Anthracite iron

Anthracite iron or Anthracite 'Pig Iron' is the substance created by the smelting together of anthracite coal and iron ore, that is using Anthracite coal instead of charcoal to smelt iron ores — and was an important historic advance in the late-1830s enabling great acceleration the industrial revolution in Europe and North America. 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).

Inventor and industrialist Josiah White, 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 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 the vast quantities of iron that built 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 iron, creating a cycle of increasing demand, experimentation and improvements— part of the revolution in industrial revolution.

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