ironmaking

• ironmaking

• ironmaking

SUBJECT AREA: Metallurgy

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His father was a mason and brickmaker but, anxious to improve himself, Cort set up in London in 1765 as a navy agent, said to have been a profitable business. He recognized that, at that time, the conversion of pig iron to malleable or wrought iron, which was needed in increasing quantities as developments in industry and mechanical engineering gathered pace, presented a bottleneck in the ironmaking process. The finery hearth was still in use, slow and inefficient and requiring the scarce charcoal as fuel. To tackle this problem, Cort gave up his business and acquired a furnace and slitting mill at Fontley, near Fareham in Hampshire. In 1784 he patented his puddling process, by which molten pig iron on the bed of a reverberatory furnace was stirred with an iron bar and, by the action of the flame and the oxygen in the air, the carbon in the pig iron was oxidized, leaving nearly pure iron, which could be forged to remove slag. In this type of furnace, the fuel and the molten iron were separated, so that the cheaper coal could be used as fuel. It was the stirring action with the iron bar that gave the name "puddling" to the process. Others had realized the problem and reached a similar solution, notably the brothers Thomas and George Cranage, but only Cort succeeded in developing a commercially viable process. The laborious hammering of the ball of iron thus produced was much reduced by an invention of the previous year, 1783. This too was patented. The iron was passed between grooved rollers to form it into bars. Cort entered into an agreement with Samuel Jellico to set up an ironworks at Gosport to exploit his inventions. Samuel's father Adam, Deputy Paymaster of the Navy, advanced capital for this venture, Cort having expended much of his own resources in the experimental work that preceded his inventions. However, it transpired that Jellico senior had, unknown to Cort, used public money to advance the capital; the Admiralty acted to recover the money and Cort lost heavily, including the benefits from his patents. Rival ironmasters were quick to pillage the patents. In 1790, and again the following year, Cort offered unsuccessfully to work for the military. Finally, in 1794, at the instigation of the Prime Minister, William Pitt the Younger, Cort was paid a pension of £200 per year in recognition of the value of his improvements in the technology of ironmaking, although this was reduced by deductions to £160. After his death, the pension to his widow was halved, while some of his children received a pittance. Without the advances made by Cort, however, the iron trade could not have met the rapidly increasing demand for iron during the industrial revolution.

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SUBJECT AREA: Metallurgy

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Cowper was apprenticed in 1834 to John Braithwaite of London and in 1846 obtained employment at the engineers Fox \& Henderson in Birmingham. In 1851 he was engaged in the contract drawings for the Crystal Palace housing the Great Exhibition, and in the same year he set up in London as a consulting engineer. Cowper designed the 211 ft (64.3 m) span roof of Birmingham railway station, the first large-span station roof to be constructed. Cowper had an inventive turn of mind. While still an apprentice, he devised the well-known railway fog-signal and, at Fox \& Henderson, he invented an improved method of casting railway chairs. Other inventions included a compound steam-engine with receiver, patented in 1857; a bicycle wheel with steel spokes and rubber tyre (1868); and an electric writing telegraph (1879). Cowper's most important invention by far was the hot-blast stove, the first application of C.W. Siemens's regenerative principle to ironmaking, patented in 1857. Waste gases from the blast furnace were burnt in an iron chamber lined with a honeycomb of firebricks. When they were hot, the gas was directed to a second similar chamber while the incoming air blast for the blast furnace was heated by passing it through the first chamber. The stoves alternatively received and gave up heat and the heated blast, introduced by J.B. Neilson, led to considerable fuel economies in blast-furnace operation; the system is still in use. Cowper played an active part in the engineering institutions of his time, becoming President of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in 1880–1. He was commissioned by the Science and Art Department to catalogue the collections of machinery and inventions at the South Kensington Museum, whose science collections now form the Science Museum, London.

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SUBJECT AREA: Metallurgy

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Gibbons was an ironmaster in the Black Country, South Staffordshire, in charge of six blast furnaces owned by the family business. Until Gibbons's innovation in 1832, small changes in the form of the furnace had at times been made, but no one had seriously questioned the square shape of the hearth. Gibbons noticed that a new furnace often worked poorly by improved as time went on. When it was "blown out", i.e. taken out of commission, he found that the corners of the hearth had been rounded off and the sides gouged out, so that it was roughly circular in shape. Gibbons wisely decided to build a blast furnace with a round hearth alongside an existing one with a traditionally shaped hearth and work them in exactly the same conditions. The old furnace produced 75 tons of iron in a week, about normal for the time, while the new one produced 100 tons. Further improvements followed and in 1838 a fellow ironmaster in the same district, T. Oakes, considerably enlarged the furnace, its height attaining no less than 60ft (18m). As a result, output soared to over 200 tons a week. Most other ironmasters adopted the new form with enthusiasm and it proved to be the basis for the modern blast furnace. Gibbons made another interesting innovation: he began charging his furnace with the "rubbish", slag or cinder, from earlier ironmaking operations. It contained a significant amount of iron and was cheaper to obtain than iron ore, as it was just lying around in heaps. Some ironmasters scorned to use other people's throw-outs, but Gibbons sensibly saw it as a cheap source of iron; it was a useful source for some years during the nineteenth century but its use died out when the heaps were used up. Gibbons published an account of his improvements in ironmaking in a pamphlet entitled Practical Remarks on the Construction of the Staffordshire Blast Furnace.

