Chapter CXXV – Behold, how great a coke a little dwarf maketh!

57th of Autumn 5859
Libertycave, Mount Curry

Bilal had seen many an odd thing during his life. Maid cafes, strange otherworlders, catgirls… Today, however, he was holding something stranger than all of the aforementioned: “Cooked coal?” Next to him were workers from the copperworks, who were equally fascinated by the strange rock.

“Yes, ‘cooked coal’, or coke for short.” Whitebeard was holding a grayish rock, like coal but paler, showing it off proudly to her new coworker. “You’ve been using charcoal, right? Coke is like that, except you burn coal instead of wood to make it.” Of course, even if she was a dwarf with much experience and wisdom, Whitebeard had no way to know the chemical process behind coke. They weren’t burning coal to make coke – they were burning the organic substances that came with coal (such as water) in the absence of air (similar to charcoal being wood burnt in the absence of air), leaving behind coke.

“I can get what you’re trying to do, but…” Bilal vaguely gestured at the lines upon lines of coke ovens that the dwarves had built right outside of the copperworks “All of this, just to burn coal? That ‘coke’ you’re holding, it just looks like a lump of ash.”

“Peh. That’s why I don’t like dealing with humans.” Whitebeard conspicuously tugged on her great white beard “You see this beard? I was smithing before your grand-grandparents were even a twinkle in your grand-grand-grandparents’ eyes. Have some respect for your elders, won’t you?”

“Apologies, ma’am.” Bilal could already feel his head ache from dealing with dwarves. “So, what do we do with these?”

“Patience, I was about to get to that. With these, we can make steel. Not the sad lump of pig iron that you presented to me as ‘steel’ a week ago, I mean actual, genuine, strong dwarven steel.” With the mention of steel, a gang of dwarves suddenly gathered around Whitebeard as she pointed at a structure that had been ominously standing behind them “Now, behold: a blast furnace!”

Bilal, and the workers at the copperworks, had of course not been ignorant of the odd structure that the dwarves had been constructing right in his backyard. They had been watching dwarves hard at work, cooking bricks and stacking bricks every single day without a pause. Bilal had thought that maybe this structure was some sort of housing, it seemed too large and tall to be a furnace, but it seemed that he was wrong (unless “blast furnace” was dwarven slang for “house”).

Whitebeard stepped aside to proudly show off the dwarven structure “The ‘house of pigs’ as we call it, because it produces pig iron like no other.”

“Pig iron?” Bilal shuddered “You put pigs in your iron?”

“No, no- I am impressed that you people managed to produce a bar of ‘steel’ with such little knowledge of metalmaking. Really, you did an excellent job despite your inexperience, mixing coal and iron until you got something resembling steel.” Whitebeard took a little bar of whitish gray, grainy metal that had been thrown right next to the blast furnace. “This, this is pig iron. You pour in some coke, limestone and iron from the top of that furnace, blow some air through the bottom with the bellows, and voila, you get this.” She promptly broke the little bar with no effort “As you can see, it is essentially useless for anything.”

Bilal found a bar of pig iron too, and with little effort, it snapped in his hands. “We had such brittle metal come out when we tried to make steel too. I assume it has some sort of use if you built such a giant furnace to make it.”

“Yes, we dwarves would never make something useless. Thankfully your copperworks has the other half of what we need to make steel: bloomeries and crucibles. The iron we produce there is what we’d call ‘wrought iron’, since you have to work to beat the iron out of the slag that comes out of the bloomery. Most human smiths stop here and work wrought iron into tools, weapons, whatever else they need.”

“We haven’t had much iron come around these parts, what little we have here we’ve made into smithing tools to help with the copperworks.” Bilal himself had a pair of iron hammers that he was quite proud of.

“Wrought iron is good enough for most things, I have to admit. However, if you want something that’ll put a clean cut through your enemies, or prevent your enemies from putting a clean cut on you, you’ll want some good dwarven steel.” Whitebeard had been slowly marching over to a clay crucible that had been dragged outside by the dwarves. “Now, guess what happens when we mix wrought iron and pig iron in a crucible?”

“Uhm, since pig iron seems brittle, we’d get something even worse?” replied Bilal.

“Wrong. You get steel, stronger than wrought iron.” Whitebeard’s hand slid towards the steel dagger sheathed on her waist, a fine example of the metal. “Don’t ask me how this works, the finest dwarven minds have racked their brains for centuries on how adding a weaker metal results in a stronger metal. We have yet to figure it out.”

Unfortunately for the finest dwarven minds, they’d have to crack modern chemistry (far from possible with pre-modern technology) to figure out the fact that steel is an alloy of carbon and iron. The dwarven method was simple if one was to look from that modern angle: Wrought iron doesn’t contain enough carbon, pig iron contains too much carbon, mixing both results in an iron alloy that contains just the right amount of carbon (a.k.a. steel) which makes it stronger and more resistant than wrought iron. Pig iron has a lower melting point (due to it having a weaker structure), while wrought iron is normally impossible to melt in a charcoal or coal-powered crucible. However, coke burns hotter than either, meaning that it is possible to mix both alloys to create steel easily without going through the many troubles that smiths on Gemeinplatz and Earth had to go through to get the alloys to mix together. The dwarven method was quite ingenious – especially the substitution of coke for charcoal, which’d take until the 18th century on Earth to become widespread.

“I guess it’s like mixing tin and copper to make bronze” concluded Bilal after pausing to think “Metals sure are mysterious.”

Whitebeard smiled at her new coworker “That’s why I love them. Metallurgy isn’t seen as magic, but I think it should be.” She cleared her throat, it was sore after all that talk, and looked at all the copperworkers around her “That was more than enough talk, I think. I can see that you are all eager to upgrade from copperwork to steelwork, and that won’t happen just by listening to me talk. I have a bunch of dwarves here ready to take on apprentices. Let us get to work!”

With that the copperworks, or soon to be the former copperworks, gained liveliness as the copperworkers mingled with the dwarves to find themselves a suitable role in the steelmaking process. Liberty would be built on strong foundations – not brittle copper, but sturdy steel.