In most of the countries of the world there is more or less iron ore. Yet people mixed copper and tin to form bronze, and fashioned bronze tools and weapons, long before they learned to use iron. The reason for this was that iron is not found like gold, copper, or tin, by itself. It is mixed with clay, or rock, or other substances, and in this form is called iron ore. To obtain the iron, the ore must be put under great heat. When this is done, the iron in the ore melts and runs out, and only then can it be collected and made into useful things.

The first furnace in which iron ore was melted was probably no more than a pile of wood with a layer of ore on top. The entire heap was covered over with clay to keep in the heat. A large hole at the top and a number of holes at the bottom provided the needed draft. The reward for several days' work with such a furnace was a couple of pounds of iron. Yet the smith—a very honorable person among ancient peoples—forged from the iron obtained in this way, crude knives, axes, and spearheads that were superior to similar tools and weapons made of stone or of bronze.

In the course of time, improvements were made on this method of smelting iron. Charred wood, or charcoal, which makes a hotter fire, came to be used instead of wood. A goatskin bellows was added to fan the fire. With a bellows to force the air into the furnace, the draft could be made stronger than when the air entered of its own accord, and still more important, the draft could be controlled. The furnace was then built so that it could be used over and over again. It was made of clay, and at least one form was four or five feet high and about five feet wide at the bottom. An opening was left in front, which was closed with clay after the furnace was filled with layers of charcoal and iron ore, and was broken down after each melting, so that the melted iron could be taken out.

One of these improved furnaces would supply from fifteen to twenty pounds of iron in a day, and there was at last, iron enough for knives, axes, spears, swords, chisels, saws, files, forks, reap hooks, harrows, and chains. When these improvements in the furnace were brought about no one knows, but they were all probably made long before the Israelites were in bondage in Egypt.

For more than two thousand years after this, there was little progress in smelting iron. What there was, consisted in building better furnaces, and in making them so that the charcoal and the iron ore could be put in at the top, and so that the smelted iron and the slag could be drawn off at the bottom. Such a furnace could be run for months, and even for years, without being allowed to cool down.

About the time of Columbus, other improvements followed. Furnaces were built still larger, some of them as high as twenty or thirty feet. More powerful bellows also came into use, which were worked by horse power or by water power. These larger furnaces with the more powerful bellows, called blast furnaces, produced from two to three tons of iron a day.

The modern blast furnace dates, however, from the introduction of the steam engine. This did away with the bellows worked by horse power or water power, and made possible the use of blowers, which deliver a blast of air many times strong enough to blow a person off his feet.

Smelting iron required so much wood that countries like England became alarmed. It was feared that all the good timber would be burned up. A trial was made of soft coal, but it was not satisfactory. The custom of charring wood to make charcoal probably suggested the idea of charring soft coal, and using the coke, or charred coal. Coke answered very well for smelting iron, and its use became general in western Europe about 1750. But in the United States charcoal was employed until after 1865, and this accounts for the cutting off of the large trees, over great areas, in all our older states, like the Wilderness in Virginia.

Up to 1828, cold air was used to fan the fire. Then an ingenious Englishman made a great discovery. He found that if the air was heated very hot before it was forced into the furnace, the iron could be smelted with half the amount of fuel otherwise required.

The forced blast, the hot blast, and the use of coke are thus the important features of the modern blast furnace. These modern furnaces are built from seventy-five to a hundred feet high, and from twenty to thirty feet wide inside at the widest part. A single blast furnace of average size will turn out a hundred tons of iron a day, or it will produce as much iron as six to seven thousand of the furnaces of ancient times.

There is scarcely any limit to the amount of iron the modern blast furnace can produce. But the blast furnace has one drawback. The iron made in primitive furnaces could be hammered at once into tools and implements, and only the iron needed for knife blades, swords, and the like had to be refined, or changed into a finer kind of steel. The iron produced in a blast furnace, called pig iron, will not bend, and it cannot be hammered. It can be melted and molded into castings, such as stove tops and stove lids, but before it can be pressed or hammered into useful things, it has to be refined. To change pig iron into the higher grades of steel needed to make delicate machines and fine tools, such as knives, axes, saws, and chisels, was at this time very expensive. The best pig iron could be bought in London for thirty to thirty-five dollars a ton, but a ton of high grade steel cost from two hundred and fifty to three hundred dollars.

