Iron has been used for about 4000 years; it was essential to the industrial revolution and is still the principal metal of commerce.

For centuries ironmaking was a manual craft, but with the invention of the blast furnace in the fifteenth century it became possible to produce iron on a large scale. Further technological developments in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries meant that the scale of production developed rapidly and that new types of iron were introduced; one of these, steel, has largely superseded other forms.

This book describes how iron and steel have been made from earliest times to the 20th century, and includes a gazetteer of ironworking sites and other places of interest.