Introduction

The development of the technologies firstly of iron and then of steel was of crucial importance to the industrial revolution of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The industrial revolution began nearly 300 years ago and within a few decades had changed people's lives in Western Europe and North America more profoundly than has happened at any other period in history. One material, iron, and its derivative, steel, made that revolution possible.

Iron has been produced on a small scale since prehistoric times.

Iron was not a new material in the eighteenth century. It had first been produced over 2,500 years before when the bronze age turned into the iron age. Around 600 BC in China the technology of cast iron was highly developed. In the West iron was worked and refined by hand craftsmen, who eventually could manufacture superbly complex, but basically only small scale artefacts, like Henry VIII's armour or Charles II's pocket watch.

To make very large structures in iron or steel it is necessary firstly to manufacture the materials on an industrial scale and secondly to have techniques for effectively jointing components together.

The great breakthrough achieved by the revolutionaries of the late 18th century was to make iron in large quantities. When individual components could be joined together rigidly, then constructions of a previously inconceivable scale were possible. Two easily remembered dates fix the time span: 1777 and 1888. In 1777 over the River Severn at Ironbridge, a bridge was constructed that for the first time used large scale sections of cast iron. Just over a century later, in 1888, Gustav Eiffel constructed his tower in Paris, and Benjamin Baker the railway bridge over the Firth of Forth in Scotland. Today, both are still regarded as memorable examples of how huge edifices could be assembled from thousands of separate pieces of iron or steel once a technique was available for connecting them together.

This section is concerned with the development of jointing techniques for iron and steel.

This section looks at the development of jointing, beginning with Ironbridge, progressing through the 19th century, and coming up to the present day, when steel is one of the most potent contemporary architectural symbols. It illustrates how changes in available jointing technology fundamentally influenced the character and appearance of buildings and how architects and designers were able to use the new technical equipment to produce buildings that reflected the changing values of the society that built them.