The invention of the steam engine, the steamboat, the locomotive, the sewing machine, and the like, increased the amount of good steel that was needed. It seemed that the progress of the world was to be halted, unless some way was found to change the cheap pig iron, of which there was an abundance, into steel, at less expense. What the world needed was some one to do for the making of steel, what Crompton had done for spinning, Whitney for cotton growing, and McCormick for wheat raising. The man to do this was born at Charlton, England, in 1813. His name was Henry Bessemer.

In 1813, Charlton was a small country village. There among the woods and fields and country folk, Henry Bessemer lived. He received a good elementary school education, but he did not go to high school. Instead, he passed the years between the ages of thirteen and sixteen in doing whatever he wanted to do. Some of the neighbors said he was fooling his time away. However that may be, he was fond of working on a lathe which his father bought for him. He made working models of machines. One of these was a brick machine, with which he molded little bricks of white clay. He also molded, in type metal, wheels, pulleys, and other objects. "Often during my evening walks around the fields, with a favorite dog," he says in his autobiography, "I would take up a small lump of yellow clay from the roadside, and fashion it into some grotesque head or material object, from which I would afterwards make a mold and cast it in type metal."

Henry's father owned a big type foundry. This was a place of great interest. Many a day he spent there, cutting dies, molding type, and mixing different kinds of type metal. But the antimony used in making the type metal caused Henry on more than one occasion to become sick, and his sickness finally betrayed him.

"There was . . . one other attraction in the village, which played an important part in molding my ideas," he tells us. "I was very fond of machinery, and of watching it in motion. If ever I was absent from meals, I could probably have been found at the flour mill . . . , where I passed many hours, gazing with pleasure upon the broad sheet of water falling into the . . . buckets of the great . . . water wheel; or, perhaps, I might have been watching, with a feeling almost of awe, the large wooden spur wheel, which brought up the speed, and which was one of the wonders of millwright's craft in those days."

By the time Henry was seventeen years old, he was full grown, a little more than six feet tall, and full of energy. He was to become the Thomas Edison of England. But he did not set to work with any big plan in mind, as to how he was going to become the most famous inventor of his age. He merely had wide-open eyes, and did the thing before him which seemed worth doing.

On one of his rambles about London, where his parents moved in 1830, young Bessemer met with an Italian selling plaster casts "of the most beautiful medallions, real works of art, at one penny apiece." He bought a number of the most beautiful of the medallions and took them home, to cast them in metal. After working with the very greatest patience for more than a year, he not only succeeded in casting medallions in metal, but he perfected his way of casting, so that he was able to reproduce in metal, rosebuds, flowers, ferns,—indeed any natural object,—with all the delicate curves and fine lines. He also found a way of putting a coat of copper on his casts, so that they looked as if they were made of bronze.

His casts were really beautiful, and attracted attention even among artists. Thus by following out a boyish interest, and by putting to use the skill he had acquired, Bessemer was started on his great career. The neighbors, meanwhile, complained that the young man was allowed to fool his time away.

While busy with his art castings, his attention was called to the use of dies to stamp raised figures on cardboard and leather. It was a short step from making molds to cast medallions and flowers, to making dies to stamp raised figures. Then, too, Bessemer had made many a die at Charlton when "fooling his time away."

"After a certain amount of practice," he tells us, "I produced a great many very beautiful dies. . . . I erected a powerful 'fly-press' for stamping impressions from these dies.

"It will be easy to imagine my delight on securing my first order for five hundred copies, on . . . cardboard, of a beautiful cartoon of Raphael. These impressions cost me only three pence each . . . , and I found ready sale for them at a half crown.

"I also made a great many dies . . . for bookbinders, cardboard manufacturers, etc., this turning to commercial account the art of 'fine casting,' which I had heretofore only pursued as an amusement."