The measure of our civilization is in large part the measure of turning an earthen mineral—iron ore—into the metals iron and steel. There are other measures: the rise of religions and the arts, the advancement of agriculture, the murk of politics. But the story of manipulating iron and its alloy, steel, has as much to say about how we have lurched to our present shores.
An eight-inch-wide, ten-pound iron meteorite. Such meteorites were the first source of workable iron for humans.
The story begins on a dark and clear night, probably in the late Stone Age. Stars fill the black bowl of the sky, twinkling like mica. Fixed into patterns, they appear the same season after season; they are constant, predictable. Then, suddenly, between the beginning of a wink and its end, one moves. It sears across blackened sky like a scratch. It brightens, and those who see it would swear that it is on fire and falling. There is a fearsome noise, like thunder, and a great pressure on the ears. Then the fire streak is gone and the sky is as it was before, the stars as fixed as speckles on a cliff face.
Later, someone, a man or a woman or a child, but certainly someone dressed in animal skins or less, finds a blasted crater or toppled trees or splayed grasses and sees that in the middle of the destruction is a dark and pitted lump. It looks hard, but it does not quite resemble a stone; there is no grain, no strata, no speckles.
Maybe the Stone Ager is terrified and maybe not, but eventually she whacks at the pitted, tar-black lump with a stone. It is not like crumbling sandstone, nor like brittle flint, cracking shale, or stubborn granite. It can be beaten into shape and then beaten again into another shape. It is almost pure iron.
The legend of Superman, Man of Steel, holds that we earthlings are the beneficiaries of a doomed world—that the great man who would fight for truth and justice was sent to our planet because his own was doomed, about to explode. And like the best of legends, this one is true in a way, because we owe the beginning of our working with iron, our working with steel, and thus our industrial civilization and all that goes with it to the deaths long ago of unknown planets. For one-seventh of meteorites are nearly pure iron, but with a mix of nickel to toughen it, and, as astronomers tell us, so were the cores of former planets; they say iron meteorites are the exploded bits of bygone worlds. Jerry Siegel and Joseph Shuster, the two Cleveland teenage creators of Superman, put their hero-as-baby in a capsule and sent it hurtling like a meteoroid toward Earth amid a planet-wrecking explosion. It is a legend born of the Depression-era Midwest, and yet it contains elements of truth that stretch as far back in time as any myth.
For thousands of years, Stone Agers and their descendants whacked at iron meteorites, beating them into parts for tools. They called the substance an-bar (Sumerian) or biz-n-pt (Egyptian), words that generally meant “something hard from sky” or “hard stone from sky” or “marvel from heaven” or “metal from heaven.” It was the stuff of the gods, more rare and precious than anything they had ever had, more coveted than silver, more beloved than gold. Many tribesmen would bargain anything for it. Others placed chunks on pedestals and worshipped their heaven stones. Still, their ability to make use of this marvel from heaven walked hand in hand with their skills at taming less formidable metals that they had previously discovered.
THE FIRST METALS Stone Age innovators put to use, beginning about 10,000 BC, were gold, silver, and copper. At the time, these coarsely clad men and women wielded tools of bone, wood, and stone; they planted wheat and barley; they raised goats and sheep; they were on the brink of founding towns. At various places and times, perhaps looking for decorative stones, they picked up yellowish or whitish lumps and later, trying to chip the lumps into shape as they did stone, were astonished to see that these lumps yielded under the blows of their stone hammers. They saw they could beat rather than chip the lumps into shape—these were nuggets of gold, silver, or copper. If they found a meteorite, they rejoiced, because they had found the best and toughest metal yet.
For thousands of years, hut dwellers knew no more of metal than finding nuggets or meteorites and beating them into shape for simple tools, or for ornaments or trade goods. Then, beginning about 4000 BC, lucky or ingenious experimenters in the area we now call the Near East, made such a technological leap that an analogy in our own time would be difficult to name. They discovered that they did not have to find shiny nuggets of silver, gold, and copper lying around. They learned that they could take certain dirty dull stones—which did not in the least resemble the shiny ones—or certain dull dirts, place them in a fire, and wait … and some shiny metal matter would settle at the bottom. It was incredible, but gold, silver, and copper then lay at the bottom of the fire.
This discovery tolled the death knell for the Stone Age. Metalworkers gathered ores, set them in fires, and reaped the metal lumps that settled in the ash. They thus smelted whatever they could, but especially copper, which, unlike iron, was fairly easy to separate from its ores. Tribesmen who knew the secret made as much copper as they could and celebrated their new resource. Smelted copper was not like bone or stone; they could pound it into shape. It was not like fired clay; they could bend it and it would spring back. It was not like tough reeds or saplings; they could not saw through it. They could pour it into molds of any shape, and if they tired of the shape they made, they could melt down the metal and remake it. Then, about 3000 BC, they learned they could mix in molten tin and make a metal that was tougher than either copper or tin alone. That mixture was bronze, and it launched another new age.
Still, no metal was as prized as that which fell from heaven and which may have been a piece of heaven itself—the stuff of fallen stars. Heaven-iron was tougher even than bronze; it could hold a better edge and it was stronger. It was more precious than gold.
But even such advanced people as copper smelters could get iron only from the fallen stars, not fires, until another five hundred years had passed, and even then the flames produced only a poor imitation. About 2500 BC, tribesmen in the Near East mined iron ores and sprinkled them on their hearths. But the products they found after the ashes had cooled were ugly, spongy, cinder-laden lumps that resembled rocky refuse. They hammered the lumps and found that the metal was not even as hard as bronze. Still, they suspected that this dark and lumpy substance was akin to the “metal from heaven,” and so they worked with it, used it where they could, and kept experimenting.
These early efforts at smelting and metalworking enriched the home, barn, stable, and field. At the same time, those efforts brewed new and strange ideas. As early peoples shifted from agriculture and hunting to digging into the earth for the ores from which they smelted metals, their ideas about nature began to change. Digging into the earth, observed scholar Mircea Eliade in The Forge and the Crucible, gave men a sense of uneasiness at meddling with Mother Earth. “There was a feeling of venturing into a domain which by rights does not belong to man,” Eliade wrote. “All the myths surrounding mines and mountains, all those innumerable fairies, elves, genies, phantoms and spirits, are the multiple manifestations of the sacred presence which is affronted by those who penetrate into the geological strata of life.” Moreover, the ores came to be thought of as kinds of embryos of the earth, with lives of their own. Thus, working with ores became immersed in numerous taboos and ritual acts, all to assist in a kind of process of birth.
