Grand-grand…grand-son of Cranage Brothers here. The Cranages worked for the Darbys in their furnace (around 1760) and invented a new process for converting pig iron into wrought iron. Quakers themselves like the Darbys, one of their descendants founded a school in Wellington (the Old Hall) where my grandmother was born.
And so reading these historical notes reminds me of the narrations from my parents and grandparents about the steel industry and our family, very strange and nice discovery here on HN!<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cranege_brothers" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cranege_brothers</a>
Talks about history of coal, iron and steam and the "virtuous cycle" that happened between them in Great Britain from 1200 onwards.<p>There are some pretty interesting snippets:<p>"""
... there is another possible explanation for the name – that it was called sea coal because it arrived into London by sea from the North. ...
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... this would provide a tidy explanation for why the engine developed in Britain and nowhere else – no other place was exploiting coal as a fuel source nearly so intensively, and so no other place had access to the cheap fuel that made a first-generation steam engine worthwhile.
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The puddling process, developed in Britain in the 1780s, removed this last bottleneck. A puddling furnace turned cast iron into wrought simply by applying heat and stirring. This allowed the mass production of wrought iron, using coal as fuel
"""<p>Good read!
> "<i>Iron, however, presented a much greater challenge. With a melting point of 2800 degrees, no fire could be made in antiquity capable of reducing it to liquid form.</i>"<p>Are there any notes from experimentors in antiquity trying to build the hottest fire in the world, capable of reduing Iron to liquid?