ABSTRACT
The period covering the use of cast iron in building is roughly the nineteenth century. The material had been used for such purposes as cannon-balls and stove-plates in Germany as far back as the fourteenth century. Cannon were first cast of iron in the fifteenth century. John Smeaton, about 1755, introduced cast iron windshafts and gear-wheeis into windmills thereby exposing himself to adverse criticism for venturing to make important members of so brittle and unreliable a material. Contemporary millwrights and steam-engine builders hesitated for many years to follow his example; hut by the end of the eighteenth century the beams, pillars and practically all the heavier parts of steam-engines were made of cast iron. The men who built tlie engines commonly built the mill; and it was no doubt some unknown millwright or iron-founder who first conceived the idea of using cast iron columns in mill buildings instead of timber posts or masonry piers.
