Charles Wood (ironmaster)

Charles Wood (1702 – October 1774) was an English ironmaster and one of the inventors of the potting and stamping method of making wrought iron from pig iron.

Charles Wood was the 7th of 15 children of William Wood of Wolverhampton and his wife Margaret, daughter of Richard Molyneux, an ironmonger in that area. William Wood followed his father-in-law's trade until 1715, when he became an ironmaster too and later entered into a contract to provide copper coinage for Ireland. He was also a projector, floating his business as an ironmaster as a at the time of the South Sea Bubble (1720). Later, he sought to develop a new process of ironmaking and to obtain a charter for a "Company of Ironmasters of Great Britain". However the process (carried on at Frizington, Cumberland) produced little iron and he probably died in debt.

Charles Wood was a partner in some of the businesses, and certainly in the final one. His father's will left him a legacy of £15000, but his father died insolvent. The result was that Charles and some of his brothers were also made bankrupt in the following years.

Charles Wood went out to Carolina in 1733 following his bankruptcy but only stayed there a couple of years. He returned to Cumberland to marry Anne Piele of Buttermere and then went to Jamaica to superintend lead mines in Liguanea. They had a child in Jamaica in 1739, but the next was born at Whitehaven. His activities between 1741 and 1747 remain unknown, but in 1747, he was appointed assaymaster to the Governor of Jamaica.

In this period, William Brownrigg (from 1742 a Fellow of the Royal Society) reported Wood's experiments on a metal, subsequently known as platinum. This had been found in the course of alluvial gold working in what is now Colombia, and had been smuggled from Cartagena to Jamaica. Wood reported this to Brownrigg in about 1741. Brownrigg reported it to the Royal Society in 1750. They found the metal did not react with acid and was unaffected by the usual process for extracting silver from lead.

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