Iron and steel

Far above the Arctic Circle lies Kiruna, a Swedish city that reveals little at first glance. Yet the wealth, and the very reason for Kiruna’s existence, lies hidden deep underground.

For the construction of the Eiffel Tower for the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris, Gustave Eiffel had to source 7,000 tons of iron, iron he found near Nancy in the French region of Lorraine.

In the second half of the 19th century, iron ore from Lorraine and Luxembourg appeared to be on the decline. When pig iron was converted into steel using the Bessemer process, the result was far too brittle.

Two concrete towers mark the old Tuolluvaara iron ore mine in the Swedish city of Kiruna.

This summer, a 113-year-old wooden church was moved to a new location in the Swedish town of Kiruna, and that has everything to do with the iron and steel that surround us.

Almost 100 years ago, the electric locomotive ADU No. 6 was assembled in the former steelworks of the Aciéries Réunies de Burbach-Eich-Dudelange, better known as Arbed.

In 1937, steel company S.A. d'Ougrée-Marihaye established its central workshops in Ougrée, Belgium. The workshops were strategically located on a railway line between the former Ougrée coking plant and the extinguished Blast Furnace B.

To dispose of blast furnace slag from the Dudelange iron and steelworks, the company utilised a series of slag wagons provided by the German firm Jünkerather Gewerkschaft.

The invention of the Bessemer process in 1856 made large-scale steel production possible, heralding the start of the Second Industrial Revolution.
 

In 1959, an eighty-metre-high blast furnace rose from the ground in Sestao, a municipality about five kilometres from the Spanish port city of Bilbao.