An Unreliable History of Steelmaking

(Short version)

There is a Ribbon of Fire running around the World.

It runs Day and Night.
It runs out of the Past and into the Future
And it Feeds the World.
Few among Millions know this.
We are the few who tend the Ribbon of Fire.
Long May it Serve us All1

The Inland Homily. Written anonymously on a wall at Indiana Harbor sometime in the late 1980s,
and a sentiment that demands to be better preserved.

Steelmaking

As far as anyone knows, Mankind discovered how to smelt iron a little before 2000 BC. At least it
wasn't until about then that he finally bothered to leave any real evidence of his enterprise. Up till
that time, bronze had won the coveted World's Best Manufacturing Metal title for about three
thousand years running. Not that there was much competition. Among the metals then known, only
bronze could take a honed edge and a light temper, but there was no recipe that could make it both
keen and tough. A couple of hearty hacks to the bone with your typical bronze sword and you'd
reduced it to a tastefully-decorated club. Either that or it got too brittle, and you ran the risk of
leaving most of your weapon stuck in the other contestant.

Maybe someone back then decided that bronze was only ever going to be good enough to kill
people, and set out to make a manly alternative. The metals industry always has been singularly
bloody-minded. Back in the Iron Age, the first production process went like this :

 Discover how to make charcoal first

 Find some likely-looking reddish rocks
 Choose a nice day, and a location not too close to valuable property
 Mix the rocks and charcoal together in the middle of a suitable pile of other rocks
 Set fire to it all
 Wait until you notice some spongy-looking glowing stuff
 Beat hell out of this, being careful not to burn yourself

If you follow this recipe, you will be rewarded with a fairly insignificant quantity of wrought iron, plus
some slag2 and a certain amount of clinker3. (The by-products will come in handy when you later
discover roads, except that it's going to be a very short road, unless and until you dream up a
better process).

Let us now take a leap in time and travel to the eighteenth century: By about 1700, most of the
iron in the known world was being made in Europe. It was then that somebody noticed that we
seemed to be running outt of trees, and this could be a serious problem. Anyway, in treeless
Shropshire a guy named Abraham Darby started experimenting with iron made with coal. He
found that it was an excellent process for making industrial quantities of shrapnel. Then he heard
that some brewers were roasting their malt using coke, which got round the problem of tainting it

1
The Inland Homily. Written anonymously on the wall of the 80-inch at Indiana Harbor sometime in the late 1980s, and a sentiment
that demands to be better preserved.
2
Slag: escoria, deshechos
3
Clinker: caliza cocida, uno de los principales compnentes usados en la fabricación del cemento
with sulphur. Over a pint that tasted much better than the one he'd had the week before, Abe
began to ponder the possibility that the sulphur in coal was spoiling his iron too.

Cast iron now became a lot more durable, and you could of course get better properties still by hot-
working the stuff. A basic manufacturing concept of casting to approximate size followed by forging
to shape became commonplace. Wrought iron produced from coke was a big success, and the
transformation of Coalbrookdale into the cradle of modern industry was spectacular, if a little
environmentally irresponsible. To show the world the potential of abundant iron, an iron bridge was
built at Ironbridge, a particularly apt choice of location.

Very soon, England's green and pleasant land was dotted with dark satanic mills, and proto-
economists gave their permission for the Industrial Revolution to get started. Nothing too ambitious
yet, mind. A volume process for refining blast furnace iron was needed, because beating hell out of
this much cast iron was proving to be a bit tiring.

Enter Henry Cort, who was almost certainly from Northamptonshire. Henry developed a
secondary ironmaking process called puddling. The idea behind puddling sounds ridiculous to the
layman; basically you get carbon in your iron when you reduce the ore with Darby's coke, and now
you have to get most of it out again. This is a subtle concept which is quite lost on non-
metallurgists. Since being a non-metallurgist is a perfectly acceptable condition which befalls most
normal people, it suffices to say that puddling involved a kind of conscientious poking rather than
swinging big hammers. As a result, it Cort on famously.

Next came a Doncaster clock-maker called Benjamin Huntsman. It's a pity that it took a group of
statues in a shopping mall near to his adopted home of Sheffield before anyone realised who he
was. But even if the man himself was somewhat anonymous, Huntsman's legacy was noticed all
right. He developed the crucible process for making steel, and it stood Sheffield in good stead for a
couple of centuries, as those big bronze buggers at Meadowhall will testify.

And for the first time this was steel, with the non-ferrous bits in solution, and not strung out through
the stuff like some kind of heavy-duty Shredded Wheat. The Little Mesters 4 began to learn some
subtle smelting and alloying techniques, and the deliberate targeting of a spectrum of properties
from high strength to high workability became possible.

QUESTIONS

1. Please, draw a scheme of the old process to make steel following the recipe showed
in this text.
2. Do you remember which product was making using coke before it was used to
steelmaking? In which way?
3. What thing was built to show the world the potential of abundant iron?
4. What is the main damage to the environment caused by making iron using charcoal?
5. Why do you think steelmaking developed faster and better in England than any other
place in Europe? Use any source you need to find out the right answer
6. How does the manufacture of iron and steel relate to the development of the
Industrial Revolution?
7. Who developed the crucible process for making steel? What was their profession?
8. What was the consequence of making steel by hot?
9. Which town is considered the place where modern industry was born?
10. Why is so important steel? Explain your answer in detail, please

4
The Little Mesters were the creators of Sheffield's steel heritage, and they achieved this by sheer weight of numbers - creating a
City-wide cottage industry of cutlery and tool manufacture. Most of them died poor and young, their lungs caked with grinding dust.
A few lived long enough to found the Companies of Hallamshire, whose dynastic families have themselves now passed into history.