In addition, Eliade proposed that metalworking altered men’s notions of how different kinds of creations were accomplished and, consequently, what sort of god ruled heaven. Metalworkers, as no people before them, could understand that to create something good—the metal—something had to be sacrificed—the ore. Creation was no longer a matter of peaceful transition, as with agriculture and pottery, but of fiery death and resurrection. According to Eliade, a pre-metalworking god was likely to be one who was relatively unaggressive, who spoke himself and all creation into being merely by wishing so. But with the advent of the metal culture, this first god was thrown out of heaven by a fiercely masculine usurper god, one who more readily abided the notion that any creation is accomplished by aggression, sexual union, and bloody sacrifice.
ALTERED COSMOLOGIES or not, the great breakthrough for iron came in the southern portion of the region between the Black and Caspian Seas. A people called the Chalybes invaded the area about 2000 BC from their homeland north of the Caucasus Mountains. They were highly skilled at smelting and casting copper and bronze, and, in the new lands they conquered, they found iron ore and began to experiment with it. No one had yet been able to consistently fabricate terrestrial iron that was as strong and tough as meteoric iron, the metal from heaven. But after countless experiments, failures, accidents, and hunches, the Chalybes discovered that if they hammered the cindery material produced by their hearths, reintroduced it to the fire to soften it, hammered it some more, repeated this several times, and cooled it in a certain way, they then ended with a metal that was stronger and tougher than bronze. They began to get the hang of it about 1800 BC, booting their own Bronze Age into decline and ringing in, at least for them, the Iron Age. Smiths sent helpers to cliffs and mines to gather the ores that they immolated for the metal they fashioned into tools. Chalybes forged better pots for cooking food, tougher adzes for furrowing fields, stronger axes for cleaving trees, sharper saws for shaping wood, harder chisels for carving stone, and keener blades for defeating enemies.
When war clouds thundered, however, the Chalybes showed a practical streak, and, confronted with the encroaching Hittite Kingdom to the south, they allied with the larger state. They readily assimilated themselves within the Hittite realm and continued to manufacture the iron implements of cultivation and war. The Hittites guarded as best they could their technological treasure and created a vast empire based largely on the use of effective iron weapons and war chariots.
When the Hittites, in turn, were overrun by northern tribes from southeast Europe about 1200 BC, many of them fled farther south. Some of these refugees became the Philistines who occupied Canaan on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. With their advanced knowledge of ironworking, they subdued the Israelites, who had barely settled in Palestine after their long trek from Egypt. According to the Bible, the victorious and wily Philistines attempted to assure their dominance by confiscating all Israelite iron weapons and forbidding Israelites from practicing as smiths, “lest the Hebrews make themselves swords or spears.”
The efforts of the Philistines were in vain. Not only was God apparently on the side of the Israelites, but so was time. Gradually, the art of ironmaking spread through the Near East, the Mediterranean, and sub-Saharan Africa. With it went its progeny—improved cultivation and building techniques. But its other offspring was war, and the record of these years is depressingly filled with accounts of a people superior in forging iron weaponry overwhelming another less skilled in that art.
During the centuries around 1000 BC, iron was still precious and rare—in one account it was five times more costly than gold and forty times more costly than silver. The tomb of Tutankhamun, sealed in 1352 BC, contained two tons of gold but only a few items of iron—an amulet, a miniature headrest, and a dagger blade, each wrapped in the cloth that shrouded the dead king, plus some miniature tools. Homer, composing about 800 BC, rarely mentions iron; he and the peoples of the Trojan War, thought to have been fought about 1200 BC, can be said still to have lived at the tail end of the Bronze Age in their part of the world, when iron was a scarcely known luxury. A lump of iron, in fact, is offered by Achilles in the Iliad as a prize in an athletic contest.
In Western civilization, the five hundred years between the time of Homer and that of Alexander the Great was dominated by the Greeks, who made bold advances in political thinking, philosophy, mathematics, and logic—some scholars have called the citizens who strolled in the shadow of the Athenian Acropolis the greatest collection of genius ever known. But these Greeks were generally satisfied with adopting ironworking technology from others and not improving on it. In fact, the Celts, the persons cultivating central Europe, were more adept at working iron than were the Aegeans. Greeks mainly contented themselves with bronze, using it to cast fine metal statuary and using bronze spears to repulse the Persians at Marathon. Still, they found iron ore readily available on some of their islands, exploited it, and fashioned it into tools for craftsmen and farmers. Foregoing all mortar and cement, they used iron to bind many of the stones of their Parthenon, immersing the iron pinions in lead to prevent corrosion. (Lamentably, this precaution was not observed by nineteenth-century restorationists, who inserted naked clamps that subsequently rusted and, in expanding, cracked the stones they were meant to preserve.)
Greeks recognized four types of toolmaking iron: two for ordinary tools; another for augers, chisels, and stonecutting blades; and a fourth for swords, razors, and surgical instruments. Still, they had a theoretical rather than a technological bent and felt greater satisfaction at contemplating precise philosophical truths than at improving mundane necessities. So, while observing the melting and mixing of metal by smelters, they developed the theories of atoms and elements. In later years, Alexander the Great, more warlike and practical than his classical forebears, used iron chain to strengthen military bridges, and at the border of India he received—with great pleasure it can be thought—a special booty from Porus, a Punjab king: thirty pounds of solid steel.
IT MAY do well here to interrupt the story and discuss the distinction between iron and steel, and between these and their first cousins, wrought iron and cast iron. Iron is a chemical element, twenty-sixth on the Periodic Table. In its pure form, it is silver in color and soft enough to bend by hand. It is one of the most common elements in the universe and can be detected in the sun and other stars. The core of the Earth is almost entirely iron; in fact, our planet is a kind of gigantic iron nugget with a covering of stone. Iron makes up about 5 percent of the Earth’s crust and ranks fourth in abundance after oxygen (47 percent), silicon (28 percent), and aluminum (8 percent). But it is rarely found in a pure or nearly pure state on the surface of the Earth, except in the form of meteorites, one type of which is usually composed of about 93 percent iron and 7 percent nickel. Basically, all iron within digging reach has combined with other elements, mainly oxygen, to form compounds found in rocks and ores.
Steel is mostly iron, but with additional elements mixed in, and thus is properly called an alloy. Most steel is an alloy of iron and carbon, iron contributing about 98 to more than 99 percent to the mixture and carbon from 2.0 to 0.1 percent. Iron also mixes with such elements as manganese, nickel, chromium, and vanadium to make steel, but its most common mixing partner is carbon.
