Structural Steelwork

Abstract

Modern steelmaking processes employing blast furnaces to produce pig-iron from iron-ore, coke and limestone are refinements of those methods used by early ironworkers. Despite smelting techniques being used for several thousand years it is only relatively recently (i.e. the 1800s), with William Kelly’s ‘pneumatic’ steelmaking process in America, and shortly after, Sir Henry Bessemer’s converter in England, and the Siemens-Martin open-hearth process, that methods of mass production of steel have evolved.