ABSTRACT
‘The Revolution we are about to announce is not in Sicily against King Bourbon, nor in France against the Emperor, but here in England, in science, in the manufacture of iron and in arts in which all the world is interested. What but a complete revolution in all our ideas is produced by the fact that a blast of cold compressed air directed on a molten metal, without any fuel … lashes it into most furious heat, makes it boil and bubble and throw up scum like a soup kettle under which a great fire is blazing? What but a complete revolution has begun in the whole manufacture of iron, when it is shown that we can draw off melted iron from the blast furnaces … into another furnace and from it … run off in half an hour, into any shape, cast steel or perfectly pure malleable iron, fit for all the many purposes to which steel and iron are put ? The invention of the railroad, with its adjunct to telegraph, was not the beginning of a more important revolution than is, we know, now commenced in the iron trade …’ 1