Wrought iron is almost pure iron, containing too little carbon—about 0.02 to 0.10 percent—to make steel. But there is just enough carbon to make the iron hard enough to be useful, plus some stringy impurities, called slag, to make it fibrous and tough. This is the type of iron that early people knew best. The cindery lump that appeared at the bottom of their hearths was iron with traces of carbon plus bits of ash and rock; after early smiths pulled the lumps from the ashes, they hammered them into shape, expelling some of the slag and stringing out the rest so that the result was iron that was malleable and strong. Because they could so readily hammer this type into shape, they called it wrought iron.
Chinese developed cast iron as early as 500 BC and used it for centuries. This statue dates from the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644).
Metalworkers had a basic complaint with wrought iron, however: they could not melt it and pour it into molds as they could silver, gold, copper, and bronze, a great disadvantage in trying to make certain shapes. Sometimes, liquid iron would ooze out of the bottom of their furnaces. But when it solidified, smelters learned that it was not the same as wrought iron. It was brittle and would crack under the blows of a hammer. Even when heated in the same way as wrought iron, it would break beneath their hammers. Later, this substance would come to be known as cast iron, which is iron that becomes so hot in the hearth it absorbs lots of carbon from the coals or burning wood—anywhere from 2 to 4 percent of its final weight. That much carbon in the mixture is enough to lower its melting point so that it becomes liquid. In China, early smelters fashioned a whole technology around cast iron, constructing seven-foot-high furnaces and so readily making the stuff that they cast it into pots, stoves, tools, and even statues. But outside China, where hearths remained small, liquid iron flow was puny and considered a nuisance.
What early metalworkers wanted but which most, including the Chinese, found impossible to make, was something that combined the features of wrought iron and cast iron—that is, a substance that was not too pliant but not too brittle, hard enough to hold a sharp edge, but submissive to the blows of a hammer when hot. They knew something like this existed—from meteors or the occasional serendipitous lump of iron that contained just the right amount of nickel or manganese—but they could rarely make it themselves.
This elusive substance, what we now call steel, is the alloy that sails the narrow strait between too-soft wrought iron and too-brittle cast iron. It contains more carbon than the first and less than the second. Heated, it is soft enough to hammer into useful shape; cold, it is astonishingly hard, but not brittle. This rare alloy was, and still is, the coveted prize.
Possibly as far back as the Chalybes, metalworkers found a way to approach their goal: they fortified their wrought iron by thrusting bars of it under white-hot charcoal, which, as partly combusted wood, is nearly pure carbon. There, the wrought iron became so hot that carbon from the charcoal migrated a small distance into the wrought-iron surface. When smiths pulled the bars out again, they had created wrought-iron bars with a thin outer thickness of steel, a casing that could hold a sharper edge better than either wrought iron or cast iron.
Only in India could metalworkers do better. Around 400 BC, about the time the Greeks were contemplating the theory of atomism but doing little practical about it, clever Indian workers discovered how to make steel that would not be surpassed anywhere for more than two thousand years. First, they made wrought-iron bars and cut them into small lengths, which they placed into five-inch clay crucibles. They added carbonaceous material such as chipped wood or charcoal to the crucibles, sealed them, and placed them in a furnace. Then they raised the temperature of the fire around the crucibles as high as they could with bellows, so high that the wrought iron absorbed carbon and began to melt. With time, enough heat, and exactly the right amount of carbon, the whole mass liquefied. Hours later, the Indian ironworkers broke open the crucibles and removed nearly homogenous half-inch-thick, two-pound cakes of steel. No one else in any other part of the world made the same discovery.
It was such steel that Porus, the Punjab king, gave to Alexander, the Macedonian conqueror, and it was such steel that was celebrated for centuries, through the times of the Romans, the Byzantines, the Islamic warriors, and the medieval knights. Indian steel found its way in caravans to the smiths of Damascus, who fashioned it into swords and cutlery. With the passing of centuries, it traveled the length of the Mediterranean to Toledo, Spain, and became the main ingredient of Toledo blades.
AS ALEXANDER’S EMPIRE collapsed and that of the Romans swelled, Indian steel grew in renown. Romans coveted this type above all other forms of iron alloy, but they were grossly mistaken about its country of manufacture. They called it Seric steel, for Seres, the Latin name for China. Crafty Abyssinian traders deceived the Romans into believing the metal was made by the far-off Chinese, perhaps to prevent the Romans from trying to muscle them out as middlemen.
Seric steel, however, was not the only kind the Romans respected. They learned from their bloody disaster at Cannae and other Punic War battlefields that the Carthaginians wielded tough steel swords. Hannibal’s men had purchased them in Spain, a country Carthage occupied. Phoenicians from the Levant had settled there about 1100 BC and developed the region’s concentrated iron ores. They were most fortunate, for the ores held few harmful impurities and one beneficial one, manganese, which made their wrought iron a kind of steel. After the Romans used a skillful combination of naval and infantry victories to subdue the Carthaginians—the war having been fought in part over the rich ores, silver and gold included, of Iberia—they took Spain for themselves and the ironworks it contained. Spanish swords became the pride of Roman legionnaires. Against them the swords of the Gauls bent badly and had to be straightened by foot in battle, a weakness the Romans did not fail to exploit.
Iron and steel had their domestic as well as military uses. By Roman times, iron became more common and less expensive than in the world of preclassical Greece, and more people mined ores and used iron to make nails, hinges, bolts, keys, plows, and carpentry tools. They rimmed wheels with iron, the better to travel pitted roads. Iron began to acquire a sobriquet by which it has been known ever since: “the democratic metal.” It did not provide the jingle in a rich man’s purse, nor the sparkle on a dowager’s ear, but instead gave peasants, workers, and merchants a chance at better lives through its uses in cooking, farming, and building.
The Roman era added a refinement in the making of iron and steel implements—tempering. Smiths a thousand years previous had learned that quenching hot-surface-carburized wrought iron in water made the iron stronger and harder; they also knew these assets had a cost, which was that quenched pieces were more likely to break. But Roman-era smiths discovered that if, after quenching, they slowly reheated a sword or tool in a process somewhat like roasting and then patiently allowed it to cool again, they would sacrifice a bit of the hardness but gain much in toughness, reducing the chances that the piece would shatter when struck. It was a mystery, but it worked. And, like most work in iron, it was done by eye, feel, instinct, and ritual. In a world whose instruments of measurement were relatively crude, art and guesswork, as well as craft, were needed to fabricate an instrument with just the right qualities to make it perfect. But this artistic discipline was about to be thrown into a rougher and more unsettling society.
