Lecco, let to Antonio Missaglia, the greatest Milanese armourer of his day, the woods and iron mines in the mountains hard by.[1] In 1498 there were iron works and also a manufactory of armour and artillery at Vogogna[2] on the road from the Lago Maggiore to the Simplon, and mines and forges existed in the Valsesia, the Valle di Macagno, and at Salasca,[3] all in the neighbourhood of that lake.
We may learn something of the way in which the iron, when obtained, was converted into steel for the armourer's use from an account of the old Catalan forges contained in an address on the Manufacture and uses of Steel, read by Sir Henry Bessemer at the Cutlers' Hall in 1880. "It may be instructive to pause just sufficiently to get a glimpse at the system of manufacture as pursued by the artificers in steel of that period when the Bilbao, the Andrew of Ferrara, and the famous Toledo blades were manufactured; for perhaps at no period of the history of steel was the skill of the workman more necessary, or more conspicuously displayed. The small Catalan forges used for the production of iron and steel at that period were scattered throughout the Spanish Pyrenees and the Southern Provinces of France. The ores selected by the manufacturer were either the brown or red hematites or the rich spathose ores still found so abundantly in Bilbao. This small blast furnace, some two feet only in height, was blown by bellows formed of the untanned skins of animals, trodden on alternately by the foot, the fuel being exclusively charcoal. It is important to remember that the ore reduced to the metallic state in the Catalan furnaces never becomes sufficiently carburetted to admit of its fusion, as is the case in all the blast-furnaces in use at the present day, but, on the contrary, the metal sinks down through the burning charcoal to the lowest part of the furnace where the lumps of reduced ore agglutinate and form an ill-shaped coherent mass, the various portions of which are more or less perfectly carburetted, so that while some portions of the lump might be classed as soft iron, other parts have passed through every grade of carburation from the mildest to the hardest and most refractory steel. The mass of metal thus formed, and weighing from 40 to 60 lb., is removed by simply pulling down a portion of the front of the furnace. It is then taken by the workman to the anvil, where it is cut into smaller pieces and sorted for quality; those portions judged by the workman to resemble each other most nearly are put together and, after re-heating, are welded into a rough bar. This again is cut into short lengths, which are piled together, welded and drawn out. By these successive operations the several thick lumps of which the bar was originally composed have been reduced to a number of thin layers, and at each successive heating of the stratified mass, that tendency which carbon has to diffuse itself equally results in the more highly carburetted or harder portions losing some of their carbon, which is absorbed by
