(H. M. H.)
[1] The word “iron” was in O. Eng. iren, isern or isen, cf. Ger. Eisen, Dut. ysen, Swed. järn, Dan. jern; the original Teut. base is isarn, and cognates are found in Celtic, Ir. iarun, Gael, iarunn, Breton, houarn, &c. The ulterior derivation is unknown; connexion has been suggested without much probability with is, ice, from its hard bright surface, or with Lat. ars, aeris, brass. The change from isen to iren (in 16th cent. yron) is due to rhotacism, but whether direct from isen or through isern, irern is doubtful. “Steel” represents the O. Eng. stél or stéle (the true form; only found, however, with spelling stýle, cf. stýl-ecg, steel-edged), cognate with Ger. Stahl, Dut. and Dan. staal, &c.; the word is not found outside Teutonic. Skeat (Etym. Dict., 1898) finds the ultimate origin in the Indo-European base stak-, to be firm or still, and compares Lat. stagnum, standing-water.
[2] A “eutectic” is the last-freezing part of an alloy, and corresponds to what the mother-liquor of a saline solution would become if such a solution, after the excess of saline matter had been crystallized out, were finally completely frozen. It is the mother-liquor or “bittern” frozen. Its striking characteristics are: (1) that for given metals alloyed together its composition is fixed, and does not vary with the proportions in which those metals are present, because any “excess metal,” i.e. so much of either metal as is present in excess over the eutectic ratio, freezes out before the eutectic; (2) that though thus constant, its composition is not in simple atomic proportions; (3) that its freezing-point is constant; and (4) that, when first formed, it habitually consists of interstratified plates of the metals which compose it. If the alloy has a composition very near that of its own eutectic, then when solidified it of course contains a large proportion of the eutectic, and only a small proportion of the excess metal. If it differs widely from the eutectic in composition, then when solidified it consists of only a small quantity of eutectic and a very large quantity of the excess metal. But, far below the freezing-point, transformations may take place in the solid metal, and follow a course quite parallel with that of freezing, though with no suggestion of liquidity. A “eutectoid” is to such a transformation in solid metal what a eutectic is to freezing proper. It is the last part of the metal to undergo this transformation and, when thus transformed, it is of constant though not atomic composition, and habitually consists of interstratified plates of its component metals.
[3] Note the distinction between the “eutectic” or alloy of lowest freezing-point, 1130°, B, with 4.30% of carbon, and the “eutectoid,” hardenite and pearlite, or alloy of lowest transformation-point, 690° S, with 0.90% of carbon. (See § 17.)
[4] The length of the blow varies very greatly, in general increasing with the proportion of silicon and with the size of charge. Thus the small Swedish charges with but little silicon may be blown in 5 minutes, but for a 20-ton charge the time is more likely to reach, or exceed 10 minutes, and sometimes reaches 20 minutes or even more.
[5] A “billet” is a bar, 5 in. sq. or smaller, drawn down from a bloom, ingot, or pile for further manufacture.
IRON MASK (masque de fer). The identity of the “man in the iron mask” is a famous historical mystery. The person so called was a political prisoner under Louis XIV., who died in the Bastille in 1703. To the mask itself no real importance attaches, though that feature of the story gave it a romantic interest; there is no historical evidence that the mask he was said always to wear was made of anything but black velvet (velours), and it was only afterwards that legend converted its material into iron. As regards the “man,” we have the contemporary official journals of Étienne du Junca (d. 1706), the king’s lieutenant at the Bastille, from which we learn that on the 18th of September 1698 a new governor, Bénigne D’Auvergne de Saint-Mars, arrived from the fortress of the Isles Ste Marguerite (in the bay of Cannes), bringing with him “un ancien prisonnier qu’il avait à Pignerol” (Pinerolo, in Piedmont), whom he kept always masked and whose name remained untold. (Saint-Mars, it may here be noted, had been commandant at Pignerol from the end of 1664 till 1681; he was in charge there of such important prisoners as Fouquet, from 1665 to his death in 1680, and Lauzun, from 1671 till his release in 1681; he was then in authority at Exiles from 1681 to 1687, and at Ste Marguerite from 1687 to 1698). Du Junca subsequently records that “on Monday the 19th of November 1703, the unknown prisoner, always masked with a black velvet mask, whom M. de Saint-Mars had brought with him from the islands of Ste Marguerite, and had kept for a long time,... died at about ten o’clock in the evening.” He adds that “this unknown prisoner was buried on the 20th in the parish cemetery of Saint Paul, and was registered under a name also unknown”—noting in the margin that he has since learnt that the name in the register was “M. de Marchiel.” The actual name in the register of the parish cemetery of Saint Paul (now destroyed, but a facsimile is still in existence) was “Marchioly”; and the age of the deceased was there given as “about 45.”
The identity of this prisoner was already, it will be observed, a mystery before he died in 1703, and soon afterwards we begin to see the fruit of the various legends concerning him which presumably started as early as 1670, when Saint-Mars himself (see below) found it necessary to circulate “fairy tales” (contes jaunes). In 1711 the Princess Palatine wrote to the Electress Sophia of Hanover, and suggested that he was an English nobleman who had taken part in a plot of the duke of Berwick against William III. Voltaire, in his Siècle de Louis XIV (1751), told the story of the mysterious masked prisoner with many graphic details; and, under the heading of “Ana” in the Questions sur l’encyclopédie (Geneva, 1771), he asserted that he was a bastard brother of Louis XIV., son of Mazarin and Anne of Austria. Voltaire’s influence in creating public interest in the “man in the mask” was indeed enormous; he had himself been imprisoned in the Bastille in 1717 and again in 1726; as early as 1745 he is found hinting that he knows something; in the Siècle de Louis XIV he justifies his account on the score of conversations with de Bernaville, who succeeded Saint-Mars (d. 1708) as governor of the Bastille, and others; and after Heiss in 1770 had identified the “mask” with Mattioli (see below), Voltaire was not above suggesting that he really knew more than he had said, but thought it sufficient to have given the clue to the enigma. According to the Abbé Soulavie, the duke of Richelieu’s advice was to reflect on Voltaire’s “last utterances” on the subject. In Soulavie’s Mémoires of Richelieu (London, 1790) the masked man becomes (on the authority of an apocryphal note by Saint-Mars himself) the legitimate twin brother of Louis XIV. In 1801 the story went that this scion of the royal house of France had a son born to him in prison, who settled in Corsica under the name of “De Buona Parte,” and became the ancestor of Napoleon! Dumas’s Vicomte de Bragelonne afterwards did much to popularize the theory that he was the king’s brother. Meanwhile other identifications, earlier or later, were also supported, in whose case the facts are a sufficient refutation. He was Louis, count of Vermandois, son of Louise de la Vallière (Mémoires secrets pour servir à l’histoire de Perse, Amsterdam, 1745); Vermandois, however, died in 1683. He was the duke of Monmouth (Lettre de Sainte Foy ... Amsterdam, 1768), although Monmouth was beheaded in 1685. He was François de Vendôme, duke of Beaufort, who disappeared (and pretty certainly died) at the siege of Candia (1669); Avedick, an Armenian patriarch seized by the Jesuits, who was not imprisoned till 1706 and died in 1711; Fouquet, who undoubtedly died at Pignerol in 1680; and even, according to A. Loquin (1883), Molière!