HKB
a number of skilled English nail-makers into Scotland, and settled them in the village of Camelon, where, by teaching others, the business has become handed down to the present day.
The first furnace was blown at Carron on the first day of January, 1760; and in the course of the same year the Carron Iron Works turned out 1500 tons of iron, then the whole annual produce of Scotland. Other furnaces were shortly after erected on improved plans, and the production steadily increased. Dr. Roebuck was indefatigable in his endeavours to improve the manufacture, and he was one of the first, as we have said, to revive the use of pit-coal in refining the ore, as appears from his patent of 1762. He there describes his new process as follows:--"I melt pig or any kind of cast-iron in a hearth heated with pit-coal by the blast of bellows, and work the metal until it is reduced to nature, which I take out of the fire and separate to pieces; then I take the metal thus reduced to nature and expose it to the action of a hollow pit-coal fire, heated by the blast of bellows, until it is reduced to a loop, which I draw out under a common forge hammer into bar-iron." This method of manufacture was followed with success, though for some time, as indeed to this day, the principal production of the Carron Works was castings, for which the peculiar quality of the Scotch iron admirably adapts it. The well-known Carronades,[2] or "Smashers," as they were named, were cast in large numbers at the Carron Works. To increase the power of his blowing apparatus, Dr. Roebuck called to his aid the celebrated Mr. Smeaton, the engineer, who contrived and erected for him at Carron the most perfect apparatus of the kind then in existence. It may also be added, that out of the Carron enterprise, in a great measure, sprang the Forth and Clyde Canal, the first artificial navigation in Scotland. The Carron Company, with a view to securing an improved communication with Glasgow, themselves surveyed a line, which was only given up in consequence of the determined opposition of the landowners; but the project was again revived through their means, and was eventually carried out after the designs of Smeaton and Brindley.