What was iron first used for

Evidence has shown that in ancient Mesopotamia, which is now modern day Iraq, people were smelting iron around years ago in 5, BC. In ancient times, people were not always aware that iron ore was abundant on earth, So where did they get it? Meteoric iron, however, was rare and in ancient times iron was worth more than silver or gold.

In fact, Assyrian writings have depicted iron as eight times more valuable than gold, how things change! It was likely only used by the very wealthy for ceremonial purposes, as it was too expensive for every day use and its cosmic origin probably had a lot to do with its novelty.

When meteoric iron was first discovered, the ancients did not smelt it, it was simply heated and shaped with hammers. The team unearthed a blacksmith's forge and copious iron artifacts, including pieces of iron bloom and two needles, as they describe in a recent monograph, Les Ateliers d'boui, published in Paris.

Some researchers are impressed, particularly by a cluster of consistent radiocarbon dates. Others, however, raise serious questions about the new claims. The theory that it was imported from somewhere else, which - the book points out - nicely fitted colonial prejudices, does not stand up in the face of new scientific discoveries, including the probable existence of one or more centres of iron-working in west and central Africa andthe Great Lakes area.

Hittite bas relief. Tests on material excavated since the s show that iron was worked at least as long ago as BC at Termit, in eastern Niger, while iron did not appear in Tunisia or Nubia before the 6th century BC.

At Egaro, west of Termit, material has been dated earlier than BC, which makes African metalworking contemporary with that of the Middle East. There is no definitive cultural break between the thirteenth and twelfth century throughout the entire region, although certain new features in the hill country, Transjordan and coastal region may suggest the appearance of the Aramaean and Sea People groups.

There is evidence, however, that shows strong continuity with Bronze Age culture, although as one moves later into the early Iron Age the culture begins to diverge more significantly from that of the late second millennium.

Abercrombie, University of Pennsylvania, James B. These small principalities exercise considerable control over their particular regions due in part to the decline of the great powers, Assyria and Egypt, from about to Beginning in the eighth century and certainly in the seventh century, Assyria reestablishes its authority over the eastern Mediterranean area and exercises almost complete control.

Judah, left alone, gradually accommodates to Assyrian control, but towards the end of the seventh century it does revolt as the Assyrian empire disintegrated. Judah's freedom was short-lived, however, and eventually snuffed out by the Chaldean kings who conquered Jerusalem and took some of the ruling class into exile to Babylon.

During the period of exile in Babylon, the area, particularly from Jerusalem south, shows a mark decline. Other areas just north of Jerusalem are almost unaffected by the catastrophe that befell Judah. The same probably can be said for the Sa'idiyeh cemetery. Beth Shemesh, however, shows the discontinuity with the Late Bronze Age given its somewhat intrusive Aegean evidence usually associated with the Philistines.

Many of the small finds photographed below come from Gibeon, Sa'idiyeh and Beth Shemesh. Models and simulations are taken from publications of Sa'idiyeh and Sarepta. It did not exploit any ores of its own and the metal was imported, in which activity the Greeks were heavily involved. Naukratis, an Ionian town in the Delta, became a centre of iron working in the 7th century B.

The porous mass of brittle iron, which was the result of the smelting in the charcoal furnaces, had to be worked by hammering in order to remove the impurities. Carburizing and quenching turned the soft wrought iron into steel. But the range of preserved iron tools covers most human activities. The metal parts of the tools were fastened to wooden handles either by fitting them with a tang or a hollow socket. While iron replaced bronze tools completely, bronze continued to be used for statues, cases, boxes, vases and other vessels.

The best swords in the world, however, were made on the other side of the planet. Japanese smiths forging blades for the samurai developed a masterful technique to create light, deadly sharp blades.

The weapons became heirlooms, passed down through generations, and few gifts in Japan were greater. The forging of a katana was an intricate and ritualized affair. Japanese smiths washed themselves before making a sword.

If they were not pure, then evil spirits could enter the blade. The metal forging began with wrought iron. A chunk of the material was heated with charcoal until it became soft enough to fold.

A swordsmith used clay, charcoal, or iron powder for the next step, brushing the material along the blade to shape the final design. Patterns emerged in the steel that were similar to wood grain with swirling knots and ripples. Along the Rhine Valley in present-day Germany, metalworkers developed a contraption that stood about 10 feet high, with two bellows placed at the bottom, to accommodate larger quantities of iron ore and charcoal.

