ABSTRACT
During eighteenth century, Britain, then the largest producer in the world, made approximately 60,000 tons of steel and 3 million tons of pig iron, about a half being converted to puddled (wrought) iron. Iron was thus the principal metal on which the Industrial Revolution had been based, steel being a comparatively rare metal made by arduous and expensive methods. In 1960 British production of steel totalled 24 million tons, whereas only 50,000 tons of puddled iron was manufactured. The modern steel age as we know it was born with Bessemer's discovery in 1856 of the rapid conversion of pig iron into steel without the use of fuel. Production of puddled iron in that year was 1,339,000, amounting to not much more than 15% of total pig iron production. The deliberate addition of certain elements to steel to obtain enhanced properties began in 1819 when Michael Faraday investigated the properties of alloys of iron.
