Metallurgy & Smelting

An English translation of a work by Georgius Agricola (Georg Bauer) published in 1556 on the metallurgy and art of mining, refining, and smelting metals.

Elsewhere, you can view the full text of the original 1556 edition or Bern Dibner's introduction and translation .

A great many things we take for granted cannot be done efficiently, or at all, without appropriate metal tools. Advances in technology have very often depended on advances in metallurgy.

Concerned with the investigation of all aspects of the metallurgical process, from smelting to metal finishing, and from the first use of alloys in the 5th/4th millennia BC to the Industrial Revolution.

Summaries of lectures on smelting practices.

An attempt to reproduce the lead reduction method of smelting silver, as described in classical, medieval, and renaissance sources on pyrometallurgy.