It’s not possible to leave the biography of Henry Burden without relating this wonderful passage, “The Wonders of the Puddling Forge,” which we daresay borders on some sort of gothic pornography:
The chemical elements of pig-iron are such as to render it unfit for any serviceable use in these mills, and it therefore undergoes another process of melting in the puddling furnaces, where it is subject to currents of air and flame while agitated by tools in the hands of the puddler. This manipulation brings it in contact with oxygen, which drives out the carbon in the pig-iron, leaving the metal afterward in a decarbonized condition.
In this temple of Vulcan – the puddling forge – the visitor beholds a scene of stirring activity seldom witnessed elsewhere. Scattered in groups or dispersed singly through this spacious building are hundreds of brawny men, with faces bedewed with perspiration and begrimed with coal dust, nude to their waists, their feet incased in heavy hob-nailed shoes, and their strong hands turning, thrusting, pulling, and piling the molten or fashioned iron in ways innumerable amid the heat, the smoke and the short-lived splendor of a thousand red-hot metallic sparks. Here are sooty-faced men stirring through the open doors of flaming furnaces, glowing incandescent masses of iron that blind one’s eyes with their fervent brilliancy; others again taking great balls of puddled metal from the furnaces in iron buggies and casting them into the devouring jaws of the rotary concentric squeezers, from which, as unpalatable morsels, they are ejected in the shape of compact blooms which are immediately taken up red-hot as they are, and thrust between a pair of revolving cylinders, placed one above the other, and furnished with grooves of various sizes through which the blooms is run forward and backward, until it is shaped into a long bar of crude iron. The bars which have already cooled are then carefully tested by placing the end of each one on an anvil, where it is cut and bent before it receives its classification. These are then carried on cars to a great pair of iron shears, where they are cut as if they were ribbon, into pieces about three feet in length. These pieces, a number of them called “a pile,” are again placed in furnaces, where they are reheated and again taken out and passed through the roll-trains, whence they issue, like long fiery serpents, in narrow bars, and passed to the horseshoe machines.
Want to know more about Henry Burden? Just follow these links:
- The Nail Factory
- The Nail Factory Cemetery
- The Immense Iron Mills of Henry Burden
- What Burden’s Works Looked Like
- Mr. Burden’s Water Wheel
- Henry Burden
- Behold Henry Burden’s Horseshoe Machine
- The Wonders of the Puddling Forge