Polish coke

This is the last part of the blast furnace coke history, which is still without a coke itself. It tells about the sixteenth and the seventeenth European metallurgy in a short brief.

The direct ancestor of the first English and French furnaces appeared in Belgian region of Wallonia, that time knows as Namur. From there blast furnaces spread first to the Pays de Bray (eastern boundary of Normandy) and from there to the Weald of Sussex (England), where the first furnaces were built (Queenstock in Buxted in about 1491 and Newbridge in Ashdown Forest in 1496). They remained few in number until about 1530 and then their number started increasing fast to reach its peak about 1590. Most of the pig iron made in Sussex furnaces was used in finery forges to produce bar irons.

The first British furnaces outside the Weald appeared during the middle of the sixteenth century. The output of the industry reached its peak probably about 1620 and was followed by a slow decline, which ended in the early eighteenth century, at the dawn of industrial revolution. The decline was caused simply by the economy – it was far much cheaper to import iron from Sweden and elsewhere than to make it locally in England. The first blast furnace in Russia (called the Gorodishche Works) was opened near Tula in 1637. Then the idea of blast furnaces spread from there to the central Russia and next finally to the Ural Mountains.

Blast furnaces have also been discovered and used in medieval West Africa, especially among the metalworking Bantu civilizations such as the Nyoro people and the Bunyoro Empire. And at last the long-awaited blast furnace coke era became…

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