As the Roman Empire withered, many cultivated arts shriveled with it, including architecture, sculpture, and vast engineering projects, as did the skills of turning iron ores into useful implements. With the empire shrinking like a lake in drought, travel to mines became impeded by poor roads and ruthless brigands. Producers had to fall back on local ores and resources. Trade slumped. But ironmaking suffered less than other arts, even less than other metalworking skills, as there was always a need for pots and plows, swords and shields. Teutonic tribes, in some respects, were technically superior to the Romans; they were the first people to fabricate sufficiently strong plows to cultivate the forested lowlands of northern and western Europe. Meanwhile, the much-maligned Visigoths established an Iberian empire that encouraged the classical arts, including ironwork.
In India, metalworkers were especially productive. Not only did some of them continue to make the only nearly homogenous steel in the world, but others also forged forty-foot wrought-iron pillars and girders to hold up their temples. Europeans did not attempt such large pieces for over a thousand years.
About the year 700, Muslims from North Africa overthrew Visigoth rule in Spain, but they encouraged the iron industry they found there, and their patronage was well rewarded. Smiths and smelters invented an improved furnace, in modern times called a Catalan furnace after the region of Catalonia in northeast Spain. Generally, it was built against a hillside, stood about three feet high, and was operated with the aid of bellows. In five hours it could produce 350 pounds of iron; a Roman hearth in equal time only smelted 50.
A Catalan furnace was an improvement over Roman technology. In this illustration from an 1890s issue of Popular Science Monthly, bellows enter from the lower right.
The Muslims did not enjoy a monopoly on increased production, however. Smiths who fled Spain during the Arab conquest built Catalan-like furnaces in the Pyrenees and then in France and along the Rhine. About the year 800, ironwork was recorded by Bede, the first historian of the Britons, as an important English industry, and in Scandinavia Norse-men championed skilled work. The poet-author of Beowulf glorified his hero’s sword and described its blade as “patterned by twigs of venom.” Likely he was referring to the textured appearance of the metal, which was probably made by forging together twisted rods of carburized iron. The twists formed skewed herringbone, braid, and other patterns, many of which were highly prized. The Vikings saw in these textures the scaly hides of snakes or the coils of dragons. Islamic sword purchasers, selecting similar blades in Damascus, coveted such configurations as “Mohammad’s ladder” and “the chain of vertebrae.” Given the delicate and serendipitous task of fabricating a sword that was neither so ductile it would bend nor so hard it would shatter, there is no wonder that when a truly fine sword resulted, people saw in the manufacture a divine intervention and even mythologized the best ones. The most famous European swords of the times—Excalibur of Arthur, Joyeuse of Charlemagne, Durandal of Roland, and Tizona of El Cid—were as celebrated as their owners and lent some of their magic and majesty to the men who swung them.
Still, the honors for swordmaking in this time—and continuing into the nineteenth century—belonged to the Japanese. The quality of their swords, peaking around the year 1300, is unrivaled to this day. In addition, the reverence of the Japanese for their finest swords has never been surpassed. Swords fabricated by the great Japanese masters were held in the highest esteem and became invaluable family treasures; to receive one from a grateful lord or benefactor was a supreme honor.
Japanese swords embraced the four elements of creation: air, for the light that played off the grains and colors of the blades; earth, for the iron ore that gave them body; fire, for the energy that fused them; and water, for the quench that shocked them from soft to hard. So close to the sinews and spirit of the cosmos were these swords that they became sacred objects of Shinto shrines.
In making Japanese swords, ritual was essential. Smiths disciplined themselves with special diets, foreswore lovemaking, and washed and purified themselves, all lest an evil spirit enter the shop and thence the blade, a haunting that would harbor disaster for its owner.
Japanese smiths had learned from long experience that some iron was so soft it could not hold an edge and some so hard it would crack. To avoid these extremes, they mated them, welding their hardest alloy in the shape of a V to a softer core—the sides and edge in the form of the V would be hard as obsidian while the innards soft enough to absorb shocks. The core was relatively easy to make; it was a kind of wrought iron that smiths had been forging for centuries. More artful was composing the steel that would wrap the lower edges. To make this outer V, Japanese masters began with a lump of wrought iron, heated it, folded it over itself, reheated it, and refolded it again and again for about twenty folds, piling up more than a million layers in the same way a French baker makes puff pastry. In essence, the Japanese turned the wrought iron into steel, because carbon—picked up from glowing charcoal during each heating—was dispersed through the entire piece as a result of the layering. Then they hammered this outer steel onto the wrought iron core.
Such work alone would have made a sword of rare and advanced technique, but the Japanese smiths extended their efforts to further refinements. After the mating of the outer V to the inner core, they coated the surface with a slurry of clay, iron powder, charcoal, and sometimes salt—the ingredients differing from smith to smith—and brushed the slurry until it was both thick along the spine of the blade and thin along the edge. Like painters, the smiths swirled, built up, or pared away the mixture on the blade until the pattern was like none other. They let it dry and harden; then they heated the whole to a cherry red and plunged it into water. Heat from the blade passed through the thinnest areas of the coating first, cooling the blade there quickest and making it the hardest; where the coating was thicker, near the spine, the blade cooled more slowly and retained some of its flexibility.
The technique was impeccable and would have been remarkable enough, but the Japanese smiths were also masters of beauty. The layering of the steel gave it grain and pattern, and the quenching through hardened slurry added more. Of particular distinction among the polished blades was an irregular wave of pattern about a half inch up from the edge. The Japanese fashioned this wave to resemble banks of clouds, ranges of hills, skins of pears, or burls of maple wood. They gave the patterns such names as “drifting sand,” “high breaking waves,” and “chrysanthemum and water.” The swords, to this day national treasures of Japan, not only marry flexibility and strength, but also high polish and subtle texture. Nothing so lethal has been so stunning to look upon; little that man has ever fabricated with his hands has been more beautiful. Like the finest Egyptian sculpture and the English of Shakespeare’s London, the swords of medieval Japan have been imitated but never equaled.
The pattern just up from the cutting edge, the hamon, of this Japanese sword depicts the view of a Zen priest in the vicinity of Mount Fuji
A closer view of a sixteenth-century Japanese blade.
ALTHOUGH THE Japanese sword work was matchless, it remained more an artistic achievement than a technological one. Throughout the Middle Ages, Arabian and European smiths fabricated steel using the same basic principles as did the Japanese. All three cultures stood at about the same technological level—they used wrought iron, and with great effort, turned a small percentage of it into steel. In Europe of the tenth century, ironworking had revived from the slump inflicted by the post-Roman decline, aided by an increasing population and the relative political stability of Charlemagne. But the actual process continued as it had since the Spanish had improved the smelting furnace two hundred years before.
Then, in the three hundred years that preceded the fourteenth century, Europe experienced what is sometimes called its first industrial revolution. Trade revived, and the great cathedrals began to rise. The first nailed horseshoes became common, improving transportation and agriculture. Engineers tapped water and wind for new power in shaping implements. Capital accumulated, especially in the monasteries, where monks reinvested their bounty to improve their mills and other enterprises.
