red-short

Updated: May 24, 2025

I told them, consistent with the notion I had adopted in common with all others I had conversed with, that I thought it impossible, because the vegetable salts in the charcoal being an alkali acted as an absorbent to the sulphur of the iron, which occasions the red-short quality of the iron, and pit coal abounding with sulphur would increase it.

Samuel Smiles - Industrial Biography, Iron Workers and Tool Makers