Iron
Iron is often more brittle than steel. Iron ore is mined. The United States, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, India, South Africa, and Sweden. Russia and Ukraine have a lot of ore. Ore comes from grades varying from 20-70%. Iron is made by refining iron ore to a point where it reaches 90 to 95% purity. Refining has been achieved in a number of ways through the centuries, dating back as far as the 2nd millennium BC. The most used way of refining iron ore is using a blast furnace.

Until 1870, very little steel was produced either in the United States or in the rest of the world. Iron was the end product, and it had a multiplicity of uses. Perhaps the greatest use was in making railroad rails and railroad car wheels. Because most buildings were relatively small and made from stone, brick, or wood, construction iron was used only to a limited extent until the era of cast-iron architecture, beginning in the late 1800s and ending in the latter part of the 19th century, when steel became the primary structural material for large buildings. Iron also had significant uses in the form of nails and wire, pipe, ordnance, hardware, and small machine parts and in sheets plated with tin, which were used for food containers.

With the advent of steel most manufactured iron came to be used as the prime raw material for steelmaking, and that remains its principal application today. Blast-furnace iron that is not converted into steel may be used in foundries to produce castings of such items as water and drainage pipe, construction and heavy machinery parts, and a variety of small parts for the railroad and automobile industries. Iron can also be recycled.

Steel
Steel is made from iron ore. The two industries of steel is nonintegrated and integrated. An integrated steel company would convert iron ore into steel. A nonintegrated steel company would melt steel scraps into liquid steel to sell or make things out of.

Blast-furnace iron contains about 4% carbon, up to 1% of both manganese and silicon, and much smaller but still significant amounts of phosphorus and sulfur. In the steelmaking process most of the carbon is oxidized along with virtually all the silicon and much of the manganese. Phosphorus and sulfur, which can be detrimental to steel quality, must also be reduced. With few exceptions, however, manganese is always added to refined steel to increase its strength and ductility. Where there are special performance requirements, a variety of alloys--such as nickel, chromium, molybdenum, and vanadium--are also added during the production process.

Steel, which is the result of the refining process, can be defined as relatively pure iron containing less than 1% carbon. Although steel has been known for centuries, its production was extremely limited until the invention of the Bessemer process in the late 1850s. Before that time steel was produced in small containers called crucibles or by a process that consisted of placing iron bars in a charcoal furnace. In the crucible process molten iron was mixed with charcoal and refined in a refractory-lined pot. Production was so limited that the amounts of steel produced were measured in pounds. Statistics from 1860 record some 11,000 tons of steel produced in the United States, compared to almost a million tons of iron produced in the same year. Steel, too, can be recycled.