The iron trade—especially the wrought-iron trade—blossomed. Armorers made chain mail. Carriage makers reinforced wheels with iron rims. Ornamentists fashioned great window grills and choir stalls of iron. Joiners reinforced heavy wooden doors with thick iron straps and hung them on massive iron hinges. Blacksmiths made fifty thousand horseshoes for Richard I of England’s Crusade of 1188. The more enterprising metalworkers packed off to steep mountain valleys, where they not only could exploit the forests for charcoal but also the streams for tumbling water. Waterwheels were already providing cheap and superhuman work, but normally they were connected to simple rotary mechanisms, such as grain mills. Now ironworkers hooked waterwheels to shafts and shafts to cams, the better to raise the top of a bellows or the head of a heavy forging hammer.
Then, just before 1300, during the days of Dante and Marco Polo, Europeans hit on another advance. In the lower Rhine Valley, German ironworkers built larger furnaces, hoping to recover ever-larger lumps for beating into wrought iron. They built each furnace about ten feet high and shaped the inside like a broad-waisted hourglass. They fitted good bellows at the bottom—sometimes two or more—to give the thing a good blow. Then they stoked in charcoal and ore and lit it.
Indeed, the German smelters found bigger lumps at the bottom of their bigger furnaces than they had when using smaller ones. But because they forced such a strong blast from the bellows (whence the name for this invention, the blast furnace) and because they loaded so much ore and charcoal into the stack, the iron became hotter and mixed with more charcoal—hence carbon—on its way to the bottom, and some of it turned into liquid. As in classical times, the smelters at first dismissed this goo as a nuisance. When it solidified, it was brittle and unworkable, so they threw it away. But soon there was so much of it that they looked to its better qualities. Although it was brittle, it held up well under compression, like stone. And they could re-melt it and cast it into molds, just as the Chinese had been doing for seventeen centuries.
A blast furnace at rear produces molten iron that runs first into a main channel, then into side molds—the “piglets.”
Not long after the Rhinelanders made their discovery, they began causing so much liquid to flow out of the bottoms of their furnaces that they had to cut trenches in which it could run, cool, and solidify. From the bottom of each furnace they dug a long, fat trench, and then at right angles to this one they dug shorter, thinner ones. The configuration of the trenches so reminded the smelters of a sow suckling piglets that they began to call the product of their furnaces pig iron, an epithet that has survived. Thus cast iron and pig iron are equivalents—iron with a relatively high proportion of carbon—although the first term generally is applied to the solid and the second to the liquid.
At about the same time as pig iron took off, the Black Plague scythed up from the south and felled a third of the European population. For one hundred years, war, rivalry, famine, and disease cowed Europe into fearful localism. After the catastrophes finally exhausted themselves, the continent revived and demand for goods rose. But there remained two problems with ironmaking. First, few men alive knew the skills. Second, the easily obtained surface ores were exhausted. The solution, at least among southern European countries of the Renaissance, lay in the twin principles of mechanization and concentration. Merchants and bankers, flexing their muscles, raised capital to finance deeper mines and larger furnaces.
The trend of higher volume and more sophisticated metal production continued in the 1500s. New World silver and gold flowing into Spanish treasuries stimulated interest in metals generally. Envious rulers of other nascent nation-states saw the power of metals and spurred organized production in response. Moreover, the relatively new technology of printing spread the knowledge of metalworking arts to anyone who could read. Two landmark tomes on metals were published by midcentury. The first was a kind of handbook, entitled De la Pirotechnia, written by an Italian named Vannoccio Biringuccio. The second and more renowned, De Re Metallica by Georgius Agricola, was exhaustive and copiously illustrated, a sort of encyclopedia of metals. In the succeeding two hundred years, De Re Metallica remained the most respected source on metals. In our own century it is little known, but some would honor it as a foundation of technical civilization, and it was translated most recently into English by the United States’ only mining engineer president, Herbert Hoover.
Gold from America and gunpowder from China—the latter introduced as early as the thirteenth century—made for a lethal mix in Europe. One was the trophy, one the agent of war, and the two provided carrot and stick to keep Europeans blasting away at each other for the whole sixteenth century. One result was a high demand for iron. Armies and navies required projectiles, and cast-iron cannonballs won instant success. They surpassed stone (too brittle), bronze (too expensive), lead (too soft), and wrought iron (too difficult to forge in quantity). They could be mass-produced by casting in molds. Moreover, they smashed castle walls and ship hulls pretty handily. In the 1500s, cast-iron shot consumed more iron than any other product.
When English ironmasters developed a process for casting suitable cannons of iron, they created a virtual cannon monopoly. Demand for English cannons skyrocketed, and merchants sold guns all over the Continent until Elizabeth I became alarmed and proscribed cannon export. Her edict, however, met with scorn among profiteers, and cannons found their way in ships’ holds to the highest bidders; 2,400 cannons of the Spanish Armada were English-made.
Between the wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, ironworkers resumed production of more wholesome articles than cannon and shot. They cast and forged bells, pots, plows, nails, hammers, and firebacks. They experimented with new techniques, clamored for profits, and endeavored to crush competitors. If they discovered new techniques, they cloaked them with stealth and guile. Governments saw the wisdom of these ironworkers’ ways. They tried to best rival nations by regulating trade, thus priming their own industries and spurning foreign ones. They encouraged bankers to finance ever-larger furnaces and forges. And if their native ironworkers improved weapons, they took a cue from the forge owners themselves and cloaked the new techniques with stealth and guile.
A De Re Metallica illustration showing Middle Ages metalworking techniques.
National rivalries spread to the New World like so many viruses. Spain and France were already plundering the supposedly virginal continents when England went into the colonization business. Neither Spain nor France cared to exploit iron in the Americas—there was too much gold to find and fur to hunt—but the English were slightly more practical. Sir Walter Raleigh found iron ore in North Carolina in 1585; desire for it helped to establish his colony at Roanoke Island, just south of present-day Kitty Hawk, but the colony vanished with barely a trace.
When the Virginia Company arrived in Jamestown in 1607, the men had hopes of Christianizing natives, thwarting the expansion of Spanish and French interests, and establishing trade. Stockholders of the company, most of whom remained in England, readied their account books because, the British forests having been shrinking for centuries, wood for charcoal in England was becoming so expensive that iron costs were rising. In America wood was cheap, and that spelled profits from smelting iron ore. Skilled workers were recruited for the voyage across the Atlantic. First these industrious English colonists exported the raw iron ore they found along the James River, and then, in 1619, they began an ironworks where Falling Creek flows into the James, eight miles downstream from present-day Richmond. But in 1622, just as the ironworks was becoming productive, Chief Opechancanough organized an attack on the colony. His warriors overran the isolated ironmaking settlement on their way to killing about four hundred English, or one-third of Jamestown’s residents. Ironmaking did not revive in Virginia for ninety-seven years, or in any location in North America for twenty-three years. Tobacco growing, which required less skill and capital, instead became the principal endeavor of Virginia and the nascent colonies.
