[Rchard Williams]

Thanks, Marc, and for the paper.  I have been following to a certain extent the work from Glinet, whilst concentrating on cast iron otherwise, but with my new project I will be taking much more interest.  In particular I am interested in the difference in fining techniques when the pig iron feedstock was high in silicon and when it was not.  I am very interested in the chemistry of the removal of phosphorus and keen to know how Cort was able to vary his process in order to alter its ability to do this.

I look forward to meeting you in Falun and hope that there will be a lot of other French workers interested in this subject there.  If anybody can help me with provision of samples of fined bar iron, I would be very grateful.  I would love to obtain some such from Franche Comte, where they had a high silicon feedstock.

Richard

[Rchard Williams]

Thanks, Paul. I have read a couple of the papers that you have suggested for me. I found it easier to start with the work of Buchwald and Wivel I must say, but I will understand the maths with a little more application. It is clearly a matter of calibrating the various oxide ratios for lots of different ores, which is the sort of thing that I shall be doing at Warwick. They are very good at inclusions in modern steels at Warwick. I don’t know Maxime, but I shall obviously have to contact him and his co-workers some time, possibly when I understand a little more about it.

As part of my researches I intend to go to the conference at Falun in Sweden in June. Do you know of anybody else from the Society going?

[Rchard Williams]

Yes, Keith, in a normally cooled plain carbon steel, the pearlite content at room temperature is a function of carbon content, since all the carbon has to be redirected when austenite changes to ferrite, (the solubility of carbon in ferrite is very low). However, a microstructure which is 100% pearlite only exists at a carbon content around 0.8%, the eutectoid value. Up to that point ferrite occurs in the microstructure roughly pro rata with the carbon content, whilst beyond 0.8% carbon, cementite is increasingly the phase in equilibrium with the pearlite. You presumably mean that your sword contained 0.6% carbon. (6% is not possible, even in saturated cast irons.) Very crudely, the sword’s microstructure would contain a weight ratio of 2/8 ferrite to 6/8 pearlite, but of course it is a volume ratio which you observe..

If it had been cooled more quickly, perhaps quenched in water, then all sorts of tortured intermediate structures could result, of which martensite is the most famous. Surely, by the era that you are talking about, iron smiths would have known that to get the best performance out of of a steel sword, some sort of heat treatment was necessary and the material would not have been left in what is known as the normalised state?

[Rchard Williams]

Do you not think that you have got enough on the non-Portsmouth visiting Abby to prove the point, Peter?  In fact, surely you already have all you need to put Bulstrode’s thesis into the realms of strong doubt.  As you have shown, all the necessary steps leading up to Cort’s inventions were present in England before Reeders Pen was founded, and sugar rolls were nothing like Cort’s rolls.  That’s quite enough to demonstrate that people should not take what she says as gospel and the two instances of her deliberately distorting facts, allied to Candice Goucher’s revelations, is also enough to demonstrate the quality of her scholarship.

I suggest that you should keep it simple.

 

Richard

[Rchard Williams]

I thought that we might find more misquotes from Ms Bulstrode.

[Rchard Williams]

And another thing!!

John Reeder filed a patent in 1786 for improvements in sugar processing, see attached.

I wonder why he did not patent any improvement in iron processing that his workers invented?

 

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[Rchard Williams]

I have to agree that there is nothing to prove that John Cort did not know Henry Cort, nor ever will be, but her statements do not constitute proof of a connection between John and Henry.  But Cort is quite a rare name, so they could well have been closely related.  It is not a particularly germane to the argument however and there is a wider context here that nobody (including Bullstrode) seems have not considered.

It must actually have been pretty common knowledge amongst the iron industry in Britain what was going on at the Reeder ‘foundry’.  Knowledgable white artificers were coming and going, Reeder and his workers would have sent and received letters, reports would have got back via the navy about the repairs they could now get in Jamaica and the iron works that provided them.  The knowledge would have been disseminated around the industry and any new technique would have been widely discussed.  Why keep it secret?  There was no competition in Jamaica.

