ABSTRACT
The basic technical components of the 'British model' were blast furnaces that ran with coke, coal-fired puddling furnaces in which pig iron was refined, and rolling mills in which malleable iron was shaped. The transition to modernity in Britain was not, however, a sudden event, technically or economically. Charcoal was the only fuel used. The smelting of ores by direct reduction in bloomeries and high bloomeries survived in some districts of the Habsburg Monarchy into the nineteenth century, but the highest standards of production involved blast furnaces with wooden bellows, the refining of pig iron at charcoal-fired finery hearths, and the hammering of malleable iron into bars. The modernization of the Habsburg iron industry involved different problems in the different centres of iron production. In the Hungarian Kingdom the leading area in iron making, Slovakia, had rich iron ore deposits but few deposits of coal or lignite.