AS THE 1600s CLOSED, Europe increasingly flexed its muscles around the world; it was cocky and bold and eager for spoils. India, China, Japan, and the Muslim world, each having bested Europe in important ironmaking specialties, were about to eat its dust—or, more properly, soot, because Europe (and Britain in particular) was about to rise in power and wealth above all other continents, primarily based on the combustion of coal. Europe was poised to make for itself more iron and steel than any civilization had ever seen and ride this industrial wave to world domination. The beginnings had taken root years before when Europe first turned away from the alchemists, from snippets of Aristotle that were mistaken, and from the intellectual domination of priests. The Age of Reason was a new era of observation followed by postulation, a reverse of the medieval practice of postulation first. Britain profited from this new thinking, but cerebral effort was not the source of its advantage. Rather, Britain’s immediate leg up resulted instead from a crisis of its own making, a cannibalizing that nearly scuttled its ambitions: the gluttonous ravishing of its native forests.
Ironmakers in seventeenth-century Britain were not the only ones to blame, although they were perhaps the most ravenous destroyers of woodlands—a single blast furnace of the time devoured about six thousand cords of wood a year, some 240 acres. Shipbuilders felled English oak at alarming rates; soapmakers, glassmakers, and brewers also clamored for wood; and then there were all the fireplaces in the land that had to warm the populace through the cold northern winters. The damage is evident even today—most barren Scottish moors were once thick forests.
Deforestation in Britain was so severe that the kings and queens resorted to royal edicts for rationing woodlands. Charcoal for industry was so scarce and the price was so high that the country began to import smelted iron from more woody regions such as Sweden, Russia, and Germany. Cottage dwellers despaired and began to stoke their hearths with coal. This land of want hardly seemed the nursery of an industrial revolution, and yet it was this very deprivation that sparked the change. Events in Britain in the 1700s altered that nation and the world forever. Many people contributed to the upheaval, but three stand out. Their stories, told here in brief, reveal the sparks that rose to a heat fervid enough to forge a new world from the ashes of the old. One is a story of success, another of rejection followed years later by praise, and the last is of ruin.
Abraham Darby was born in 1677 or 1678 to a farmer who was also a maker of nails and locks. Young Abraham was apprenticed to manufacturers of malt mills, which were brass grinders used by brewers. He set up making malt mills himself, then turned to casting brass pots. His pots were well received, but in order to snare a larger share of the market, he tried his hand at making less expensive pots made of cast iron and, in doing so, he established business at a hamlet called Coalbrookdale near the River Severn. His partners, denigrating his switch from brass to cast iron, abandoned him, but Abraham persisted.
Charcoal was increasingly expensive to use as a fuel for smelting iron ore, so Darby looked to the cheap and abundant coal that lay around him at Coalbrookdale. He knew already that others had tried to smelt iron ore with coal and failed—the product was for some reason too brittle. But Darby took a cue from the brewers he had known in his malt-mill days and who dried their malt not with charcoal, which was roasted wood, but with what they called coke, which was roasted coal. Darby speculated that the roasting purged the coal of certain impurities that had made coal-smelted iron too brittle. So, in 1709, Darby roasted the coal of Coalbrookdale to produce the almost pure carbon, coke, and then he used the coke to smelt iron ore. The result was a tolerable cast iron.
Darby was successful from that time onward. His innovation gave him a superior product at a reduced price, allowing him to plow under competitors. For one, the coke he used was far cheaper than charcoal, and he could pass along the savings to customers. For another, it held up better in furnaces than charcoal, which often collapsed into a heavy mass, extinguishing itself and wasting valuable time. Moreover, because coke did not collapse in furnaces, Darby could build them higher and larger. After he had done that, he smelted not only more cast iron, benefitting from economy of scale, but improved cast iron: because the iron had farther to fall in a higher furnace, it became increasingly liquid and thinner and could fill more delicate molds. With these enhancements, Darby set out selling pots and tools at greatly reduced prices and was soon hailed as a valuable benefactor of the British people. His company prospered, and he founded a dynasty of Darby ironmasters in Coalbrookdale that lasted one hundred years.
Coalbrookdale, northwest of Birmingham, became an important cast-iron center in eighteenth-century England. This painting of Coalbrookdale by Philip James de Loutherbourg shows the Madeley Wood Furnaces.
The next advance came in the 1740s at the hands of a shy Sheffield sage named Benjamin Huntsman. Born in 1704, Huntsman grew up a skilled mechanic and began a business as a clockmaker. He was the neighborhood wise man and tinkerer, a kind of Sheffield equivalent of Benjamin Franklin (who at about the same time was confounding Philadelphia with aphorisms and electrical sparks). Huntsman treated discomforts of the eye, practiced a bit of minor surgery, and exercised his wit. But he also troubled and fussed over his clocks—the springs were faulty. In those days, the best “steel” came from Sweden and Germany, whose workers retained the traditional methods of carburizing the surface of wrought iron. The consistency of the steel, however, was variable—too variable for Huntsman’s clock springs. So, in order to make better springs, Huntsman endeavored to make better—that is, more homogenous—steel.
Huntsman was a Quaker and not much given to self-promotion. He worked in secret, carefully testing, failing, burying the products of his failures, and testing again. Finally, after several years, he found a method of fashioning a high-quality steel. He laid chunks of imperfect steel in clay crucibles, then added carbonaceous material and certain other ingredients. Next he sealed the crucibles, buried them in coke, started the fire, and kept it as hot as he could. Without destroying the ceramic crucibles, the inferno melted the contents inside, allowing just the right amount of carbon to diffuse evenly through the iron. In fact, the process was almost identical to the one used by workers in India for twenty-one centuries. The result was a homogenous steel that could be poured and cast, the first cast steel in Europe.
After his years of struggling and ultimate discovery, Huntsman may have expected acclamation. But when he took his new steel to the cutlers of Sheffield, already renowned for its knifeware, they thought it too hard and refused to buy it. The Quaker clockmaker was astonished, but not dismayed for long; he looked for markets abroad and, sure enough, found French cutlers who knew a good material when they saw it. They bought Huntsman’s steel and converted it to knives and scissors that they then sold back to retailers in Britain. Such success might have softened the hearts of the Sheffield manufacturers toward their neighbor Huntsman. Instead, they petitioned Parliament to pass a bill proscribing the export of his steel.
