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THE IRON AND STEEL INDUSTRY
IN SWEDEN.
IF AN INDUSTRY in any country with some right may be considered a natural
consequence of natural resources and historical development, this is certainly the case
with the iron and steel industry in Sweden. History does not reach far enough back to
tell the date when iron making was started here. We know for certain that it has
continued for more than two thousand years but certainly it is considerably older, and
consequently that art was known in Sweden long before the beginning of our æra. The
natural resources may also be considered extremely favorable for iron making at that
early period. In almost all parts of the country there are deposits of easily reduced
iron ore in marshes and lakes, deposited by ferruginous water from springs or from
the surface, and the abundant forests supplied the fuel necessary to bring out the iron.
To day we find the marks of this period of iron making in heaps of slags and remnants
of small furnaces of simple construction, totally overgrown with woods and covered
by the moos of centuries. From the way in which these remnants occur it may be judged
that iron making was a kind of domestic industry, at least in several provinces.
With advancing culture iron making has kept step, and to such a degree is it
interwoven with the life of the people, that it is impossible to tell, wether the development
in iron making was a product of advancing culture, or whether this latter was not a
consequence of the advance in the former. One thing is, however, certain, the part
played by the iron industry in the development has been a prominent one and
can hardly be overrated. It furnished the weapons at the critical times when the
freedom of the country was threatened by rapacious neighbours, it has furnished the
ploughs for cultivating the soil, and the iron has for ages been one of the most
prominent articles that Sweden has exported in exchange for products from foreign countries.
At the end of the 18th century Sweden was not only the largest manufacturer,
but also the largest exporter of iron of the world. At that time charcoal was the only
fuel that could be used in blastfurnaces and for the following refining of the pig iron
to malleable iron, and consequently Sweden with its abundant forests and practically
inexhaustible iron mines was in the most favorable condition to compete with other
countries, and finally the purity of the ores and the fuel together with the experience
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