Blast Furnace History, part 1 of 6: A Brief
Blast furnace coke was not the only fuel for blast furnaces. What else was used then instead of coke for smelting ores in the Middle Ages and before the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century? Let's take a look at the blast furnaces' history.
First blast furnaces in history appeared in the fifth century before Christ in ancient China. They have been built in Europe from the High Middle Ages. They spread from the region around Namur in Wallonia (Belgium nowadays) in the late fifteenth century. Then they were introduced to England in 1491. The fuel used in these first blast furnaces was all the time a charcoal. The first successful using of blast furnace coke for industrial scale took place in Abraham Darby in 1709. The efficiency of the process was much further enhanced, because of two simple reasons. First - a coke is much more calorific than a charcoal. Second - by the practice of preheating the blast, which was patented in 1828 by a Scottish inventor, James Beaumont Neilson.
Blast Furnace History, part 2 of 6: Chinese roots
Before blast furnace coke was used, smelting the ore was done for many centuries, especially in China. The oldest extant blast furnaces were built in China in the first century before Christ (so called Han Dynasty period). However, weapons and farm tools made of cast iron had been widespread in China about four hundred years before and the iron smelters working in the third century before Christ had an average workforce of more than two hundred men each. All those early furnaces used phosphorus-containing minerals as a flux and had walls made of clay. The effectiveness of the Chinese blast furnaces of this period was enhanced much by the famous engineer Du Shi (he lived in times of Jesus Christ). His invention was applying the power of waterwheels to piston-bellows in forging cast iron.
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Blast Furnace History, part 3 of 6: From China to Europe
This is not the end of the blast furnace coke legacy and coking plants’ ancestors. How was iron smelted all around the world? Other than in China, for sure. Europeans didn’t use blast furnaces but bloomeries. This process was used by all civilizations of the west, such as Greeks, Romans, Carthaginians and Celts. Several examples of boomery industry were found in France and Tunisia. Scientists suggest that bloomeries were in use also in Antioch during the Hellenistic Period. In parallel, smelting in bloomery-type furnaces was popular in Kush and West Africa.
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Blast Furnace History, part 4 of 6: Clever Monks
The next lesson of history of the metallurgy before the blast furnace coke era is about first European smelting complexes and monks, whose wisdom and cleverness spared the blast furnace technology for the next generations.
The oldest known blast furnaces in the West were built in Swiss village Dürstel, the German region Märkische Sauerland and at Swedish Lapphyttan islands, where the smelting complex was active for two hundred years (1150-1350). At Noraskog in the county of Järnboås (Sweden) there have been also found traces of blast furnaces dated even earlier, possibly around year 1100. Those early blast furnaces, like the Chinese ones, were very inefficient compared to the ones used today. The iron produced in the Lapphyttan complex was generally used to produce balls of wrought iron known as “osmonds”, which were widely traded internationally – as it’s mentioned in a treaty with Novgorod from 1203 and few other English documents from the 1250s and 1320s. Several another furnaces of this period (from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century) have been found in German region of Westphalia.
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Blast Furnace History, part 5 of 6: The last charcoal blast furnaces
This is the last part of the blast furnace coke history, which is still without a coke itself. It tells about the sixteenth and the seventeenth European metallurgy in a short brief.
The direct ancestor of the first English and French furnaces appeared in Belgian region of Wallonia, that time knows as Namur. From there blast furnaces spread first to the Pays de Bray (eastern boundary of Normandy) and from there to the Weald of Sussex (England), where the first furnaces were built (Queenstock in Buxted in about 1491 and Newbridge in Ashdown Forest in 1496). They remained few in number until about 1530 and then their number started increasing fast to reach its peak about 1590. Most of the pig iron made in Sussex furnaces was used in finery forges to produce bar irons.
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Blast Furnace History, part 6 of 6: The modern blast furnaces using coke
In 1709, at Coalbrookdale in Shropshire, England, Abraham Darby for the first time in history used as a fuel a blast furnace coke – not a charcoal like it was used to be done before. Foundry work was just a minor branch of the industry. Darby's son built a new furnace at nearby Horsehay and began producing and selling coke pig iron. It was widely bought by the owners of finery forges, who used it to produce iron bars. Coke pig iron was very useful, because by this time it was cheaper to produce than widely used charcoal pig iron. Coal-derived fuel used in the iron industry was one of the pillars of the British Industrial Revolution.
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