The Puddler

1800 · Puddling Process · Work 361 of 1,871

The Puddler, 1800, Puddling Process

A puddler working a reverberatory furnace in an ironworks, long rabbling bar thrust through the working door into the glowing charge, leather apron and wooden clogs, slag pooling at his feet.

What it was used for
The puddler stood between blast furnace and rolling mill. In the reverberatory furnace, where the coal never touches the iron, he stirred the melt with the rabble until the carbon had burned out; as the bath went pasty he balled it into loops, which were shingled and drawn through grooved rollers. Paul Belford gives charges of 200 to 220 kilograms of pig iron; a skilled South Staffordshire puddler needed about 1,118 kilograms of pig for 1,016 kilograms of puddled bar, a loss of about nine per cent. It was skilled work and it was paid: the Bureau of Labor Statistics gives an average day rate in Pennsylvania in 1860 of $2.34, against $1.68 for an iron moulder and $1.37 for a labourer.
What was new
Refining in a coal-fired reverberatory furnace had been attempted earlier in the 18th century; on Belford's account, however, Cort's patent made older processes such as stamping and potting commercially unviable: the reverberatory furnace freed refining from charcoal without putting the sulphur of coal into the iron, and grooved rollers drew the shingled ball out into bars. The British patents No. 1351 (1783) and No. 1420 (1784) describe this. Cort was not alone: in September 1783, between his two patents, Peter Onions obtained patent No. 1370 for a single-stage process. Cort lost everything all the same, and not to a competitor. His financier Adam Jellicoe, to whom he had assigned the patents as security for 27,000 pounds, died in 1789 a defaulter on navy funds. The Navy Board at once issued processes against the firm of Cort & Jellicoe.

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