To make iron you start with iron ore .
Iron ore is nothing more than rock that happens to contain a high concentration of iron.
One thing that gave certain countries an edge between the 15th and 20th centuries was the availability of iron ore deposits. For example, England, the U.S., France, Germany, Spain and Russia all have good iron ore deposits. Usually you find these minerals mixed into rocks containing silica. You can see in the previous section that all of the iron ores contain iron combined with oxygen. To make iron from iron ore, you need to eliminate the oxygen to create pure iron.