[HN Gopher] The Triumvirate: Coal, Iron, and Steam
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The Triumvirate: Coal, Iron, and Steam
Author : cfmcdonald
Score : 44 points
Date : 2021-07-13 17:28 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (technicshistory.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (technicshistory.com)
| mjklin wrote:
| Q: Why is Ohio full of steelworks?
|
| A: Because it's halfway between the iron of Lake Michigan and the
| coal of the Appalachians.
| stefanoco wrote:
| Grand-grand...grand-son of Cranage Brothers here. The Cranages
| worked for the Darbys in their furnace (around 1760) and invented
| a new process for converting pig iron into wrought iron. Quakers
| themselves like the Darbys, one of their descendants founded a
| school in Wellington (the Old Hall) where my grandmother was
| born. And so reading these historical notes reminds me of the
| narrations from my parents and grandparents about the steel
| industry and our family, very strange and nice discovery here on
| HN!
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cranege_brothers
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _Iron, however, presented a much greater challenge. With a
| melting point of 2800 degrees, no fire could be made in antiquity
| capable of reducing it to liquid form._ "
|
| Are there any notes from experimentors in antiquity trying to
| build the hottest fire in the world, capable of reduing Iron to
| liquid?
| cfmcdonald wrote:
| It's very unlikely that anything like this exists. Whatever
| writing craftsmen may have done in ancient times, it simply was
| not preserved and copied.
|
| The situation gradually improves post-Renaissance, but we don't
| even have any contemporaneous writings about how Newcomen
| designed and built his engine in the early 1700s - just second-
| hand information from decades later.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Wikipedia says, "Whilst terrestrial iron is naturally abundant,
| its high melting point of 1,538 degC (2,800 degF) placed it out
| of reach of common use until the end of the second millennium
| BC"
|
| 2000 BCE seems firmly in the age of antiquity.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| I mean, I want to read the abridged proverbial blog posts of
| Rhododendron of Pathos in 2000BCE, child of the local
| blacksmith, and their experiments with building a hotter
| forge and measuring the temperature and how they identified
| iron compared to other materials and so on.
|
| I can imagine over the centuries, a lot of people dedicated
| many years of their lives to pursuits like this, most of
| which went nowhere, and probably some were based on
| interesting models of the world such as phlogiston or etc.
| kryptiskt wrote:
| They didn't need to melt it to work with it.
|
| From https://acoup.blog/2020/09/25/collections-iron-how-did-
| they-...:
|
| "The second problem is chemical, because we are never going
| to melt this iron. Our furnaces can't get that hot (and even
| if they could, melting this iron would cause it to absorb a
| lot of carbon from our fuel, which we do not want). So we're
| going to be reducing our iron - that is, getting it to change
| chemically with the exposure of heat. That means the chemical
| composition of our iron matters a lot and we have to solve
| our chemical problems before we can smelt our ore.
|
| The good news is that some ores of iron reduce fairly easily
| and directly, most notably hematite and the hydroxide-iron
| ores like limonite and goethite. They reduce fairly easily
| (but the latter two tend to come with lots of water that
| needs removing). But then we have magnetite, which while also
| an iron-oxide, doesn't reduce nearly so easily as hematite,
| and siderite (and other carbonates) which has carbon in it,
| which we do not want. Moreover, our country rock might have
| some trace amounts of things like sulfur (or iron-sulfides)
| in them, which we very much do not want. Sulfur will
| absolutely ruin our final iron product, so we do not want it
| floating around when we get to the smelting process."
| abetusk wrote:
| Talks about history of coal, iron and steam and the "virtuous
| cycle" that happened between them in Great Britain from 1200
| onwards.
|
| There are some pretty interesting snippets:
|
| """ ... there is another possible explanation for the name - that
| it was called sea coal because it arrived into London by sea from
| the North. ... """
|
| """ ... this would provide a tidy explanation for why the engine
| developed in Britain and nowhere else - no other place was
| exploiting coal as a fuel source nearly so intensively, and so no
| other place had access to the cheap fuel that made a first-
| generation steam engine worthwhile. """
|
| """ The puddling process, developed in Britain in the 1780s,
| removed this last bottleneck. A puddling furnace turned cast iron
| into wrought simply by applying heat and stirring. This allowed
| the mass production of wrought iron, using coal as fuel """
|
| Good read!
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