It is my understanding that early modern and medieval edged tools were made
of iron with a strip of steel welded along the cutting edge. All steel
made in England from about the 1610s to the 1650s was made by the
cementation process, by heating bars of iron with charcoal dust in a sealed
container. I presume this process was adopted because it was difficult to
obtain a consistent product with a bloomery or finery.
Ken Barraclough's two books Steel Before Bessemer (1985), one on blister
steel and the other on crucible steel are (I think) still in print and
available form the publishers, the Institute of Materials, 1 Carlton House
Terrace, London SW17 5DB. Personally I am not convinced that we really
understand the pre-cementation processes for making steel. I know of very
few places where they even might have been practised in Britain.
I do not believe in 'wrought steel' at least not after 1620.
Peter King
----- Original Message -----
From: J. H. Brothers <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: 29 November 2000 16:15
Subject: Re: a metal question / 'wrought steel'?
> There were a number of ways to make steel. You might want to look at:
>
> Rostoker, William and Bennet Bronson
> 1990 Pre-Industrial Iron: Its Technology and Ethnology. Archeomaterials
> Monograph No. 1, Philadelphia.
>
> Gordon, Robert B.
> 1996 American Iron 1607-1900. The Johns Hopkins University Press,
Baltimore
> and London.
>
> Barraclough, Kenneth C.
> 1976 The development of the Cementation Process for the Manufacture of
Steel.
> Post-Medieval Archaeology 10:65-88.
> 1991 Steel in the Industrial Revolution. In The Industrial Revolution in
> Metals, edited by R. F. Tylecote and Joan Day, pp. 261-306. The Institute
of
> Metals, London.
>
>
> They have pretty good descriptions of the various methods for making
steel.
>
> According to what I have read, a bloomery hearth can also be used to make
> steel. Needham states that the bloomery was never really used in China to
make
> wrought iron. It was used for the production of steel (Gilmour
1999:87-90;
> Needham 1980:514-520 and 539). The tatara method used in Japan produces
steel,
> as well as cast iron and wrought iron all at once.
>
> Gilmour, Brian
> 1999 Ironworking in ancient China: a review of two recent publications.
The
> Journal of the Historical Metallurgy Society 32(2):87-92.
>
> Needham, Joseph
> 1980 The Evolution of Iron and Steel Technology in East and Southeast
Asia. In
> The Coming of the Age of Iron, edited by Theodore A. Wertime and James D.
Muhly,
> pp. 507-542. Yale University Press, New Haven and London.
>
> I'm not a metallurgist so I won't comment too much on "wrought steel".
Except
> to say that it might not always be appropriate. Steel made by cementation
would
> have been "wrought" or "forged" but I think the historic term is "shear
> steel". This steel was a thin layer formed on the outside of bars of low
> carbon iron. After processing these would have been pile welded to form a
> sandwich of steel and iron. The more times it was cut up and forged, the
more
> layers were obtained.
>
> Steel that was produced in bloomeries or the "natural, cullen(?), or
German"
> steel would not have been. As they would have been steel all the way
through
> the bloom. There is some historic evidence, and I can't remember where I
read
> it (article by Brian Awty?), that bloomers were rated by the amount of
steel
> they managed to produce. The more steel the better they were.
>
> Also some steel produced in cementation furnaces was further processed
into
> "crucible steel". Here it was completely melted in a crucible and the
result
> would not have been layered, but a more homogenous material. this is a
later
> development in Europe. Again look at the above references for dates and
> techniques.
>
> Hope this is of some help.
>
> Jamie Brothers
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