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Wrought Iron Candle Holders

	Modern man is sometime a pretty complacent creature, patting himself on the back for all our miracle achievements, from medicine to the space race. But if you think back over history, you find discoveries and ingenuity that for their time, matches if not outstrips any of our inventions today. For all our computers and silicon chips, the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century brought about many more mechanical and sociological changes. Go back another few hundred years to the Middle Ages and you come upon such wonders as the blast furnace that made the smelting of iron in purified and usable forms, much more common. But even that was not new. For iron had been harvested, melted down and cast by the Chinese around 550B.C. And while they were not imitators, having no contact with the outside world at that time, they too were not the first to plumb the depths of iron’s possibilities. That honor is believed to go to the inhabitants of what was then called Asia Minor, nearly 4,000 years ago. They were the first to use what are called bloomeries, a pit or chimney style smelting furnace, to refine iron ore. These rudimentary furnaces were fueled by charcoal, which the workers had to make in large quantities to burn as hot and long as it took to melt the ore. Charcoal was the one part of the smelting process that survived into the next millennia, still firing furnaces at the time of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century and beyond. The combination of ore and charcoal in the bloomery eventually produced particles of iron that fell to the bottom and formed a bloom.