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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (53396)	8/10/2009 8:44:17 PM
From: Snowshoe	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 218029

Last year China spent a staggering $57 billion importing iron ore from Australia, Brazil, etc. The Europeans kept using a primitive iron smelter called a "bloomery" much later in history than the Chinese... Bloomery en.wikipedia.org The onset of the Iron Age in most parts of the world coincides with the first widespread use of the bloomery. While earlier examples of iron are found, their high nickel content indicates that this is meteoric iron. Other early samples of iron may have been produced by accidental introduction of iron ore in bronze smelting operations. China has long been considered the exception: by 5th 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 furnace to a low-carbon, wrought iron-like material. It was thought that the Chinese skipped the bloomery process completely, starting with the blast furnace and the finery forge to get wrought iron. Recent evidence, however, shows that bloomeries were used earlier in China, migrating in from the west as early as 800 BC, before being supplanted by the locally developed blast furnace.