Dominic Rozanno, age 13, of Danville, I11., for his question:
WHEN WAS IRON FIRST MADE?
Iron ore, which makes up about five percent of the earth's crust, is the basic material from which iron is made. Men started to use items made of iron befor they learned how to write.
Some historians tell us that men may have first obtained their knowledge of iron from meteors that fell from the sky. Others say that men discovered iron accidentally by building fires on top of patches of rich iron ore. The historians think the iron melted from the ore and combined with sand in the earth to form wrought iron.
No matter how iron was discovered, we know that it was used by men in ancient civilizations of China, India, Chaldea, Babylon and Assyria. The Egyptians imported iron to make tools and weapons.
The Old Testament of the Bible mentions iron. The Roman author Pliny also mentions it, saying that iron was the most useful and most fatal instrument in the hand of man.
A steel chariot wheel rim believed to be more than 2,000 years old has been found in England. And the Crusaders in the 1100s, we know, admired the fine steel swords made by the Syrian workmen of Damascus.
For thousands of years, men made iron in a simple way. The ore was put in a hot deep fire of charcoal. The carbon in the charcoal slowly combined with the oxygen in the iron ore and escaped as gas. The fire was not hot enough to melt the resulting iron but was hot enough to soften it so that it could be pounded or forged into a solid block. Repeated heating and forging forced out the impurities, leaving good wrought iron.
The ironmakers of early days soon learned how to make the fire hotter by blowing on it through a hollow tube. Later, bellows were used to force air into the fire. Sometimes iron was made in furnaces of a tall shaft type and other times in furnaces of a short hearth type.
Spanish ironworkers of Catalonia built a better kind of hearth furnace in the 700s. It was called the Catalan forge. The ore and charcoal were mixed in a hearth or crucible. Air was forced in at the bottom of the furnace by water power. The furnace could produce 140 pounds of wrought iron in five hours. This was much more than earlier furnaces could produce.
In Belgium and Rhenish Prussia, about 1340, men first learned to make molten iron in a blast furnace. Ironmaking soon became a thriving business. There were many trades of ironworkers, including blacksmiths, wiresmiths, needlemakers and swordmakers.
The English colonists brought ironmaking with them to the New World. Construction of a blast furnace was started at Falling Creek, Virginia, about 1621, but it was abandoned after an Indian massacre in 1622.
The first successful blast furnace was built in 1644 at Braintree, Massachusetts, which is now West Quincy. It closed, however, in 1647.
The first successful ironworks to maintain sustained production for several years was built at Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1646. Soon after, additional furnaces were built in Connecticut and New Jersey