the.com/pig iron
raw, brittle, carbon-stuffed iron that's basically steel's awkward unrefined teenager
means Crude iron fresh from the blast furnace, loaded with carbon and impurities, brittle and good only as the raw stock for making steel or cast iron.
from The name comes straight from the foundry floor. Molten iron was run off the furnace into a branching network of sand channels: a long central trough feeding a row of smaller side moulds. To the workers it looked like a litter of piglets suckling at a sow — the main channel was the 'sow,' and the chunky cast bars feeding off it were the 'pigs.' So 'pig iron' is purely a barnyard metaphor for the shape of the cooled metal, dating to the early days of iron founding.
- name origin
- molds resembled piglets nursing on a sow
- too brittle
- snaps under stress, useless until refined
- carbon heavy
- contains up to 4.5 percent carbon
- steel's parent
- nearly all steel begins as pig iron
- blast furnace
- born at temperatures past 1500 Celsius
blast furnace output — primary iron product from smelting ore at ~1200°c, containing 3-5% carbon
henry bessemer's invention — his converter (1856) revolutionized pig iron into steel by blowing air through molten metal