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Updated: May 29, 2025
In 1854 I took out a patent for puddling iron by means of steam. Many of my readers may not know that cast-iron is converted into malleable iron by the process called puddling.
Solid wrought-iron forgings are not all that could be desired in respect of elasticity and hardness, but their chief defect is want of homogeneity, due to the crude process of puddling, and to their numerous and indispensable welds. Low cast-steel, besides being elastic, hard, tenacious, and homogeneous, has the crowning advantage of being produced in large masses without flaw or weld.
A little later they set to work, puddling the best of the wash dug out in the course of sinking; and then the debris was put through the cradle, and Jim awoke at last to the full zest of the digger's lust.
"May," he broke out impatiently, "are you blind? Look at that woman's face! It asks questions of God, and says, 'I have a right to know. Good God, how hungry it is!" They looked a moment; then May turned to the mill-owner: "Have you many such hands as this? What are you going to do with them? Keep them at puddling iron?" Kirby shrugged his shoulders. Mitchell's look had irritated him.
Every now and again the dirtied water is poured off gently, and with a fresh supply, which is furnished by a mate with a long-handled dipper from the stream or pool, you puddle away. The great thing is, not to be afraid Of over-work, for the better the puddling is, so much the more easy and profitable is the cradling.
Bessemer's claim to "do" 800 pounds of metal in 30 minutes against the puddling furnace's output of 500 pounds in two hours was calculated to arouse the opposition of those who feared the loss of capital invested in puddling furnaces and of those who suspected that their jobs might be in jeopardy.
The past came rolling back upon me as I stopped my horses and looked at it, a wonderful road, that never was a highway in law, curving about the side of a knoll, the comb between the tracks carrying its plume of tall spear grass, its barbed shafts just ripe for boys to play Indian with, which bent over the two tracks, washed deep by the rains, and blown out by the winds; and where the trail had crossed a wet place, the grass and weeds still showed the effects of the plowing and puddling of the thousands of wheels and hoofs which had poached up the black soil into bubbly mud as the road spread out into a bulb of traffic where the pioneering drivers sought for tough sod which would bear up their wheels.
Bessemer was the first however to show that if air was forced, not upon the surface, but into and amongst the particles of molten iron, the same sort of combustion took place. Pig iron, which is highly carbonized iron from the blast furnace, was laboriously converted into malleable iron by the old process of the puddling furnace.
And that is the way the farmer's son has learned hog scalding from the time when our ancient fathers got tired of eating bristles and decided to take their pork clean shaven. To-day there are books telling just how many degrees of heat make the water right for scalding hogs, and the metallurgists have written down the chemical formula for puddling iron.
Hammered bar's at ninety, and I'm glad to get it then. The puddling furnaces will do something with the grey pig; we have eight in blast now, turning out the railroad and heavier bars. This year will see forty-five hundred tons of iron worked, and close to four thousand kegs of nails."
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