Furthermore John Reeder does not seem to have tried to interest iron masters here about any new technology after he was forced to destroy the works in Jamaica.

[Rchard Williams]

Whilst waiting in the labs at Warwick University to be able to pickle bits of Peter Crew’s and my cast iron cooking pots for carbon and sulphur analysis, I idly put together a tabular refutation of Jenny Bullstrode’s thesis, see attached.

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[Rchard Williams]

Thanks once again, Ray, a terrific clarification.  Tall induced-draft furnaces in Africa naturally produced a steel, albeit perhaps one not enormously rich in carbon.  With the import of high quality bar iron from Sweden, the Africans had to learn that softer iron was useful for different purpose I guess, just as steel and bar iron coexisted in Europe.

Interestingly, the principal use of ‘lesser quality’ iron (ie higher in phosphorus) in Britain was in nail making, which was a very large part of the European iron market.  I wonder what the Africans used for nails?  Perhaps they did not have such a demand for such things.

[Rchard Williams]

I have just sat through an hour of blood-boiling lecture by Jenny Bulstrode (Greg Denning Lecture 2021) in which she verbalises the paper.

The points that stand out as new.

1.  She says that prior to Cort’s work nobody recycled iron in Britain, it was cheaper to make it from new!!!!!

2.  She actually showed a contemporary picture of sugar rolls, see attached.  Grooves definitely longitudinal.

Nobody queried her argument directly, although the chairman asked her about the difference in quality between African and Swedish iron.  She waffled.  Somebody did ask if anybody had challenged her thesis in the time since she wrote the paper, and she said yes, but she did not clarify.  She also said something about a more technical paper being produced since her initial one.  I think that the one we have all been talking about must be the one she means.  Technical indeed!

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[Rchard Williams]

Ray,

Super work again.  This Candice Goucher seems quite an expert on the Reeder ‘foundry’.  She is a serious prof at the Washington State University and has written a lot about the issue.  There is a report on line about a preliminary excavation that she made in the 1990s, but I have not yet found a follow up.

At no point does she make any claims about a rolling mill being present.  She did find what she called iron slag, but that was to be analysed.  It could be waste from a foundry remelting operation, from forging or be blast furnace or bloomery slag.

She makes no claim about forge hammers and recycling of wrought iron is not mentioned either.  Other reports on the works emphasise that there were other metals besides iron being worked, particularly copper base and lead.  Many seem to claim that it was essentially a remelting foundry.  The Goucher reference to making boilers presumably means they cast large three legged cauldrons and part of one of these was found in the excavations.

Goucher implies that she has studied the Devon archives, so the extra information that Jenny Bulstrode obtained from those regarding reverberatory furnaces, rolling mill and forges seems to me to be a bit suspicious.  Like the ‘deliberate’ misquote of the Abby non-voyage to Portsmouth.  I think that you may be over generous to the paper in suggesting that it should simply cut out the Cort link, but a definitive view could probably only be obtained by a careful study of her references in the Devon archives.

Richard

[Rchard Williams]

As per Paul’s request, attached

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[Rchard Williams]

Chaps,

I have just searched for ‘John Reeder Jamaica’ on my Safari search engine and it brought up a considerable string of these above postings under the Historical Metallurgy website banner.

Does this mean what we put in them is freely available to the general public, or did it just pick up that I had access to them and the view is properly  restricted?

Richard

[Rchard Williams]

Chaps,

If you want to hear/see the lady talking about her paper, search for ‘Greg Denning lecture 2021’.  (I cannot get the link to the U-tube video to paste to this post.)

Richard

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Rchard Williams]

Peter,

I quote from Andrew Roberts Email to me.

‘Derwentcote also once housed a forge used for various processes (as I am sure you probably know). It has not been the focus of our work due to it being almost obliterated in the 19th century and until recently not accessible to the public. However Derwentcote was an early adopter of the Cort process in 1784, albeit it seems to have been adapted and/or abandoned very quickly afterwards.’

Richard

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