Industrial Biography: Iron Workers and Tool Makers. Samuel Smiles
the early stages of its manufacture converted with difficulty into forms that required proportion or elegance."—(Papers on Iron and Steel, 365-6.) By some secret method that has been lost, perhaps because no longer needed since the invention of steel, the ancients manufactured bronze tools capable of taking a fine edge. In our own time, Chantrey the sculptor, in his reverence for classic metallurgy, had a bronze razor made with which he martyred himself in shaving; but none were found so hardy and devoted as to follow his example.
[5] It may be mentioned in passing, that while Zinc is fusible at 3 degrees of Wedgwood's pyrometer, Silver at 22 degrees, Copper at 27 degrees, and Gold at 32 degrees, Cast Iron is only fusible at 130 degrees. Tin (one of the constituents of the ancient bronze) and Lead are fusible at much lower degrees than zinc.
[6] The Romans named the other metals after the gods. Thus Quicksilver was called Mercury, Lead Saturn, Tin Jupiter, Copper Venus, Silver Luna, and so on; and our own language has received a colouring from the Roman nomenclature, which it continues to retain.
[7] I. Samuel xiii. 19, 20.
[8] II. Kings xxiv. 16.
[9] Papers on Iron and Steel, 363-4.
[10] Dr. Livingstone brought with him to England a piece of the Zambesi iron, which he sent to a skilled Birmingham blacksmith to test. The result was, that he pronounced the metal as strongly resembling Swedish or Russian; both of which kinds are smelted with charcoal. The African iron was found "highly carbonized," and "when chilled it possessed the properties of steel."
[11] HOLINSHED, i. 517. Iron was also the currency of the Spartans, but it has been used as such in much more recent times. Adam Smith, in his Wealth of Nations (Book I. ch. 4, published in 1776), says, "there is at this day a village in Scotland where it is not uncommon, I am told, for a workman to carry nails, instead of money, to the baker's shop or the alehouse."
[12] Primeval Antiquities of Denmark. London, 1849, p. 140.
[13] See Dr. Pearson's paper in the Philosophical Transactions, 1796, relative to certain ancient arms and utensils found in the river Witham between Kirkstead and Lincoln.
[14] "In the Forest of Dean and thereabouts the iron is made at this day of cinders, being the rough and offal thrown by in the Roman time; they then having only foot-blasts to melt the ironstone; but now, by the force of a great wheel that drives a pair of Bellows twenty feet long, all that iron is extracted out of the cinders which could not be forced from it by the Roman foot-blast. And in the Forest of Dean and thereabouts, and as high as Worcester, there ave great and infinite quantities of these cinders; some in vast mounts above ground, some under ground, which will supply the iron works some hundreds of years; and these cinders ave they which make the prime and best iron, and with much less charcoal than doth the ironstone."—A. YARRANTON, England's Improvement by Sea and Land. London, 1677.
[15] M. A. LOWER, Contributions to Literature, Historical, Antiquarian, and Metrical. London, 1854, pp. 88-9.
[16] This famous sword was afterwards sent by Richard I. as a present to Tancred; and the value attached to the weapon may be estimated by the fact that the Crusader sent the English monarch, in return for it, "four great ships and fifteen galleys."
[17] Weland was the Saxon Vulcan. The name of Weland's or Wayland's Smithy is still given to a monument on Lambourn Downs in Wiltshire. The place is also known as Wayland Smith's Cave. It consists of a rude gallery of stones.
[18] Among the Scythians the iron sword was a god. It was the image of Mars, and sacrifices were made to it. "An iron sword," says Mr. Campbell, "really was once worshipped by a people with whom iron was rare. Iron is rare, while stone and bronze weapons are common, in British tombs, and the sword of these stories is a personage. It shines, it cries out—the lives of men are bound up in it. And so this mystic sword may, perhaps, have been a god amongst the Celts, or the god of the people with whom the Celts contended somewhere on their long journey to the west. It is a fiction now, but it may be founded on fact, and that fact probably was the first use of iron." To this day an old horse-shoe is considered a potent spell in some districts against the powers of evil; and for want of a horse-shoe a bit of a rusty reaping-hook is supposed to have equal power, "Who were these powers of evil who could not resist iron—these fairies who shoot STONE arrows, and are of the foes to the human race? Is all this but a dim, hazy recollection of war between a people who had iron weapons and a race who had not—the race whose remains are found all over Europe? If these were wandering tribes, they had leaders; if they were warlike, they had weapons. There is a smith in the Pantheon of many nations. Vulcan was a smith; Thor wielded a hammer; even Fionn had a hammer, which was heard in Lochlann when struck in Eirinn. Fionn may have borrowed his hammer from Thor long ago, or both may have got theirs from Vulcan, or all three may have brought hammers with them from the land where some primeval smith wielded the first sledge-hammer; but may not all these 'smith-gods be the smiths who made iron weapons for those who fought with the skin-clad warriors who shot flint-arrows, and who are now bogles, fairies, and demons? In any case, tales about smiths seem to belong to mythology, and to be common property."—CAMPBELL, Popular Tales of the West Highlands, Preface, 74-6.
[19] BROOK, Discovery of Errors in the Catalogue of the Nobility, 198.
[20] MEYRICK, i. 11.
[21] GILBERT, Cornwall.
[22] Before table-knives were invented, in the sixteenth century, the knife was a very important article; each guest at table bearing his own, and sharpening it at the whetstone hung up in the passage, before sitting down to dinner, Some even carried a whetstone as well as a knife; and one of Queen Elizabeth's presents to the Earl of Leicester was a whetstone tipped with gold.
[23] The early scarcity of iron in Scotland is confirmed by Froissart, who says,—"In Scotland you will never find a man of worth; they are like savages, who wish not to be acquainted with any one, are envious of the good fortune of others, and suspicious of losing anything themselves; for their country is very poor. When the English make inroads thither, as they have very frequently done, they order their provisions, if they wish to live, to follow close at their backs; for nothing is to be had in that country without great difficulty. There is neither iron to shoe horses, nor leather to make harness, saddles, or bridles: all these things come ready made from Flanders by sea; and should these fail, there is none to be had in the country."
[24] PARKER'S English Home, 77
[25] The precise time at which Andrea de Ferrara flourished cannot be fixed with accuracy; but Sir Waiter Scott, in one of the notes to Waverley, says he is believed to have been a foreign artist brought over by James IV. or V. of Scotland to instruct the Scots in the manufacture of sword-blades. The genuine weapons have a crown marked on the blades.
[26] Mr. Parkes, in his Essay on the Manufacture of Edge Tools, says, "Had this ingenious artist thought of a bath of oil, he might have heated this by means of a furnace underneath it, and by the use of a thermometer, to the exact point which he found necessary; though it is inconvenient to have to employ a thermometer for every distinct operation. Or, if he had been in the possession of a proper bath of fusible metal, he would have attained the necessary certainty in his process, and need not have immured himself in a subterranean apartment.—PARKES' Essays, 1841, p. 495.
[27] HOLINSHED, History of England. It was even said to have been one of the objects of the Spanish Armada to get the oaks of the Forest of Dean destroyed, in order to prevent further smelting of the iron. Thus Evelyn, in his Sylva, says, "I have heard that in the great expedition of 1588 it was expressly enjoined the Spanish Armada that if, when landed, they should not be able to subdue our nation and make good their conquest, they should yet be sure not to leave a tree standing in the Forest of Dean."—NICHOLS, History of the Forest of Dean, p. 22.
CHAPTER II.
EARLY ENGLISH IRON MANUFACTURE.
"He that well observes