Tubal-Cain, supposedly about 4000 years B.C., is mentioned in the Bible as an “artificer in iron and brass,” and a wedge of wrought iron was buried in the great pyramid of Cheops probably as early as 3500 B.C. This wedge was recently found and is now the property of the British Museum. The Chinese made use of iron many centuries before the Christian era, but the Assyrians are supposed to have been the first to use the metal on a really extensive scale. [Illustration: THE PILLAR AT DELHI, INDIA ] The much discussed pillar at Delhi, India, which is still standing in a remarkable state of preservation, is twenty-two feet high. It is made up of several wrought iron sections cleverly welded together. As the natives regard it with religious awe, metallurgists have been unable to make thorough investigation and chemical analysis. While the date of its erection is somewhat in doubt, it is supposed to have been about the 4th or 5th century A.D. But from our modern viewpoint those early iron furnaces were queer things. The first were little more than piles of ore and wood or charcoal on the tops of hills where a brisk wind would make a hot fire. Later, with the invention of the crudest of bellows, the smelting was done in small holes in the side of banks of clay, charcoal made from the forest trees being used as fuel. Indeed, some of these types of furnaces still exist and are so operated to-day in neglected districts in Western India and elsewhere, producing their little five to 100 pound balls of iron after several hours of tedious work. When the Romans invaded Britain (now England), they found the Britons making iron in crude furnaces called bloomaries; and not a great deal of improvement, except in size, was made up to Queen Elizabeth’s time, when strict laws had to be enacted to prevent destruction of the forests which were being denuded for production of charcoal, coke, which we know so well, not yet having been produced for fuel. [Illustration: MILADY’S NEEDLE ] [Illustration: THE CATALAN FORGE ] But the real forerunner of our modern blast furnace was the Catalan forge, developed in and named from Catalonia, north Spain, where it originated. The Catalan, however, and all of such crude early furnaces, including those thus far described, produced a variable kind of what we now know as “wrought iron,” and our modern “cast” iron did not appear until about 1350 when, with larger furnaces, an excess of charcoal, with greater heat and other favorable conditions, the Germans found that the pasty, difficultly melting metal could be made to absorb carbon enough to make it easily fusible. _This_ was the secret.