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Iron has been used for about four thousand years; it was essential to the industrial revolution and is still the principal metal of commerce. For centuries ironmaking was a manual craft and only small quantities were made, but in the fifteenth century making iron on a larger scale became possible. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries technology and the scale of production developed rapidly and new types of iron were introduced. One of these, steel, has largely superseded other forms. This book describes how iron and steel have been made from earliest times to the twentieth century.

• Wrought iron dates back at least four thousand years. It is a pure form of iron with a fibrous structure and can be shaped by hammering, squeezing or rolling. Superseded by steel, its production ceased in the 1970s.
• Cast iron, an alloy of iron and carbon, dates from the fifteenth century. To be shaped, it has to be melted and poured into a mould. Iron castings are still widely made and used.
• Steel is now the most widely used and versatile form of iron, and its composition varies. Its mass production was made possible by Henry Bessemer, whose process, introduced in 1856, allowed cast iron to be converted into steel without the use of fuel and enabled steel to be produced in much larger quantities than was possible with wrought iron.