Meanwhile, Huntsman, shy of public attention, foreswore a patent and instead tried to preserve his process in secrecy. He allowed work only at night, forbade strangers in his foundry, and swore employees to silence. His Sheffield rivals, failing in their attempt at Parliamentary bullying and realizing that they would have to buy cast steel or lose out to the French importer-exporters, tried bribery and spying to purloin Huntsman’s secret. The Quaker sage put up a good fight, but by 1750 the secret was out—at least locally—and Sheffielders were making Huntsman-inspired cast steel as fast as they could. Fortunately for Huntsman, he managed to retain certain arts and the secrets of some ingredients, with the result that until his death in 1776, his steel was still prized above all others. At last Europe had a homogenous steel of its own. And in one stroke, Sheffielders could not only make a steel far superior to any made in the old forging way, but they could also make it faster, if in small quantities. Sheffield became the center of Europe’s finest steel.
Last, there is Henry Cort, born in Lancaster in 1740. He may have had a grammar school education, and he was described by James Watt later in life as “a simple good-natured man, but not very knowing.” In a portrait, he appears balding, double chinned, and gazing toward heaven. To this ethereal place he would have to look for reward, for he was much wronged on Earth.
Young Cort seems to have been a quick lad who worked his way from small means to good fortune through honest and hard work. He came to own an ironworks and won contracts from the Royal Navy for making naval implements. With one eye toward efficiency and the other to recent improvements in the field, he earnestly set to work.
In an early puddling furnace, coal did not touch the iron, but the routed flame passing over raised the iron to a workable temperature.
In those days, wrought iron surpassed cast iron in production and usefulness, but it was still difficult to make. Ironmakers had to resort to one of two methods. For the first, called the direct method, they gathered iron lumps from smelting furnaces and pounded much of the slag out of them, just as ironmakers had done for the previous three thousand years. For the second, called the indirect method, they shoved cast-iron bars—or, to say the same thing, frozen pig-iron bars—into a short charcoal hearth, waited for them to soften, and then hammered out much of the slag, expelling at the same time much of the carbon. Unfortunately, both methods required a great deal of hammering, and the second was uncomfortably expensive because the ironworkers used charcoal as fuel. Whenever they used coke, even in as pure a form as they could make it, they found that the wrought iron thus refined was brittle and therefore spoiled. The problem did not arise in Darby’s enterprise because he was making cast iron, not wrought iron.
Cort had some ideas about how to improve the production of wrought iron, and, expounding them, impressed a naval official by the name of Adam Jellicoe, who put up the capital for Cort to build improved facilities. Cort erected a new kind of furnace, based on the work of predecessors, that had not one chamber, but two—one for the fuel, which was cheap coal, and the other for cast-iron bars. The flame from the fuel in the first chamber passed over the cast-iron bars in the second chamber on its way to the chimney. The coal never touched the cast iron—another factor of success—but the flame was hot enough to liquefy it, and so the cast iron settled into a puddle at the bottom of its chamber. Because the substance was molten, carbon could readily leave it by mixing with the air (“burning” to form CO and CO2). But as the carbon level of the liquid dropped, the melting point rose, and so the substance began to stiffen. Men used long rods to turn the goo—a process called puddling—in an attempt to homogenize it. Most of the carbon burned away, but slag strands remained, and so men pulled from the furnace chamber a lump of malleable wrought iron made by stirring. The process was arduous, but not as lengthy and exhausting as hammering.
The navy was impressed and awarded Cort more contracts. He set to work again and perfected a way of running the pasty product of his furnaces through grooved rollers, turning them into bars, again without any hammering. Soon he could make wrought-iron bars with his roller method faster than anyone could make them using a hammer and anvil. Rollers were not new, but Cort put them to better use than his predecessors and, by combining his methods of converting cast iron to wrought iron and shaping the wrought iron with grooved rollers, he could manufacture wrought-iron bars fifteen times faster than anyone before him and at less cost. He took out patents on his methods and his works prospered.
Then, in 1789, his benefactor, Adam Jellicoe, died. In reviewing Jellicoe’s estate, His Majesty’s Government discovered that Jellicoe had embezzled navy funds to finance Cort. Although no one seriously accused Cort of conspiracy in the fraud, the Crown wanted its money back and confiscated Cort’s ironworks. Moreover, it revoked Cort’s patents. Ironmasters leapt at the abandoned patents and began churning out wrought iron at an unheard-of rate, becoming millionaires from Cort’s processes while Cort languished in ruin. Eventually the government, which expanded its empire on Cort’s adaptive genius, conceded Cort a pension of 200 pounds a year, reduced to 160 for deductions, until his death in 1800.
Neither Darby nor Huntsman nor Cort was a student of the science of metals, but due to their work, the technology of Europe, then the world, turned from one based on wood, stone, and brick to one based on iron. In fact, it is probably not a coincidence that these three men did not trouble over the nature of the structure of metal, for, if they had, they probably would have made no advancement at all. In their lifetimes, chemical and metallurgical theory was abundantly confused. Dominant in the 1700s was the theory of phlogistonism. By this school, when materials burned, they surrendered a substance called phlogiston. That seemed natural enough from the evidence of burning wood, paper, or charcoal, all of which reduced in size when burned. Unfortunately, the scientists were looking for an elusive substance that escaped (that is, the phlogiston) when they should have been looking for a tangible substance that combined (that is, oxygen).
Fortunately, Swedes and Frenchmen, perhaps less practical than the English of the eighteenth century or jealous of English success and probing for English secrets, began making scientific inquiries into chemical reactions and the structure of metals. Antoine Lavoisier, using his careful measurements of combustion and, later, his explanation of the role in combustion of Joseph Priestley’s newly discovered element, oxygen, expunged phlogistonism. And not long after, three French scientists, partly building on pioneering analyses of Swedes, declared that steel was actually iron with traces of carbon—that in fact, wrought iron, steel, and cast iron were all alloys differing only in their carbon content. This discovery had been elusive for centuries, and with good reason. No one had suspected that the same substance that provided the heat to produce iron and steel, that is, the carbon in charcoal or coke, was also what crept into the iron skin to make the iron useful. But by 1790, science was fast on the heels of its oft-supposed offspring, technology.
