IRON, Chromium and Manganese IRON Iron is one of the world's workhorse elements, found in most of the structures we make, from bridges and skyscrapers to computers and fencing wire. Iron is cheap to obtain, easy to shape and very strong. For all these reasons it is used more widely than any other metal. But it was not always so. Although the first use of iron dates back some three thousand years to the period of archaeology called the Iron Age, until the last century iron was difficult to find and work and expensive to use.
Pure iron is a soft silvery-grey metal.
This temperature is much higher than the temperature at which wood burns. Earlier civilisations found iron so difficult to use because they could not produce such high temperatures to work iron. In fact iron has only been widely available since the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries. At this time, inventors like Abraham Darby learned how to obtain large quantities of iron economically using coke. With iron at last cheap and plentiful, the people of the 19th century led the world into the engineering age.