Abstract
AT a meeting of the Newcomen Society held on January 17, Mr. Rhys Jenkins read a paper on “The Reverberatory Furnace with Coal Fuel, 1612–1712”. The term reverberatory, he said, came from the Low Latin “reverbero”, to beat back; to-day, by reverberatory furnace, we mean one in which the material under treatment and the solid fuel are kept apart, and the flame and hot gases from the burning fuel enter the furnace proper at one end and are deflected or beaten down on to the material on the hearth by the roof of the furnace. The earliest account of such a furnace was given by Theophilus the monk, who wrote in the eleventh century. It was used for making glass. Early in the sixteenth century reverberatory furnaces were used in Germany for melting bronze for guns, but Agricola in his “De re metallica” makes no mention of them. The earliest description in the English language of a reverberatory furnace was found in a work published in 1613 by John Rovenson, while the earliest drawing of any value of a coal-burning reverberatory furnace was given by the German metallurgist Schliiter in his “Gründlicher Unterricht von Huttenwerken” of 1738. During the seventeenth century the smelting of lead, copper and iron in reverberatory furnaces was attempted by various individuals at several places; the furnaces being generally without chimneys. An interesting point was when was it recognised that with a closed fireplace the air required for the combustion of the fuel could be drawn through by a chimney. The first record of the use of chimney draught is contained in Glauber's work of 1646 “Furni novi Philosophic!”, translated into English in 1651.
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Early History of the Reverberatory Furnace. Nature 133, 131–132 (1934). https://doi.org/10.1038/133131d0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/133131d0