Talk:Puddling (metallurgy)

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Another article?

"By this time, Chinese metallurgists had discovered how to puddle molten pig iron, stirring it in the open air until it lost its carbon and became wrought iron. (In Chinese, the process was called chao, literally, stir frying.)"

I have considerable doubts as to the value of this short article, which seems to duplicate puddling furnace. I have removed and adjusted a few statements that appear to me to be inaccurate. However it would probably be better to merge it with puddling furnace. Peterkingiron 21:54, 10 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Merge Proposal with puddling furnace

see Talk:puddling furnace. Peterkingiron 16:50, 30 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

k, I'll accept your edit for this section. intranetusa 14:00, 31 March 2007(UTC)

Fettling

Is this only done once after the construction of the furnace to prepare the hearth or is it done at the beginning of the each batch? If it's only done once then I say it should be moved to the furnace section. --Wizard191 (talk) 02:45, 17 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

China

I have removed material asserting that puddling took place in China by 3rd century AD. It is not disputed that pig iron was made into wrought iron in China using coal as fuel. However, it is a misdesciption to call this "puddling". Many iron articles were spammed a while back with a picture of a Chinese process, usually captioned as "puddling", but the picture did not show the closed reverberatory furnace characteristic of the British puddling process. I fear this is a case of an excess of enthusiasm from some one not familiar with the subject. Peterkingiron (talk) 17:57, 20 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I fully agree with Peterkingiron. This is a common mistake, and his removal was avoided by further contributions. See my corrections. Puddling is the process invented by Cort, and means the use of a reverberatory furnace. The closer refining Chinese process are Commons:File:Chinese puddling furnace Sichuan by Luo Mian.svg and Commons:File:Chinese puddling furnace Sichuan by Yang Kuan.svg. And they are NOT puddling furnaces, there are genuine Chinese inventions. Borvan53 (talk) 13:10, 19 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Shouldn't this merit re-creation of a unique article referring to those Chinese processes? It appears such an article was previously created, then merged with this one, so now doesn't exist. (albeit it also appears there were factual errors in the original article that should have been addressed and the article as a whole expanded upon)

It's further confused by puddling being referenced in the Crucible steel article here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crucible_steel#China

"The production of crucible steel in China began around the first century BC, or possibly earlier. The Chinese developed a method of producing pig iron around 1200 BC, which they used to make cast iron. By the first century BC, they had developed puddling to produce mild steel and a process of rapidly decarburizing molten cast-iron to make wrought iron by stirring it atop beds of saltpeter (called the Heaton process, it was independently discovered by John Heaton in the 1860s)." 99.162.146.140 (talk) 02:16, 17 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

To add to article

To add to this article: a photo of a rabble (puddling bar). 76.190.208.61 (talk) 22:30, 1 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

New research on Jamaican origins for Cort process

New research relevant to this article, I believe. It relates to the Cort process being appropriated from its Jamaican developers.^[1]^[2] RobbieIanMorrison (talk) 07:24, 5 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Bulstrode’s claims aren’t particularly well founded and it seems this has already been addressed in the Henry Cort page. UselessPistol (talk) 04:52, 13 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

References

^ Bulstrode, Jenny (21 June 2023). "Black metallurgists and the making of the industrial revolution". History and Technology: 1–41. doi:10.1080/07341512.2023.2220991. ISSN 0734-1512. Retrieved 2023-07-05.
^ Devlin, Hannah (5 July 2023). "Industrial Revolution iron method 'was taken from Jamaica by Briton'". The Guardian. London, United Kingdom. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2023-07-05. An innovation that propelled Britain to become the world's leading iron exporter during the Industrial Revolution was appropriated from an 18th-century Jamaican foundry, historical records suggest.

Samuel Baldwyn Rogers

I've recently started a page on Samuel Baldwyn Rogers, whose biographies indicate that he had a significant role in developing the iron-bottomed puddling furnace. I know nothing of the technology behind this, but am slightly surprised that his name doesn't appear in this article. Should he be mentioned? Ghmyrtle (talk) 07:40, 2 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It's not in any of the regular histories (mid 20th century at least) because he's local, and he's seen as having made engineering changes to the machinery of the process, rather than changing the science and metallurgy of the process itself. So he's usually overshadowed by Joseph Hall a few years later and his development of 'pig-boiling' as a quicker means of decarburising pig iron (I suspect this is the basis of the "doubled production capacity" claim). But Hall's innovation depended on Rogers having first made the iron furnace lining practical.

Contemporary sources give him credit, but that's because puddling was an important process at the time. After Bessemer, Mushet and Gilchrist Thomas (again Bessemer gets the credit, but the process had no commercial success until Gilchrist Thomas) mild steel became everything and puddling wrought iron was significantly overlooked in the contemporary histories. More recent and more detailed histories redress this somewhat, but you'd be looking at the level of journals from Trans. Newcomen Soc. or Historical Metallurgy. Andy Dingley (talk) 15:22, 2 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I thought you might have the answer. An interesting character anyway, and deserving of an article I think. Thanks! Ghmyrtle (talk) 21:37, 2 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

S.B. Rogers' innovation was certainly important, as it greatly improved the yield of bar iron from pig iron. Andy Dingley is wrong as to the significance of Bessemer. His process certainly had problems but R.F. Mushet solved that, to make the acid Bessemer process effective. The Gilchrist-Thomas or basic Bessemer process was slightly later. Peterkingiron (talk) 16:40, 8 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Mushet recognosed what the problem was with Bessemer's process (after which Bessemer was viable, but only for a handful of ore sources) and he also then invented the spiegeleisen process, see spathic iron ore for an explanation. Which transformed the future of Ebbw Vale and Watchet. But as the West Somerset Mineral Railway and Abersychan found out, this process only lasted about 20 years before Gilchrist Thomas took over completely and the sites tied to spiegeleisen closed. Andy Dingley (talk) 18:24, 8 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Oxidizing

The hot gasses above the molten iron in the furnace are indeed oxidizing. This seems wrong as the iron in iron ore is oxidized iron, and smelting the ore reduces the ore to iron. This iron is called pig iron and has a high carbon content, typically 3.8–4.7%, along with sulfur, phosophorus, and other dross, which makes it brittle and not useful directly as a material. The puddling process oxidizes these impurities, particularly carbon to carbon dioxide, thus removing them and producing wrought iron, which contains only a small, 0.05%, amount of carbon. By modifying this process, enough carbon will remain to convert the pig iron into steel. Nick Beeson (talk) 14:24, 2 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

[bulstrode-2023-1] Bulstrode, Jenny (21 June 2023). "Black metallurgists and the making of the industrial revolution". History and Technology: 1–41. doi:10.1080/07341512.2023.2220991. ISSN 0734-1512. Retrieved 2023-07-05.

[devlin-2023-2] Devlin, Hannah (5 July 2023). "Industrial Revolution iron method 'was taken from Jamaica by Briton'". The Guardian. London, United Kingdom. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2023-07-05. An innovation that propelled Britain to become the world's leading iron exporter during the Industrial Revolution was appropriated from an 18th-century Jamaican foundry, historical records suggest.

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