Late Antique Blast Furnace Found in South Tyrol

[Sean Manning]

My understanding is that if you want to make cast iron a stage in your workflow, you need to design the furnaces accordingly, but many teams who have fired up simple iron smelters a few dozen times have made cast iron by accident. Whereas old theoretical research presented wrought iron, steel, and cast iron as three steps which require increasingly sophisticated furnaces, today with more practical experience we understand that workers were often trying to make soft wrought iron because its easy to forge, and trying not to make cast iron because they were not ready to cast it into anything useful.

Running a low-tech iron furnace is like running a kitchen, sometimes the environment does not cooperate and sometimes the materials are not as desired and there are many different ways to the same result. If all that the kitchen produces is Thai food, that could be all the workers know how to make, or it could be what they are getting paid to make today.