Wrought Iron
Wrought iron is an easily forged and welded variety of iron. Wrought iron is a combination of refined metallic iron with a one to three percent siliceous slag content. Wrought iron is commercially sound iron and it's ductile, malleable and tough. Wrought iron is not suitable for manufacturing swords or other blades though. Often it's forged into solid bars, and when this happens, wrought iron is referred to as bar iron. Though not used often in the modern age, wrought iron has been produced through a variety of methods.
Bloomery
The first method for creating wrought iron was called bloomery. This involved a clay smelter where the ore would be put inside of a pot or ladle with a layer of charcoal over it. This resulted in the ore only becoming soft, and it then had to have impurities pounded off of it by a hammer. Since the metal was worked hard, twisted, and generally beaten, it was being wrought. Bloomery left wrought iron with a definite grain, like wood, if it broke or was bent past its endurance point.
Blast Furnace
In 1708 iron making changed forever. A man named Edward Darby used coke, a much cheaper and common fuel that could be used in lumps, to revolutionize iron making. The furnaces could be much larger, and a larger amount of iron could be produced as a result. Blast furnaces, which were huge compared to more traditional blooming furnaces, produced brittle iron called pig iron. Chemicals were added to the process that would boil out the excess carbon and produce wrought iron similar to that made in bloomery, but in larger quantities and for a much cheaper price.
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