The Romance of War Inventions / A Description of Warships, Guns, Tanks, Rifles, Bombs, and Other Instruments and Munitions of Warfare, How They Were Invented & How They Are Employed

by Thomas W. Corbin

An 18-pounder in Action.

The crew consists of six men. No. 1 (the sergeant) gives instructions. No. 2 stands at the right of the breech. No. 3 fires the gun. No. 4 holds the shell ready for placing in the bore. No. 5 adjusts the fuse and hands the shell to No. 4. No. 6 prepares the ammunition and hands it to No. 5. In this picture only three of the crew are left.

Wrought iron is made by working the molten pig iron instead of casting it. The work is done in a different type of furnace altogether from the blast furnace and the cupola. It is more like an oven, in the floor of which is a depression wherein the molten metal lies. The fire-place is so arranged that the flames pass over the metal, being deflected downwards upon it by the roof as they pass.

It should be understood that in casting pig iron one does little more than form it into some desired shape, the nature of the metal undergoing little or no change. In working it, however, into wrought iron, we change its nature.

The pig iron contains from 2 to 5 per cent of carbon, which it obtains from the coal in the blast-furnace, and it is this particular proportion of carbon which gives it its own peculiar properties. To convert it into wrought iron a workman puts a long iron rod into the furnace and stirs the metal about, thereby exposing it to the air and permitting the carbon to be burnt out. As it loses carbon the iron becomes less and less fluid until it reaches a sticky stage. Thus the workman, who is known by the name of puddler, as the process is called puddling, works up a ball of decarbonized and therefore sticky iron upon the end of his rod. Having thus produced a rough ball or lump he draws it out of the furnace and leaves it to cool.

Thus the result of the puddling process is to produce a number of rough lumps or balls of iron

with only about one-tenth per cent of carbon. They are next reheated, in another furnace, and a number of them are hammered together under a mechanical hammer into larger lumps called blooms or billets. The hammering process has the effect of driving out impurities and also of improving the texture of the metal.

Iron sheets, bars, rods and so on are formed by heating the billets and rolling them out in powerful rolling mills, machines which in principle are precisely similar to the domestic mangle, wherein two iron rollers with properly shaped grooves in them squeeze out the billet into the desired form.