Ingot iron is slagless steel with less than 0.30% of carbon.
Ingot steel is slagless steel containing more than 0.30% of carbon.
Weld steel is slag-bearing iron malleable at least at some one temperature, and containing more than 0.30% of carbon.
4. Historical Sketch.—The iron oxide of which the ores of iron consist would be so easily deoxidized and thus brought to the metallic state by the carbon, i.e. by the glowing coals of any primeval savage’s wood fire, and the resulting metallic iron would then differ so strikingly from any object which he had previously seen, that its very early use by our race is only natural. The first observing savage who noticed it among his ashes might easily infer that it resulted from the action of burning wood on certain extremely heavy stones. He could pound it out into many useful shapes. The natural steps first of making it intentionally by putting such stones into his fire, and next of improving his fire by putting it and these stones into a cavity on the weather side of some bank with an opening towards the prevalent wind, would give a simple forge, differing only in size, in lacking forced blast, and in details of construction, from the Catalan forges and bloomaries of to-day. Moreover, the coals which deoxidized the iron would inevitably carburize some lumps of it, here so far as to turn it into the brittle and relatively useless cast iron, there only far enough to convert it into steel, strong and very useful even in its unhardened state. Thus it is almost certain that much of the earliest iron was in fact steel. How soon after man’s discovery, that he could beat iron and steel out while cold into useful shapes, he learned to forge it while hot is hard to conjecture. The pretty elaborate appliances, tongs or their equivalent, which would be needed to enable him to hold it conveniently while hot, could hardly have been devised till a very much later period; but then he may have been content to forge it inconveniently, because the great ease with which it mashes out when hot, perhaps pushed with a stout stick from the fire to a neighbouring flat stone, would compensate for much inconvenience. However this may be, very soon after man began to practise hot-forging he would inevitably learn that sudden cooling, by quenching in water, made a large proportion of his metal, his steel, extremely hard and brittle, because he would certainly try by this very quenching to avoid the inconvenience of having the hot metal about. But the invaluable and rather delicate art of tempering the hardened steel by a very careful and gentle reheating, which removes its extreme brittleness though leaving most of its precious hardness, needs such skilful handling that it can hardly have become known until very long after the art of hot-forging.
The oxide ores of copper would be deoxidized by the savage’s wood fire even more easily than those of iron, and the resulting copper would be recognized more easily than iron, because it would be likely to melt and run together into a mass conspicuous by its bright colour and its very great malleableness. From this we may infer that copper and iron probably came into use at about the same stage in man’s development, copper before iron in regions which had oxidized copper ores, whether they also had iron ores or not, iron before copper in places where there were pure and easily reduced ores of iron but none of copper. Moreover, the use of each metal must have originated in many different places independently. Even to-day isolated peoples are found with their own primitive iron-making, but ignorant of the use of copper.
If iron thus preceded copper in many places, still more must it have preceded bronze, an alloy of copper and tin much less likely than either iron or copper to be made unintentionally. Indeed, though iron ores abound in many places which have neither copper nor tin, yet there are but few places which have both copper and tin. It is not improbable that, once bronze became known, it might replace iron in a measure, perhaps even in a very large measure, because it is so fusible that it can be cast directly and easily into many useful shapes. It seems to be much more prominent than iron in the Homeric poems; but they tell us only of one region at one age. Even if a nation here or there should give up the use of iron completely, that all should is neither probable nor shown by the evidence. The absence of iron and the abundance of bronze in the relics of a prehistoric people is a piece of evidence to be accepted with caution, because the great defect of iron, its proneness to rust, would often lead to its complete disappearance, or conversion into an unrecognizable mass, even though tools of bronze originally laid down beside it might remain but little corroded. That the ancients should have discovered an art of hardening bronze is grossly improbable, first because it is not to be hardened by any simple process like the hardening of steel, and second because, if they had, then a large proportion of the ancient bronze tools now known ought to be hard, which is not the case.
Because iron would be so easily made by prehistoric and even by primeval man, and would be so useful to him, we are hardly surprised to read in Genesis that Tubal Cain, the sixth in descent from Adam, discovered it; that the Assyrians had knives and saws which, to be effective, must have been of hardened steel, i.e. of iron which had absorbed some carbon from the coals with which it had been made, and had been quenched in water from a red heat; that an iron tool has been found embedded in the ancient pyramid of Kephron (probably as early as 3500 B.C.); that iron metallurgy had advanced at the time of Tethmosis (Thothmes) III. (about 1500 B.C.) so far that bellows were used for forcing the forge fire; that in Homer’s time (not later than the 9th century B.C.) the delicate art of hardening and tempering steel was so familiar that the poet used it for a simile, likening the hissing of the stake which Ulysses drove into the eye of Polyphemus to that of the steel which the smith quenches in water, and closing with a reference to the strengthening effect of this quenching; and that at the time of Pliny (A.D. 23-79) the relative value of different baths for hardening was known, and oil preferred for hardening small tools. These instances of the very early use of this metal, intrinsically at once so useful and so likely to disappear by rusting away, tell a story like that of the single foot-print of the savage which the waves left for Robinson Crusoe’s warning. Homer’s familiarity with the art of tempering could come only after centuries of the wide use of iron.
3. Three Periods.—The history of iron may for convenience be divided into three periods: a first in which only the direct extraction of wrought iron from the ore was practised; a second which added to this primitive art the extraction of iron in the form of carburized or cast iron, to be used either as such or for conversion into wrought iron; and a third in which the iron worker used a temperature high enough to melt wrought iron, which he then called molten steel. For brevity we may call these the periods of wrought iron, of cast iron, and of molten steel, recognizing that in the second and third the earlier processes continued in use. The first period began in extremely remote prehistoric times; the second in the 14th century; and the third with the invention of the Bessemer process in 1856.
6. First Period.—We can picture to ourselves how in the first period the savage smith, step by step, bettered his control over his fire, at once his source of heat and his deoxidizing agent. Not content to let it burn by natural draught, he would blow it with his own breath, would expose it to the prevalent wind, would urge it with a fan, and would devise the first crude valveless bellows, perhaps the pigskin already familiar as a water-bottle, of which the psalmist says: “I am become as a bottle in the smoke.” To drive the air out of this skin by pressing on it, or even by walking on it, would be easy; to fill it again with air by pulling its sides apart with his fingers would be so irksome that he would soon learn to distend it by means of strings. If his bellows had only a single opening, that through which they delivered the blast upon the fire, then in inflating them he would draw back into them the hot air and ashes from the fire. To prevent this he might make a second or suction hole, and thus he would have a veritable engine, perhaps one of the very earliest of all. While inflating the bellows he would leave the suction port open and close the discharge port with a pinch of his finger; and while blowing the air against the fire he would leave the discharge port open and pinch together the sides of the suction port.
The next important step seems to have been taken in the 4th century when some forgotten Watt devised valves for the bellows. But in spite of the activity of the iron manufacture in many of the Roman provinces, especially England, France, Spain, Carinthia and near the Rhine, the little forges in which iron was extracted from the ore remained, until the 14th century, very crude and wasteful of labour, fuel, and iron itself: indeed probably not very different from those of a thousand years before. Where iron ore was found, the local smith, the Waldschmied, converted it with the charcoal of the surrounding forest into the wrought iron which he worked up. Many farmers had their own little forges or smithies to supply the iron for their tools.