The blast furnace got blazing hot, the iron absorbed more carbon than ever, and the mixture turned into cast iron that could be easily poured into a mold.

It was the ironmaking process the Chinese had practiced for 1, years—but with a bigger pot. Workers dug trenches on the foundry floor that branched out from a long central channel, making space for the liquid iron to flow. The trenches resembled a litter of suckling piglets, and thus a nickname was born: pig iron.

Iron innovation came just in time for a Western world at war. The invention of cannons in the 13th century and firearms in the 14th century generated a hunger for metal. Pig iron could be poured right into cannon and gun barrel molds, and Europe started pumping out weapons like never before. But the iron boom created a problem. As European powers began to stretch their power across the globe, they used up tremendous amounts of timber, both to build ships and to make charcoal for smelting.

The British Empire turned to the untapped resources of the New World for a solution and began shipping metal smelted in the American colonies back across the Atlantic. But smelting iron in the colonies destroyed business for the ironworks in England. Abraham Darby spent much of his childhood working in malt mills, and in the early s, he remembered a technique from his days of grinding barley: roasting coal, a combustible rock.

Others had tried smelting iron with coal, but Darby was the first to roast the coal before smelting. Roasted coal maintained its heat far longer than charcoal and allowed smiths to create a thinner pig iron—perfect for pouring into gun molds.

England had discovered the power of smelting with coal. Benjamin Huntsman was frustrated with iron. The alloys available to the clockmaker from Sheffield varied too much for his work, particularly fabricating the delicate springs. An untrained eye doctor and surgeon in his spare time, Huntsman experimented with iron ore and tested different ways of smelting it. Eventually he came up with a process quite similar to the ancient Indian method of using a clay crucible.

The ingots that emerged from the smelter were more uniform, stronger, and less brittle—the best steel that Europe, and perhaps the world, had ever seen. By the s, Sheffield became the national fulcrum of steel manufacturing. Seven decades later, the whole country knew the process, and the steelworks of England burned bright. The Crystal Palace was built with cast iron and glass for the event, and almost everything inside was made of iron and steel.

Locomotives and steam engines, water fountains and lampposts, anything and everything that could be cast from molten metal was on display. The world had never seen anything like it. Henry Bessemer was a British engineer and inventor known for a number of unrelated inventions, including a gold brass-based paint, a keyboard for typesetting machines, and a sugarcane crusher.

When the Crimean War broke out in Eastern Europe in the s, he built a new elongated artillery shell. He offered it to the French military, but the traditional cast iron cannons of the time were too brittle to fire the shell. Only steel could handle the controlled explosion. The crucible steelmaking process was much too expensive to produce items as large as cannons, so Bessemer set out to find a way to produce steel in larger quantities.

One day in , he decided to pour pig iron into a container rather than let it ooze into a trench. Once inside the container, Bessemer blasted air through perforations on the bottom. According to Steel: From Mine to Mill , everything remained calm for about 10 minutes, and then suddenly sparks, flames, and molten pig iron came bursting from the container.

When the chaos ended, the material left in the container was carbon-free, pure iron. The impact of this explosive smelting incident is hard to overstate. When Bessemer used the bellows directly on the molten pig iron, the carbon bonded with the oxygen from the air blasts, leaving behind pure iron that—through the addition of carbon-bearing materials such as spiegeleisen, an alloy of iron and manganese—could easily be turned into high-quality steel.

At the top, a small opening spewed flames 30 feet high when the air blasted into the furnace. Almost immediately, though, a problem arose in Britain's ironworks. It turned out that Bessemer had used an iron ore containing very little phosphorus, while most iron ore deposits are rich in phosphorus. The old methods of iron smelting reliably removed the phosphorus, but the Bessemer Converter did not, producing brittle steel. The issue vexed metallurgists for two decades, until a year-old British police clerk and amateur chemist, Sidney Gilchrist Thomas, found a solution to the phosphorus problem.

It worked like a charm. The old Huntsman crucible process, which produced a paltry 60 pounds of steel in two weeks, was obsolete. The Bessemer Converter was the new king of steel. On the other side of the Atlantic, massive iron ore deposits remained untapped in the American wilderness.

In , the United States was producing only a fifth as much iron as Britain. But after the Civil War, industrialists began turning their attention to the Bessemer process, sparking a steel industry that would generate vastly more wealth than the California Gold Rush.

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