Old iron indeed :-)

[skyking1]

We spent a few days in Ironbridge at the Valley Hotel. The bridge was erected in 1779 and heralded the beginning of the industrial revolution. From the bridges, they saw a way to erect tall buildings of iron and the high rise buildings were born, the beginnings of the skyscrapers.


They could not cast the bridge arches in one piece, as they were estimated to require 10 tons of iron each. Of course handling the brittle 10 ton piece was also beyond what they would likely do so that worked out. They used dovetails and wedges and all sorts of the common woodworking methods to put it together, which gave it enough flexibility to survive the expansion and contraction that they really had not planned for.

 

[skyking1]

The next day we went to dinner and Mark and I walked back to the hotel along the river. We stumbled onto another historic iron bridge, the longest iron railway span at 200' and built in 1864. It carried the rails to the site of the first blast furnace to use coke instead of coal. That was the thing that got iron production really moving.


They had buried that first furnace in rubble and raised the factory over it, or it would have been demolished and lost. They dug it up and preserved it under that A-frame roof.

Darby #1 was directed to the abandoned furnace in 1701, it had blown up after the millpond wall failed and flooded it when hot about 1691. He rebuilt it and started that coke fuel practice.


That 1777 date represents when Darby III enlarged it and started making iron for that bridge above. They made pig iron to take down to the Bedlam Furnaces to cast the bridge parts.
That is the business end of it, where some lucky guy got to break the clay dam and release the 2000 degree iron in his general direction.
Life in the gorge was not too sweet. Life expectancy was about 40. The Darbys were Quaker and did not believe in ostentation, and lived and died in the valley near their workers.
Someone painted what it looked like at night at the gorge.

This is what is left of the top of that furnace. The common practice was to use children to wheelbarrow the loads of coke, iron ore, and limestone and dump them right in the chimney. Children were more plentiful and that was how the apprenticeship worked.

 

[skyking1]

The Coalbrookdale company was among the first to start casting art pieces, and got started at a good time. They created many of the exhibits at the Grand Exposition in 1850. This piece was exhibited there, then moved to a town where it was displayed for many years and then lost out back in the sheds. If it had been found, it may have been melted down for the war efforts.

 

[skyking1]

This massive hollow casting shows off the complicated jobs they did here.

 

[skyking1]

I like this 45 ft plus long iron truss, made up of all those different elements in compression and tension.

 

[DMiller]

Where we are now MO Hwy 19 runs N-S, it follows a old Trail called the Old Iron Road that brought Pig Iron from Steelville MO to the MO River. Between Steelville and St. James MO is Meramec Spring State Park, that is where a huge Raw Iron Ore deposit was found and a massive Iron Foundry constructed. Much was left to go back to nature as the Iron depleted and demand waned with the Old Iron Road no longer necessary due to Rail Road construction. The State Park has cleaned up much of the area but left the machinery laying about as when the site was abandoned. It is also the site of a Large State Trout farm, Meramec River begins here and is spring or runoff fed from here to the Mississippi. Trout do not get that far yet makes a great fisherman's retreat zone. My Cousin from SLC is size reference.

 

[OzDozer]

It never ceases to amaze me how they managed to move these massive weights in the days of horses and carts and wooden bridges! Steam traction engines didn't come into being until the 1850's, so the motive power for moving all these huge early castings must have been horses or bullocks or mules. Heavy haul trailers must have been wooden-framed? Craneage must have been multiple pulleys and blocks and hemp rope?

 

[Shimmy1]

Mankind has been doing the impossible since the pyramids. I think in some ways we were better off as a society when things had to be done the hard way. That being said, I still won't give up my hydraulic excavator, skidsteer, forklift, heated shop, or cordless tools.