Critical to the development of the industrial might of the United States was the development of an iron-making industry as good as or better than any in the world. Development of the capacity to make wrought iron of adequate quality and in sufficient quantitities to supply American industries that were making boilers, steam engines, rails, edge tools, arms, structural iron for buildings and ship hulls, was an essential step toward the attainment of industrial maturity in the United States. Yet the capcity to make such wrought iron was not easily acquired. The replacement of iron by steel was well underway before American ironmakers achieved the technological maturity to compete with imports in quality as well as in quantity. Professor Gordon is studying how this technological maturity was achieved through one way of making wrought iron: the bloomery process. He will use archaeometallurgical methods and historical sources to investigate the evolution of American technology for the direct reduction of ore to iron in the 19th century. The research will focus on the American bloomery process practiced in the Adirondack region of New York State because bloom smelting reached its highest level of technological development there. He will utilize the results being obtained by several historians and historical archaeologists now working on the records and physical remains of the iron industry in northwestern New York. The results will be used to show how American ironmasters brought the direct reduction process to a high level of technological maturity through experience, the application of science, and the development of skills by metallurgical artificers. They will also be used in a comparative study of bloom smelting technology in other parts of the world aimed at the resolution of technical questions about alternative ways fo carrying on the direct reduction process now being debated by archaeometallurgists.
