ON THE IRON MANUFACTURE IN GREAT BRITAIN. 99 
On the Progress, present Amount, and probable future Condition of 
the Iron Manufacture in Great Britain. By G.R. Porter, .R.S. 
In obedience to the request of the Council of the British Association, made 
at its meeting in June 1845 at Cambridge,—a request from that body being 
- equivalent to a command,—I avail myself of the first moment of leisure that 
has since presented itself, to investigate the condition of the iron manufac- 
ture in Great Britain. 
The incessant claims upon my time, of public duties, which have called in 
their performance for the most anxious and unremitting labour, throughout 
all of the present year that has hitherto elapsed, may perhaps be allowed to 
plead in excuse for the imperfect manner in which I am able to perform my 
task. I wish, most sincerely, that it had been otherwise, and that it had 
been possible to devote to its accomplishment an amount of time and a de- 
gree of research that might have enabled me to present a work more worthy 
of the acceptance of this body, and better proportioned to the importance of 
the subject. 
* It was, doubtless, a conviction of the great and growing influence which 
the progress of the iron manufacture must exercise upon other important 
branches of our national industry, that led the Council of our body to desire 
information concerning it, and all that has since arisen in the course of our 
legislation has given additional interest to the subject, so that it has become 
more than ever of consequence to know the actual condition of this great 
branch of our industry, and of the capabilities which present themselves for 
its increase. The enormous demand for iron caused by the general and 
simultaneous construction of railways all over this kingdom, and not here 
only, but in various parts of Europe and in the United States of America, 
and also by their promised extension to India, is calculated to produce much 
of anxious inquiry into the subject, in order to ascertain, in the first place, 
whether, and in what way, that enormous demand can be met, and then to 
satisfy ourselves that through the cessation of that demand, which from its 
nature must be in a chief degree temporary, we may not be exposing to 
ruinous depreciation establishments for the formation of which vast capitals 
have been and will be sunk, in which many skilled workmen are trained, who: 
during the continuance of the existing great demand will be receiving high 
wages, but who.when it ceases may, many of them, be thrown out of em- 
ployment, and who must be so, unless some new and permanent uses can be 
found for the produce of their industry. 
_ The object of the present inquiry does not call for any research into the 
“remote history of the iron manufacture. It will not assist us in the solution 
of the questions now pressing upon our attention, to ascertain whether, in 
“eenturies preceding the Christian zra, when the Pheenicians traded with our 
‘ancestors for tin, the Britons did, as some writers have assumed, know and 
| oiteig the manufacture of iron. Certain it is, that the rise of that manu- 
facture upon any scale deserving of notice as a national object, dates from a 
‘time within the memory of persons now living. In 1788 the whole quantity 
of pig-iron made in England and Wales is said to have amounted to no more 
than 61,300 tons, of which quantity 48,200 tons were made with coke of 
and the remaining 13,100 tons were still made with charcoal (see 
Appendix No.1). In the same year the production in Scotland did not 
exceed 7000 tons. In Ireland charcoal-iron was made on a moderate scale 
during the seventeenth century. Sir William Petty tells us in his ‘ Political 
Anatomy of Ireland,’ that in 1672 the quantity of iron made there was about 
1000 tons, giving employment to about 2000 persons of both sexes. Works 
eh H 2 
