AMERICAN INDUSTRIES SINCE COLUMBUS. 329 



a silvery luster, and oftentimes more or less porous or " honey- 

 combed " near the upper surface, The purpose of this " refining " 

 was, as the name suggests, the purification of the metal previous 

 to its being treated in a puddling-furnace for final conversion 

 into wrought iron. At the present day the " refinery " is rarely 

 employed, improved methods having rendered it unnecessary. 



The invention of the " puddling process " is usually ascribed to 

 Henry Cort, of Gosport, England, who patented it in 1784. This 

 process was a great improvement over that of the "blomary 

 fire," inasmuch as the labor was diminished, and, as the metal 

 was not in contact with the fuel, therefore raw mineral coal, 

 which was much cheaper than charcoal, could be used with nat- 

 ural draught, thus dispensing with all blowing machinery. The 

 process, as practiced on its introduction into America, consisted 

 substantially of melting refined pig iron on the sand bottom of a 

 reverberatory furnace, and stirring the pool (or " puddle," whence 

 the name of the process) of molten metal until it became con- 

 verted into a granular, pasty mass of wrought or f orgeable iron, 

 as the result of the decarbonizing action of the heated air passing 

 through the furnace and over the metal. This granular mass of 

 metal was divided by the " puddler " (as the workman was called) 

 into several separate " balls," or " loups," which were taken in turn 

 to a " shingling hammer," and " shingled " into " blooms " ; this 

 last operation being precisely similar to the shingling of the 

 " ball " from a blomary fire, already described. 



Figs. 22 and 2-3 are respectively vertical and horizontal longi- 

 tudinal sections of one of the 

 earlier forms of " puddling- 

 furnace," in which e is the 

 sand bed of the puddling- 

 chamber, d the " bridge-wall " 

 which separated the fuel on 

 the grates b of the " fire-box " 

 from the iron in the puddling- 

 chamber e , i is the chimney- 

 flue, and k a lever for raising 

 the door j. In some of the 

 early puddling - furnaces in 

 New England and eastern 

 Pennsylvania the fuel used 

 was dry split wood ; and as late as 1858 dry pine wood was used 

 for puddling and heating at the Hurricane Rolling-Mill and Nail- 

 Works in South Carolina. This was probably the last instance of 

 the use of wood as a fuel for such purposes in the United States. 



Soon after the introduction of the puddling process into this 

 country, Mr. Samuel Baldwyn Rogers, of Nant-y-glo, Monmouth- 



TOL. XXXVIII. 23 



Fig. 22. An Early Puddling-Furnace. 



