Puddling Arrives in Scotland. The late 1830s saw malleable ironworks open in North Lanarkshire at Calderbank and Dundyvan. This was more than 50 years after the invention of puddling. After all, Henry Cort had held demonstrations of his new process in Edinburgh as early as 1784.

Each puddler worked at an individual puddling furnace, manipulating a ball of molten iron under intense heat. When ready, the ball of iron would be beaten using a shingling hammer to remove impurities. Roller – rolling mills were used to flatten and shape iron and steel to make bars, angles and plates. The iron rollers fed iron between ...

Schematic drawing of a puddling furnace. Puddling is the process of converting pig iron to bar (wrought) iron in a coal fired reverberatory furnace. It was developed in England during the 1780s. The molten pig iron was stirred in a reverberatory furnace, in an oxidizing environment to burn the carbon, resulting in wrought iron. [1]

The most reliable evidence about the spread of the puddling process is that collected by Charles Hyde. He reckons that only four works are puddling when Cort's business collapses in 1789. There is Cort's plant at Fontley, which is puddling successfully using old cast iron recovered from the Navy.

Puddling was a method of turning pig iron into much more malleable wrought iron. It was invented by Henry Cort but perfected by Richard Crawshay at Cyfarthfa in the 1790s. The puddler stirred the molten metal in a puddling furnace with an iron bar, working in conditions of tremendous heat and agitating the metal as it boiled and then gathering ...