Iron Steel

Today, there is iron or steel almost everywhere you look. Cars, buildings and appliance in the home all contain large amounts of iron. It is a material that can be found in many places on the Earth’s surface; it is easy to work and it is strong and durable, so long as it is not allowed to rust. But for thousands of years people did not know about iron. Since it is found in a rocky ‘ore’, its presence is not obvious. It was probably first discovered somewhere in western Asia, perhaps in Syria, or by the Hittite people of Turkey, around 2000 BC.

To make iron suitable for working, the ore bearing the metal collected. This is called ‘smelting’. Molten iron can be poured into molds to cast objects, but the resulting ‘cast iron’ is weak and brittle. So ‘wrought iron’ was developed by taking a piece of iron that had been smelted and hammering it repeatedly, to form the shape of the item they wanted to make. The hammering, as well as shaping the metal, gave it extra strength.