“For a long time, steel production was one of the criteria to measure the power and strength of a country. He finally understood the reason for that now.”
Internal thoughts of Roland – Fourth Prince of The Kingdom of Graycastle
Industrial Revolution With a Blast Furnace
Tools are important in any age and when it comes to a fantasy world those tools include swords, spears, armor, canons, and the like. The agricultural industry also benefits from tools like plows, mills. Nails and hammers are critical to the construction industry and coin presses and molds are critical for the economy. All these industries rely on tools and these tools would not be possible without knowledge of metallurgy.
Metallurgy is the study of the properties and purification of metals. With proper tools and knowledge, ore can be transformed into useful homogenous materials like iron or steel. Controlled techniques and proper ratios can turn those materials into useful alloys that have desirable properties like corrosion resistance or increased tensile strength. Let’s focus on one of the most widely used metals – iron.
Iron by itself is a valuable resource and critical to the defense and economic growth of any nation state – this is true in the modern world as well as the fantasy world. Iron combined with carbon creates iron-carbon steel when carbon is less than 2% by weight and pig iron otherwise. With the correct mixture of iron and carbon, a strong, hard, and non-ductile product can be created. Given enough time and skill, a blacksmith could create steel by hand, but it would take a great deal of time and the output would be quite low. I’ll eschew those techniques in favor of discussing the production process of pig iron at scale.
Pig iron – an iron-carbon alloy with high carbon content – is the perfect starting product. If you want to be a merchant, then you’ll have no shortage of customers who would love to buy your pig iron in bulk. If you want to be a warlord, then you’ll need a steady supply of pig iron to produce wrought iron and steel to equip your armies. If you want to be a diplomat, then there is no better negotiating tool than access to a high quality and high output strategic resource. Anyone who has read Release That Witch will know where I’m going with this – “steel is justice”. Fantasy world politics are centered around strength and there is no greater strength than steel. With strength comes the right to determine what is just. Steel is strength and strength is justice therefore “steel is justice”.
Ok, so how do we produce large quantities of pig iron? Well, assuming a steady and uninterrupted supply of iron ore, the answer is the blast furnace. The concept for a blast furnace has been around for thousands of years.
Blast furnace in 7 steps.
- Build a tower with an open top. This tower needs to have thick earthen walls to withstand incredibly high temperatures.
- Stick a pipe into the base of the tower so that it creates an air hole. This is your Tuyere. Connect this pipe to a bellows to force air into the furnace.
- Create an opening into the base of the tower below your Tuyere this will be the exit for the molten slag that you don’t want.
- Create an opening into the base of the tower below and on the opposite side of your slag exit. This will be the exit for the molten pig iron.
- Create a mound of fuel (e.g. coal, charcoal, coke) in the bottom of the tower so that the Tuyere pokes into the center of the mound.
- Start a fire in the mound and operate the bellows to increase the airflow to the fire.
- Alternate tossing iron ore and more fuel in the top of the tower at a consistent rate.
The output of the blast furnace can be increased with the addition of a stove next to it where the hot gasses from fuel combustion are forced through the Tuyere. This is called the hot blast and will vastly reduce the fuel necessary to operate the blast furnace.
Those steps are all that is necessary to start an industrial powerhouse. There are refinements for each of the above steps, but the basic operation of a rudimentary blast furnace will no doubt be a boon. And given the technological level of the fantasy world you are transported into, it could be even more lucrative (and less risky) to simply sell this information to the right people.
And let’s not forget that these same techniques can be used to work with the magic imbued metals like mithril (magic imbued silver), orichalcum (magic imbued gold), adamantite (magic imbued diamond) albeit at different temperatures from iron. So get out there and learn more about how you could bring your future knowledge to bear in a world of swords and magic.
