During the Industrial Revolution, new methods of producing bar iron by substituting coke for charcoal emerged, and these were later applied to produce steel, ushering in a new era of greatly increased use of iron and steel that some contemporaries described as a new "Iron Age". New methods of producing it by carburizing bars of iron in the cementation process were devised in the 17th century. Archaeological evidence of cast iron appears in 5th-century BC China. All these processes required charcoal as fuel.īy the 4th century BC southern India had started exporting Wootz steel (with a carbon content between pig iron and wrought iron) to ancient China, Africa, the Middle East and Europe. During the medieval period, smiths in Europe found a way of producing wrought iron from cast iron (in this context known as pig iron) using finery forges. The use of wrought iron (worked iron) was known by the 1st millennium BC, and its spread defined the Iron Age.
It is not known when or where the smelting of iron from ores began, but by the end of the 2nd millennium BC iron was being produced from iron ores from at least Greece to India, and Sub-Saharan Africa.
The earliest surviving iron artifacts, from the 4th millennium BC in Egypt, were made from meteoritic iron-nickel. Bloomery smelting during the Middle Ages.įerrous metallurgy, the metallurgy of iron and its alloys, began in prehistory.
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