Anthracite iron or anthracite pig iron is iron extracted by the smelting together of anthracite coal and iron ore, that is using anthracite coal instead of charcoal in iron smelting. This was an important technical advance in the late-1830s, enabling a great acceleration of the Industrial Revolution in the United States and in Europe.
History
Unlike many seminal advances, the contributors, place and date of this epoch are well recorded within specific moments in the late 1830s. The first repeatable and reliably successful furnaces and smelts were managed by the same person in both the United Kingdom and the United States, in the principal control and supervision of ironmaster David Thomas, who began experimenting with attempts to use locally available Welsh anthracite deposits as early as 1820 soon after he became in charge at Yniscedewin Iron Works in Wales.
Around this 1837-38 timeframe, experiments were also being made in Pennsylvania near Port Carbon and in present-day Jim Thorpe, but with overall better success than in Wales. Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company (LC&N) and their two founders, Josiah White and Erskine Hazard, began systematic experiments to smelt using anthracite in two furnaces in Jim Thorpe in 1832–1837 with intermittent, but sporadically improved successes using cold blast processes with two differently designed furnaces.