Peter Hutchison wrote:
> For what it is worth Turner in his book "Iron" says that the American
> bloomeries could produce steel "at will". I thought this was called natural
> steel or bloomery steel rather than wrought steel.
Documentary and metallographic evidence relating to this question can be found
in R.B. Gordon and D. Killick, "Metallurgy of the American Bloomery Process",
Archeomaterials 6:141-167, 1992. The evidence shows that it was easy to produce
"direct" steel in the American bloomery (hot-blast, water-driven piston
bellows, rectangular low hearth hearth of water-jacketed cast-iron plates,
producing in best practice a 400-lb bloom every three hours from nearly pure
magnetite ore crushed to 3 mm grain size). Since the market for this iron was
almost entirely in applications demanding carbon-free ductile iron (especially
for gun barrels and wire for suspension cables) the production of steel was an
annoyance. Newspaper and academic accounts of the industry make it clear that
every attempt was made NOT to produce steel - to do so was the mark of a
careless craftsman.
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