Anthracite iron

Anthracite iron or anthracite pig iron is iron extracted by the smelting together of anthracite coal and iron ore, that is using anthracite coal instead of charcoal in iron smelting. This was an important technical advance in the late-1830s, enabling a great acceleration of the Industrial Revolution in the United States and in Europe.

Unlike many seminal advances, the contributors, place and date of this epoch are well recorded within specific moments in the late 1830s. The first repeatable and reliably successful furnaces and smelts were managed by the same person in both the United Kingdom and the United States, in the principal control and supervision of ironmaster David Thomas, who began experimenting with attempts to use locally available Welsh anthracite deposits as early as 1820 soon after he became in charge at Yniscedewin Iron Works in Wales.

Around this 1837-38 timeframe, experiments were also being made in Pennsylvania near Port Carbon and in present-day Jim Thorpe, but with overall better success than in Wales. Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company (LC&N) and their two founders, Josiah White and Erskine Hazard, began systematic experiments to smelt using anthracite in two furnaces in Jim Thorpe in 1832–1837 with intermittent, but sporadically improved successes using cold blast processes with two differently designed furnaces.

While this preliminary work was being done on both sides of the Atlantic, another brain [in Scotland] was at work, which furnished the key that unlocked the secret to success, by Mr. Neilson of Glasgow, the inventor of the hot-blast, who in 1828 obtained a patent for his valuable invention, the importance of which was not realized for a long time. The pamphlet on the hot-blast, issued by Neilson, was eagerly read by Mr. Thomas, who was at once convinced of the value of the discovery.

One evening, while sitting with Mr. Crane in his library, talking the matter over, he took the bellows and began to blow the anthracite fire in the grate. "You had better not, David," said Mr. Crane; "you will blow it out." And Thomas replied, "If we only had Neilson's hot-blast here, the anthracite would burn like pine." Mr. Crane said, "David, that is the idea precisely," and this idea both recognized as one which would bear working out; and through Mr. Thomas's indomitable pluck and perseverance it succeeded.

In fact, this was the origin of the successful application of the hot-blast in making iron with anthracite. In the meantime the Clyde iron-works, in Scotland, had put a furnace in operation, using the hot-blast with semi-bituminous coal in the furnace. Mr. Thomas urged upon Mr. Crane the immediate adoption of the new discovery, and he was sent to Scotland to see how the process worked. After the most careful examination, Mr. Thomas determined that the hot-blast was just what was wanted for an anthracite furnace. He returned to Yniscedwin with a license from Mr. Neilson, and an expert mechanic who understood the construction of heating ovens, and at once proceeded to construct hot-blast ovens, and erected them at the furnace which was known as the 'Cupola furnace,' 11 feet bosh by 45 feet high. The furnace was blown in, February 5, 1837; the success was complete; and anthracite-iron continued to be profitably made from said furnace without intermission [thereafter].
 
Anthracite-iron was a new-born commodity in the commerce of the world, and David Thomas was its godfather. The news of his success spread over the United Kingdom; the London Mining Journal gave it great prominence; and an account of the discovery appeared in the press of the United States.

— Samuel Thomas, Transactions of the American Institute of Mining Engineers (1899)

After experimenting for nearly a decade in two cold blast furnaces built in present-day Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, LC&N Co.'s White and Hazard went recruiting in Wales after news reached them Anthracite pig iron was regularly and reliably being produced in George Crane's Yniscedwyn Iron Works, by David Thomas. Catasauqua Creek, about six miles below the Lehigh Gap and 14–15 miles (23–24 km) from the company offices in Mauch Chunk, now known as Jim Thorpe, was chosen for a new joint venture by LC&N and David Thomas, the Lehigh Crane Iron Works. After building infrastructure, including a firebrick works, a second blast furnace was under construction when on July 4, 1840, the first hot blast furnace in North America produced Anthracite pig iron, a necessary precursor to creating wrought iron and cast iron.

The first American smelt of anthracite pig iron was performed July 4, 1840 by principal-partners David Thomas, Josiah White and Erskine Hazard at their Lehigh Crane Iron Works in their first hot blast furnace along Catasauqua Creek aided by Samuel Thomas and the employees of the LCIW, in what became Catasauqua, Pennsylvania in the Lehigh Valley region of eastern Pennsylvania. The technology enabled industries the chance to produce cast iron sufficient to demand and eventually adapt production to also feed the demand to generate wrought iron and steel. These useful materials are achieved by adding additional processing—by taking pig iron as an ingredient into a reverberatory furnace (and in later years, a Bessemer converter).

Anthracite, also known as stone coal or rock coal, is very difficult to ignite, mine, clean, and break into smaller chunks and requires correct conditions to build heat or hold temperature and sustain burning—which often depend upon the size and uniformity of the coal particles. Yet American cities were cramped for fuels, woodlands were exhausted near bigger towns and Philadelphia, the largest city in America, also needed fuels for mills and foundries to sustain manufacturing. Inventor and industrialist Josiah White (owner of a wire mill, foundry and nail factory), had determined how to burn anthracite in iron working processing furnaces during the War of 1812, but its use in smelting operations was hit or miss, dependent upon the material packing geometries of any particular charging load in a cold blast furnace. The earlier development of coking of bituminous coal, as well as anthracite coke enabled the smelting of iron using local coal sources with cold blast air in blast furnaces after the latter 1830s allowed the production of vast quantities of iron that established the fundamental infrastructure of the early North American Industrial Revolution, which was built on iron products and only some steel. At the time, iron was used minimally with respect to wood. Even most railroad tracks were laid with wooden rails, sometimes covered by iron strapping. As more iron became available, more uses were found for it, creating a cycle of increasing demand, experimentation and improvements as part of the Industrial Revolution.