Polish coke

Blast furnace coke was not the only fuel for blast furnaces. What else was used then instead of coke for smelting ores in the Middle Ages and before the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century? Let's take a look at the blast furnaces' history.

First blast furnaces in history appeared in the fifth century before Christ in ancient China. They have been built in Europe from the High Middle Ages. They spread from the region around Namur in Wallonia (Belgium nowadays) in the late fifteenth century. Then they were introduced to England in 1491. The fuel used in these first blast furnaces was all the time a charcoal. The first successful using of blast furnace coke for industrial scale took place in Abraham Darby in 1709. The efficiency of the process was much further enhanced, because of two simple reasons. First - a coke is much more calorific than a charcoal. Second - by the practice of preheating the blast, which was patented in 1828 by a Scottish inventor, James Beaumont Neilson.

The fining process of making wrought iron from pig iron (left); men working at blast furnace - smelting iron ore and producing pig iron (“Tiangong Kaiwu Encyclopedia”, 1637)

The blast furnaces were differentiated from the bloomeries in a simple way. Blast furnaces produce molten metal which can be tapped from the furnace. The idea of a bloomery is quite different - to avoid it melting so that carbon can't be dissolved in the iron. Bloomeries were also artificially blown by using of the bellows. Generally, the term of “blast furnace” is reserved for furnaces which refine iron (and0 other metals) from ore.

CATEGORY: blast furnace coke