← all shorts

Concept

Bloomery

A glowing star-shaped bloom emerges from a dark, circular furnace, surrounded by smoke and rocks, illustrating a pre-industrial iron-smelting process known as a bloomery.

A pre-industrial iron-smelting furnace that produces a spongy mass of iron and slag — the bloom — without melting the metal. Bloomeries dominated iron production worldwide until the blast furnace displaced them in the late medieval period in Europe, and much later in South Asia. Multiple blooms had to be forge-welded together to make any large object, which is how the Delhi pillar was assembled.

Mentioned in 2 articles