from and to copper from It was also applied to iron foundry work in the s, but in this case the reverberatory furnace was known as an air furnace. The foundry cupola is a different and later innovation. Reverberatory furnace. The reverberatory furnace could produce cast iron using mined coal. The burning coal remained separate from the iron ore and so did not contaminate the iron with impurities like sulfur and ash.
This opened the way to increased iron production. Abraham Darby made great strides using coke to fuel his blast furnaces at Coalbrookdale in However, the coke pig iron he made was used mostly for the production of cast iron goods, such as pots and kettles. He had the advantage over his rivals in that his pots, cast by his patented process, were thinner and cheaper than theirs. Coke pig iron was hardly used to produce wrought iron in forges until the mids, when his son Abraham Darby II built Horsehay and Ketley furnaces.
By then, coke pig iron was cheaper than charcoal pig iron. Since cast iron was becoming cheaper and more plentiful, it became a structural material following the building of the innovative Iron Bridge in by Abraham Darby III. The Iron Bridge crosses the River Severn in Shropshire, England, and is the first bridge in the world to be made of cast iron.
During the winter of —74, local newspapers advertised a proposal to petition Parliament for leave to construct an iron bridge with a single feet 37 m span. Wrought iron for smiths to forge into consumer goods was still made in finery forges, as it long had been. However, new processes were adopted in the ensuing years. This page has been archived and is no longer updated. Find out more about page archiving. The Blast Furnace Animation. British History Timeline.
Explore the British History Timeline from the Neolithic to the present day.
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