The Triumvirate: Coal, Iron, and Steam
technicshistory.com
The Triumvirate: Coal, Iron, and Steam
1–10 of 14 posts
Re: The Triumvirate: Coal, Iron, and Steam
#2> "Iron, however, presented a much greater challenge. With a melting point of 2800 degrees, no fire could be made in antiquity capable of reducing it to liquid form."
Are there any notes from experimentors in antiquity trying to build the hottest fire in the world, capable of reduing Iron to liquid?
Re: The Triumvirate: Coal, Iron, and Steam
#3Talks about history of coal, iron and steam and the "virtuous cycle" that happened between them in Great Britain from 1200 onwards.
There are some pretty interesting snippets:
""" ... there is another possible explanation for the name – that it was called sea coal because it arrived into London by sea from the North. ... """
""" ... this would provide a tidy explanation for why the engine developed in Britain and nowhere else – no other place was exploiting coal as a fuel source nearly so intensively, and so no other place had access to the cheap fuel that made a first-generation steam engine worthwhile. """
""" The puddling process, developed in Britain in the 1780s, removed this last bottleneck. A puddling furnace turned cast iron into wrought simply by applying heat and stirring. This allowed the mass production of wrought iron, using coal as fuel """
Good read!
Re: The Triumvirate: Coal, Iron, and Steam
#4> " Iron, however, presented a much greater challenge. With a melting point of 2800 degrees, no fire could be made in antiquity capable of reducing it to liquid form. " Are there any notes from experimentors in antiquity trying to build the hottest fire in the world, capable of reduing Iron to liquid?
Wikipedia says,
"Whilst terrestrial iron is naturally abundant, its high melting point of 1,538 °C (2,800 °F) placed it out of reach of common use until the end of the second millennium BC"
2000 BCE seems firmly in the age of antiquity.
Re: The Triumvirate: Coal, Iron, and Steam
#5> " Iron, however, presented a much greater challenge. With a melting point of 2800 degrees, no fire could be made in antiquity capable of reducing it to liquid form. " Are there any notes from experimentors in antiquity trying to build the hottest fire in the world, capable of reduing Iron to liquid?
Wikipedia says, "Whilst terrestrial iron is naturally abundant, its high melting point of 1,538 °C (2,800 °F) placed it out of reach of common use until the end of the second millennium BC" 2000 BCE seems firmly in the age of antiquity.
I mean, I want to read the abridged proverbial blog posts of Rhododendron of Pathos in 2000BCE, child of the local blacksmith, and their experiments with building a hotter forge and measuring the temperature and how they identified iron compared to other materials and so on.
I can imagine over the centuries, a lot of people dedicated many years of their lives to pursuits like this, most of which went nowhere, and probably some were based on interesting models of the world such as phlogiston or etc.
Re: The Triumvirate: Coal, Iron, and Steam
#6Grand-grand…grand-son of Cranage Brothers here. The Cranages worked for the Darbys in their furnace (around 1760) and invented a new process for converting pig iron into wrought iron. Quakers themselves like the Darbys, one of their descendants founded a school in Wellington (the Old Hall) where my grandmother was born.
And so reading these historical notes reminds me of the narrations from my parents and grandparents about the steel industry and our family, very strange and nice discovery here on HN!
Re: The Triumvirate: Coal, Iron, and Steam
#7> " Iron, however, presented a much greater challenge. With a melting point of 2800 degrees, no fire could be made in antiquity capable of reducing it to liquid form. " Are there any notes from experimentors in antiquity trying to build the hottest fire in the world, capable of reduing Iron to liquid?
Wikipedia says, "Whilst terrestrial iron is naturally abundant, its high melting point of 1,538 °C (2,800 °F) placed it out of reach of common use until the end of the second millennium BC" 2000 BCE seems firmly in the age of antiquity.
They didn't need to melt it to work with it.
From https://acoup.blog/2020/09/25/collections-iron-how-did-they-...:
"The second problem is chemical, because we are never going to melt this iron. Our furnaces can’t get that hot (and even if they could, melting this iron would cause it to absorb a lot of carbon from our fuel, which we do not want). So we’re going to be reducing our iron – that is, getting it to change chemically with the exposure of heat. That means the chemical composition of our iron matters a lot and we have to solve our chemical problems before we can smelt our ore.
The good news is that some ores of iron reduce fairly easily and directly, most notably hematite and the hydroxide-iron ores like limonite and goethite. They reduce fairly easily (but the latter two tend to come with lots of water that needs removing). But then we have magnetite, which while also an iron-oxide, doesn’t reduce nearly so easily as hematite, and siderite (and other carbonates) which has carbon in it, which we do not want. Moreover, our country rock might have some trace amounts of things like sulfur (or iron-sulfides) in them, which we very much do not want. Sulfur will absolutely ruin our final iron product, so we do not want it floating around when we get to the smelting process."
Re: The Triumvirate: Coal, Iron, and Steam
#8Q: Why is Ohio full of steelworks?
A: Because it’s halfway between the iron of Lake Michigan and the coal of the Appalachians.
Re: The Triumvirate: Coal, Iron, and Steam
#9> " Iron, however, presented a much greater challenge. With a melting point of 2800 degrees, no fire could be made in antiquity capable of reducing it to liquid form. " Are there any notes from experimentors in antiquity trying to build the hottest fire in the world, capable of reduing Iron to liquid?
It's very unlikely that anything like this exists. Whatever writing craftsmen may have done in ancient times, it simply was not preserved and copied.
The situation gradually improves post-Renaissance, but we don't even have any contemporaneous writings about how Newcomen designed and built his engine in the early 1700s - just second-hand information from decades later.
Re: The Triumvirate: Coal, Iron, and Steam
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wikipedia says, "Whilst terrestrial iron is naturally abundant, its high melting point of 1,538 °C (2,800 °F) placed it out of reach of common use until the end of the second millennium BC" 2000 BCE seems firmly in the age of antiquity.
They didn't need to melt it to work with it. From https://acoup.blog/2020/09/25/collections-iron-how-did-they-... : "The second problem is chemical, because we are never going to melt this iron. Our furnaces can’t get that hot (and even if they could, melting this iron would cause it to absorb a lot of carbon from our fuel, which we do not want). So we’re going to be reducing our iron – that is, getting it to change…
"It is not known when or where the smelting of iron from ores began, but by the end of the 2nd millennium BC iron was being produced from iron ores from at least Greece to India"
...
"The place and time for the discovery of iron smelting is not known, partly because of the difficulty of distinguishing metal extracted from nickel-containing ores from hot-worked meteoritic iron.[2] The archaeological evidence seems to point to the Middle East area, during the Bronze Age in the 3rd millennium BC. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrous_metallurgy
Even the source you linked mentions actual smelting as early as 900BCE. Just because it wasn't the most common method doesn't mean it wasn't known or possible.