Still, scientists would have to make a mighty effort, because technology was acting like a frog in a jumping contest, taking leaps, halting, testing the air, then leaping again even farther. Ironmasters had Adam Smith to thank for his 1776 work, The Wealth of Nations, which celebrated free markets as the determinant of worthy products. In the same year they saw a marriage of ironmaking and machine that would send the Darby-Huntsman-Cort products into the world. That was the year John Wilkinson, just upstream from Coalbrookdale, wedded a James Watt steam engine to a blast furnace. The combination was appallingly prodigious. The steam engine increased iron production and lowered cost. With more and cheaper iron, Englishmen could make more boilerplates for more steam engines. With more steam engines, they could pump more water out of mines, which meant more coal, which meant more coke, which meant more iron, which meant more and cheaper machines like borers, lathes, and gear cutters to shape iron products, which meant better iron products, which meant increased demand. Soon manufacturers had mated steam engines to forge hammers, plate rollers, and bar shapers. Iron products proliferated like rabbits.
In England, pig-iron production in 1740 weighed 18,000 tons; in 1780, it had more than doubled to 40,000 tons. In 1790 it had doubled again. In 1800, it had doubled again, now up to 160,000 tons. Ten years later it had doubled again. A depression following the Napoleonic wars slowed the pace so that in 1820 only 400,000 tons were produced, but by 1830 production reached 700,000 tons. In 1840, it had more than doubled again, this time to 1,700,000 tons, more than ten times what it had been forty years previous. Iron was the stuff of the age—iron in wrought iron, cast iron, and that rare and precious substance, steel. Iron was making Britain over like nothing since the invasion of 1066.
This metamorphosis, however, was not to everyone’s liking. Factories increased in size and decreased in amiability. Workers, many of whom had migrated from rural areas, squeezed into hastily erected houses in sooty company towns. Children worked twelve-hour shifts in textile mills. Miners rarely saw the light of day. William Wordsworth lamented an age not of spirit but of materials: “Getting and spending we lay waste our powers/Little we see in Nature that is ours … With this, with everything we are out of tune.” He and fellow poets founded the Romantic Movement and exiled themselves to wander in less industrialized countries, such as Greece and Italy, setting in motion the theory that an artist’s proper place was not, as it had been for Chaucer, Shakespeare, Moliere, and Mozart, with society, but set off against it as rebels. They launched the artist-as-exile era.
British manufacturers hardly blinked at the notions of poets, however. They were off on the greatest gallop of the Iron Age. And other western European countries climbed on the juggernaut. Napoleon offered a four-thousand-franc reward to the first industrialist in his empire who could match the quality of Sheffield steel. German and French ironmasters expanded their operations, sometimes importing English workers for their coveted skills. In Glasgow in 1828, a gasworks manager blew preheated air into a blast furnace and tripled its efficiency. Three years later, a German exploited the same idea and used the waste gases roaring from the top of his blast furnace to heat the ingoing air at the bottom, improving the efficiency again. Others, freed from cumbersome bellows by sleeker steam engines, put two, three, or four holes in the bottom of blast furnaces and made ever more iron at ever-faster rates. Furnaces grew to thirty-five feet, then to sixty feet, and at night they resembled stubby monsters spewing smoke and sparks among the dark hills and cowering homes.
The Crystal Palace opened in London in May 1851 to great celebration and exhibited breakthrough technologies of the age. Library of Congress
From the time of Napoleon’s exile in 1815 to midcentury was a remarkable era, in a way the golden age of iron. Iron was the wonder stuff, the stuff of progress. In the 1820s, Thomas Telford spanned the 580-foot Menai Straits in northern Wales using wrought iron chains to suspend a roadway. In the 1830s, on account of iron, railway mania began; by 1841, Britain had laid 1,400 miles of wrought-iron rails. In 1834, manufacturers began making wire rope—that is, cables of iron wire rather than of hemp—and put them to work on mine hoists, suspension bridges, and budding telegraph systems. Engineering, long a scorned sprout of the military vine, took root on its own, and the age saw engineers for the first time form societies and schools. The youngest tinkerer and the loftiest professional had dreams of great iron factories, great iron-hulled ships carrying four thousand passengers (indeed, such a ship was launched in 1859 with a hull of thirty thousand iron plates), and great iron buildings that would make a man proud to be alive.
In fact, the Age of Iron peaked in just such a building, the Crystal Palace of 1851 in London’s Hyde Park. This great tiara of the Iron Age was designed, fittingly, by an amateur, gardener-turned-architect Joseph Paxton, who had built greenhouses for the Duke of Devonshire. Moreover, he raised it at the behest of another amateur enamored of technology, the German-born husband of Queen Victoria, Prince Albert. The Palace was to house the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, but especially to display Britain’s virtuosity to the world. In every respect, the building and the exhibition were great successes.
The Crystal Palace itself was a celebration of iron. It stretched 1,848 feet (six football fields), spanned eighteen acres, and enclosed thirty-three million cubic feet. It sported 3,300 slender iron columns and 2,150 airy iron trusses. It was the first building to use prefabricated modular units, an attribute that helped builders erect it in only twenty-two weeks. And it put to flight any notion that in the future of architecture masonry and wood would not take a back seat to iron. This great wedding cake of delicate iron lace and twenty-two acres of sparkling glass was the wonder of the world.
When the exhibition opened, to the luscious green of an English May and the wide-eyed curiosity of a dozen countries, no one accused it of not living up to its promises. Not only was there Victorian sentiment aplenty but also all manner of implements in iron: water fountains, fireplace mantels, lampposts, electromagnets, looms, presses, and colossal ornamental gates from Coalbrookdale, the latter of which still stand at the juncture of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens. There were locomotives, hydraulic presses, and steam engines, plus models of bridges, railways, and canals. Internationally displayed for the first time were the iron McCormick reaper and the iron Singer sewing machine. On the darker side, there were some iron cannons and, for export to the slave states of America, iron shackles, chains, and handcuffs, but these chilling exhibits of iron’s duplicity were easy to overlook in all the optimism. Thirteen countries brought samples of their iron ore. The science section of the exhibition catalogue fervidly declared, “The opportunity now afforded of examining the various iron ores of the world, is, in itself, a proof of the value of the Exhibition.”
This epoch of progress, this spring flood of dynamism was astonishing in itself—the world had never seen anything like it—and yet it was merely the green covering of a still unopened blossom, for this era fostered glories that would flower in the next and greater one. Within the Iron Age, the embryos of the next age were difficult to see, and yet in hindsight they would look grander and more prophetic. Here was Alfred Krupp, age fourteen and desperately tense at the funeral in 1826 of his Essen ironmaster father, who had broken his health trying to discover the secret of Sheffield steel. And here, too, was “Andra” Carnegie, all of age thirteen in 1848 as he tagged along with his unemployed father from Scotland to Pittsburgh, the American crossroads of iron ore and coal. The Age of Steel was about to bloom.
