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Wrought iron is an iron alloy with a very low carbon content (less than 0.05%) in contrast to that of cast iron ... which was invented by Henry Cort in 1784. [34]
Pig iron is known as 'raw iron', while wrought iron is known as 'cooked iron'. By the 1st century BC, Chinese metallurgists had found that wrought iron and cast iron could be melted together to yield an alloy of intermediate carbon content, that is, steel. [40] [41] [42]
Henry Cort (c. 1740 – 23 May 1800) was an English ironware producer who was formerly a Navy pay agent. During the Industrial Revolution in England, Cort began refining iron from pig iron to wrought iron (or bar iron) using innovative production systems.
Steel is an alloy composed of between 0.2 and 2.0 percent carbon, with the balance being iron. From prehistory through the creation of the blast furnace, iron was produced from iron ore as wrought iron, 99.82–100 percent Fe, and the process of making steel involved adding carbon to iron, usually in a serendipitous manner, in the forge, or via the cementation process.
Cast iron rails, 4 feet (1.2 m) long, began to be used in the 1790s and by 1820, 15-foot-long (4.6 m) wrought iron rails were in use. The first steel rails were made in 1857 and standard rail lengths increased over time from 30 to 60 feet (9.1–18.3 m).
The wrought iron rail, invented by John Birkinshaw in 1820, solved these problems. Wrought iron (usually simply referred to as "iron") was a ductile material that could undergo considerable deformation before breaking, making it more suitable for iron rails. But wrought iron was expensive to produce until Henry Cort patented the puddling ...
Cast iron was not useful for items in tension like beams, where the more expensive wrought iron was preferred. Improvements in production saw the costs decrease at the same time as cast iron gained popularity. The puddling process, patented in 1784, was a relatively low cost method for producing a structural grade wrought iron.
The Chinese are thought to have skipped the bloomery process completely, starting with the blast furnace and the finery forge to produce wrought iron; by the fifth century BC, metalworkers in the southern state of Wu had invented the blast furnace and the means to both cast iron and to decarburize the carbon-rich pig iron produced in a blast ...