Volume Twelve - Pre-Victorian to the Present Day - further aspects - The River Ely Iron Ore Wharf . . .

William Menelaus, a manager at Dowlais in the 1850's commented : 'Here is a process which absolutely costs nearly one half of the value of the material operated upon.'

A 1796 description of a typical puddling furnace environment provides a vivid insight : -

'Athletic men, bathed in perspiration, naked from the waist upward, exposed to severe alternations of temperature, some, with long bars, stirring the fused metal through the door of the furnace, whose flaming concavity presented to view a glowing lake of fire - were working like Cyclopes. . .

By continued and violent applications of strength, visible in writhing changes of attitude and contortions of the body, raking backwards and forwards, and stirring round the yielding metal, they contrived to weld together a shapeless mass gradually increasing in size till it became about one hundred pounds weight; this by the simultaneous effort of two men with massive tongs, was dragged out of the furnace, radiant with white heat . . . '

 

Menelaus' Machinery for Straightening Rails - William Menelaus, of Dowlais Ironworks - Patent dated 5th October, 1858. [016]