It was one of the marvellous attractions at the great Paris Exposition of 1900.
Lighting is closely allied to the various subjects herein considered, but consideration of the various modes and kinds of lamps for lighting will be reserved for the Chapter on Furniture for Houses, etc.
[CHAPTER XIV.]
METALLURGY.
“Nigh on the plain, in many cells prepared,
That underneath had veins of liquid fire
Sluiced from the lake, a second multitude
With wondrous art founded the massy ore;
Severing each kind, and scumm’d the bullion dross;
A third as soon had formed within the ground
A various mould, and from the boiling cells
By strange conveyance fill’d each hollow nook;
As in an organ, from one blast of wind,
To many a row of pipes the sound board breathes.”
—Paradise Lost.
Ever since those perished races of men who left no other record but that engraven in rude emblems on the rocks, or no other signs of their existence but in the broken tools found buried deep among the solid leaves of the crusted earth, ever since Tubal Cain became “an instructor of every artificer in brass and iron,” the art of smelting has been known. The stone age flourished with implements furnished ready-made by nature, or needing little shaping for their use, but the ages of metal which followed required the aid of fire directed by the hand of man to provide the tool of iron or bronze.
The Greeks claimed that the discovery of iron was theirs, and was made at the burning of a forest on the mountains of Ida in Crete, about 1500 B. C., when the ore contained in the rocks or soil on which the forest stood was melted, cleansed of its impurities, and then collected and hammered. Archeologists have deprived the Greeks of this gift, and carried back its origin to remoter ages and localities.
Man first discovered by observation or accident that certain stones were melted or softened by fire, and that the product could be hammered and shaped. They learned by experience that the melting could be done more effectually when the fuel and the ore were mixed and enclosed by a wall of stone; that the fire and heat could be alone started and maintained by blowing air into the fuel—and they constructed a rude bellows for this purpose. Finding that the melted metal sank through the mass of consumed fuel, they constructed a stone hearth on which to receive it. Thus were the first crude furnace and hearth invented.
As to gold, silver and lead, they doubtless were found first in their native state and mixed with other ores and were hammered into the desired shapes with the hardest stone implements.