Early Iron Workers
by I’ve been putting up a few stories lately from my text books. This one is about the Early Iron Workers. The title speaks for itself so you probably know what it’s going to be about.
Very rarely, iron occurs as a native metal. Some metal iron is formed where hot volcanic rock meets a seam of coal. The heat allows a chemical reaction to take place between the iron compounds in the rock and carbon in the coal. Many meteorites that strike the Earth are made of Iron. It is possible that early people knew of metal iron but as the pieces were so rare they did not begin to make iron products on a large scale.
A chance heating of an iron are in a charcoal fire most probably led to the discovery of the extraction of iron and the development of metal products. Before this discovery was made, bronze was the msot common metal in everyday use. It is an alloy of copper and tin, but it is quite weak. Soldiers using bronze swords in battle had to stop occasionally to straighten them!
Iron is a stronger metal than bronze and soon replaced it as the most common metal for everyday uses.
The Hitties were the first people to produce iron in large amounts about 3500 years ago. They were a people that lived in the land now called Turkey.
Iron needed a higher temperature than copper or tin for extraction from its ore. The extraction was achieved by heating the ore with charcoal and using bellows to supply more air to the furnace.
The iron made in these early furnaces was wrought iron. This is a soft form of iron. The hittites discovered how to give the wrought iron a coating of harder metal by allowing the iron surface to combine with some of the carbon in the charcoal and form steel.
In Northern India, the iron workers developed a process which prevented wrought iron from rusting. In 400 BC they made a pillar of wrought iron 8 metres high and 6 tonnes in weight. This pillar is still standing today and does not have any rust. Nobody knows how these early iron workers made such a metal.
Liked it
