Ferrous metallurgy

Uncommon card · No. 159199

Ferrous metallurgy or siderurgy is the metallurgy of iron and its alloys. The earliest surviving prehistoric iron artifacts, from the 4th millennium BC in Egypt, were made from meteoritic iron-nickel. 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 in the region from Greece to India, The use of wrought iron (worked iron) was known by the 1st millennium BC, and its spread defined the Iron Age. 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. All these processes required charcoal as fuel. By 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. Archaeological evidence of cast iron appears in 5th-century BC China. New methods of producing it by carburizing bars of...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Public domain