The Many and Various Roles of Manganese in Iron and Steel Production

Manganese oxide and metallic manganese have made a long and varied contribution to the production of iron and steel through the centuries, long before Sir Robert Hadfield’s alloy manganese steel first produced in 1882. Although quite well known empirically, this contribution has sometimes been misunderstood or misrepresented.The success of some of the early so-called ‘natural steels’ was the presence of manganese oxides in the iron ores used.Manganese oxide was already used as a flux from the early days of the production of crucible steel in Asia and it now appears that it was used as a flux from the inception of the otherwise very different later European crucible steel technologies. After the introduction of crucible steel making in Britain in the 18th century, foreign competitors believed that the reason for the success of the processes used at Sheffield was a secret flux and studies on recently discovered 18th century crucibles in Sheffield have shown that process was indeed fluxed with manganese oxide.The function of manganese in the later European crucible steel industry has been rather overshadowed and confused historically by the very different ‘Carburet of manganese’, a strange concoction, patented by Josiah Heath in 1839 added to iron or steel to purify the metal. At the time the chemistry of the process was misunderstood and many acrimonious and inaccurate claims were made, crucially confusing the very different functions of manganese oxide and manganese metal, overshadowing the part already played by manganese oxide for almost a century previously..Finally manganese and its salts played a crucial role in the Bessemer process of steel making.

Indian steel: a forgotten commodity of the great trade routes

Among numerous exotic goods carried along ancient trade routes the so-called Seric iron is one of the most mysterious and least known. According to ancient sources, it was imported from a half-mythical land of Serica. New discoveries in southern India suggest it should be identified with the kingdom of Chera (in modern Tamilnadu) which existed between 300 BC and AD 300. This metal, one type of which was the patterned Damascene steel, was used mainly in the production of high-quality weapons. From about the 3rd century AD local production centers of crucible steel emerged also outside India.