“He gave me a skin-bag flayed from an ox… and therein he bound… the blustering wind”.
Homer, The Odyssey
The ability to extract metals from their ores is one of the most significant discoveries in antiquity. Until the invention of bellows, furnace fires were stoked by breath alone. Teams of men, using blowpipes, would blow on the charcoal to supply the oxygen required to increase its temperature. The teams could achieve temperatures high enough to smelt copper and tin and melt metals such as bronze, silver, and gold.
Bellows improved this process not least because arm and leg power is considerably less exhaustible than lung power. They also enabled much larger furnaces to be used; one man with bellows could generate heat around seventy times faster than one with a blowpipe. A pan found in Talla, Mesopotamia, dated around 2500 B.C.E., is believed to be the earliest evidence of bellows, although they likely predate this. The pan, which held a fire, has a projection with two holes in it, thought to be where bellows were attached. Two bellows were used alternately to generate a continuous a stream of air and maintain the constant temperatures required for smelting.
Another advantage of bellows is that they use ambient air which is higher in oxygen and lower in carbon dioxide and water vapor than exhaled breath. This enabled even higher temperatures, hot enough to smelt iron, to be achieved for the first time but, although required for ancient iron production, the presence of bellows alone does not indicate that iron was in use. It would be another millennium before bellows reached Egypt and later Europe. One thing is clear—a world of possibilities opened up once societies could extract iron from its ore.
