Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c24.22

c24.22

19. The lumps which result from the native furnaces weigh about eleven pounds, and are sold sometimes at the rate of two annas each. They are not, however, all iron, and on bringing them to a welding heat in a forge, a large portion consisting of fused oxide, melts away, and the best lumps I have examined yield only about six pounds of iron, (generally they do not contain more than three pounds). Taking forty rupees a ton as the expense of forging the iron into rought bars by hand hammers, we shall have eighty rupees a ton as the expense of bar iron, made with these diminutive furnaces, which is less than the present market price at Madras of the cheapest English bar iron. In my experimental investigation of the best methods of managing small blast furnaces, not larger than the native ones, I have found that two men can procure in a day’s work of twelve hours forty pounds of crude iron, with an expenditure of half the quantity of charcoal and ore used by the natives. Furnaces of this size offer therefore a cheap, convenient, and ready mode of smelting iron wherever charcoal is abundant.