Abstract
BEFORE the introduction of mild steel about sixty years ago, engineers had to rely on wrought iron made by the puddling process introduced by Henry Cort in 1783. Among the various brands of wrought iron none was superior to those made in Yorkshire. But long before Cort's time iron was made in Yorkshire, and in a paper entitled βThe South Yorkshire Iron Industry 1698β1759β, read to the Newcomen Society on December 14, Dr. A. Raistrick gave an account of the operations carried out in the Sheffield-Leeds-Huddersfield area about two hundred years ago. The source of his information was manuscripts discovered a few years ago, and now preserved by the Bradford City Museums and Library Committee, relating to the activities of the various branches of the Spencer family, all Quakers. The documents give accounts of 10 furnaces, 14 forges and 5 slitting mills, and though much of the information relates to the business side of the industry, they embody a considerable amount of technical information about the mining of the iron ore, the construction and working of the furnaces and forges and the production of charcoal. The main group of furnaces was on the outcrop of the Tankersley Ironstone and near streams which were used for driving water-wheels for working the bellows. As in Sussex, a determining factor of the industry was the supply of charcoal, and it was rarely possible for a furnace to be worked for more than half the year. The manuscripts, as Dr. Raistrick said, put a new complexion on the story of the iron industry in the area.
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The Iron Industry in South Yorkshire. Nature 142, 1111 (1938). https://doi.org/10.1038/1421111a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/1421111a0