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SUBJECT AREA: Metallurgy

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After leaving school before the age of 14 Neilson followed his father in tending colliery-steam engines. He continued in this line while apprenticed to his elder brother and afterwards rose to engine-wright at Irvine colliery. That failed and Neilson obtained work as Foreman at the first gasworks to be set up in Glasgow. After five years he became Manager and Engineer to the works, remaining there for thirty years. He introduced a number of improvements into gas manufacture, such as the use of clay retorts, iron sulphate as a purifier and the swallow-tail burner. He had meanwhile benefited from studying physics and chemistry at the Andersonian University in Glasgow.

Neilson is best known for introducing hot blast into ironmaking. At that time, ironmasters believed that cold blast produced the best results, since furnaces seemed to make more and better iron in the winter than the summer. Neilson found that by leading the air blast through an iron chamber heated by a coal fire beneath it, much less fuel was needed to convert the iron ore to iron. He secured a patent in 1828 and managed to persuade Clyde Ironworks in Glasgow to try out the device. The results were immediately favourable, and the use of hot blast spread rapidly throughout the country and abroad. The equipment was improved, raising the blast temperature to around 300°C (572°F), reducing the amount of coal, which was converted into coke, required to produce a tonne of iron from 10 tonnes to about 3. Neilson entered into a partnership with Charles Macintosh and others to patent and promote the process. Successive, and successful, lawsuits against those who infringed the patent demonstrates the general eagerness to adopt hot blast. Beneficial though it was, the process did not become really satisfactory until the introduction of hot-blast stoves by E.A. Cowper in 1857.

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SUBJECT AREA: Chemical technology

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The son of a prosperous Sheffield manufacturer, Roebuck forsook the family business to pursue studies in medicine at Edinburgh University. There he met Dr Joseph Black (1727–99), celebrated Professor of Chemistry, who aroused in Roebuck a lasting interest in chemistry. Roebuck continued his studies at Leyden, where he took his medical degree in 1742. He set up in practice in Birmingham, but in his spare time he continued chemical experiments that might help local industries.

Among his early achievements was his new method of refining gold and silver. Success led to the setting up of a large laboratory and a reputation as a chemical consultant. It was at this time that Roebuck devised an improved way of making sulphuric acid. This vital substance was then made by burning sulphur and nitre (potassium nitrate) over water in a glass globe. The scale of the process was limited by the fragility of the glass. Roebuck substituted "lead chambers", or vessels consisting of sheets of lead, a metal both cheap and resistant to acids, set in wooden frames. After the first plant was set up in 1746, productivity rose and the price of sulphuric acid fell sharply. Success encouraged Roebuck to establish a second, larger plant at Prestonpans, near Edinburgh. He preferred to rely on secrecy rather than patents to preserve his monopoly, but a departing employee took the secret with him and the process spread rapidly in England and on the European continent. It remained the standard process until it was superseded by the contact process towards the end of the nineteenth century. Roebuck next turned his attention to ironmaking and finally selected a site on the Carron river, near Falkirk in Scotland, where the raw materials and water power and transport lay close at hand. The Carron ironworks began producing iron in 1760 and became one of the great names in the history of ironmaking. Roebuck was an early proponent of the smelting of iron with coke, pioneered by Abraham Darby at Coalbrookdale. To supply the stronger blast required, Roebuck consulted John Smeaton, who c. 1760 installed the first blowing cylinders of any size.

All had so far gone well for Roebuck, but he now leased coal-mines and salt-works from the Duke of Hamilton's lands at Borrowstonness in Linlithgow. The coal workings were plagued with flooding which the existing Newcomen engines were unable to overcome. Through his friendship with Joseph Black, patron of James Watt, Roebuck persuaded Watt to join him to apply his improved steam-engine to the flooded mine. He took over Black's loan to Watt of £1,200, helped him to obtain the first steam-engine patent of 1769 and took a two-thirds interest in the project. However, the new engine was not yet equal to the task and the debts mounted. To satisfy his creditors, Roebuck had to dispose of his capital in his various ventures. One creditor was Matthew Boulton, who accepted Roebuck's two-thirds share in Watt's steam-engine, rather than claim payment from his depleted estate, thus initiating a famous partnership. Roebuck was retained to manage Borrowstonness and allowed an annuity for his continued support until his death in 1794.

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Тематики

• металлургия в целом

EN

• blast-furnace ironmaking

• производство n доменное

english: blast-furnace ironmaking

deutsch: Hochofenbetrieb

français: production f de la fonte dans le haut fourneau

• производство n чугуна

english: ironmaking, iron manufacture

deutsch: Roheisenerzeugung f

français: production f de fonte

1) Engineering: nonblast-furnace ironmaking

2) Makarov: nonblast-furnace iron-making, nonblast-furnace route of iron-making

1) General subject: cast-iron cast-iron production, cast-iron production

2) Engineering: ironmaking

3) Metallurgy: iron manufacture, pig iron production

4) Makarov: iron making

Eisenwerk n HÜTT ironmaking plant

• electric ironmaking furnace

• electric pig-iron furnace

• blast-furnace practice

• ironmaking

en\ \ blastfurnace ironmaking