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Smelting, process by which a metal is obtained, either as the element or as a simple compound, from its ore by heating beyond the melting point, ordinarily in the presence of oxidizing agents, such as air, or reducing agents, such as coke. The first metal to be smelted in the ancient Middle East was probably copper (by 5000 bc), followed by tin, lead, and silver. To achieve the high temperatures required for smelting, furnaces with forced-air draft were developed; for iron, temperatures even higher were required. Smelting thus represented a major technological achievement. Charcoal was the universal fuel until coke was introduced in 18th-century England; meanwhile, the blast furnace had achieved a high state of development.

  • Worker with molten copper.
    Charles O’Rear/Corbis

In modern ore treatment, various preliminary steps are usually carried out before smelting in order to concentrate the metal ore as much as possible. In the smelting process a metal that is combined with oxygen—for example, iron oxide—is heated to a high temperature, and the oxide is caused to combine with the carbon in the fuel, escaping as carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide. Other impurities, collectively called gangue, are removed by adding a flux with which they combine to form a slag.

In modern copper smelting, a reverberatory furnace is used; concentrated ore and a flux, commonly limestone, are charged into the top, and molten matte—a compound of copper, iron, and sulfur—and slag are drawn out at the bottom; a second heat treatment, in another (converter) furnace, is necessary to remove the iron from the matte.

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...4th millennium bce. The reasons for this change are unknown but may in part relate to the depletion of surface ore deposits. At this early state, the technique of copper manufacture consisted of smelting in an open one-faced mold and hammering. Later, when copper of different compositions from deeper deposits was used, the properties of copper in combination with other metals were explored....
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Perhaps 1,000 years after humans learned about melting virgin copper, they found that still another stone, a brittle one directly useless for tools, would produce liquid copper if sufficiently heated while in contact with charcoal. This step was epoch making, for it was the discovery of smelting, or the separation of a metal from a chemical compound called ore. Smelting, as differentiated from...
Smelting is a process that liberates the metallic element from its compound as an impure molten metal and separates it from the waste rock part of the charge, which becomes a molten slag. There are two types of smelting, reduction smelting and matte smelting. In reduction smelting, both the metallic charge fed into the smelter and the slag formed from the process are oxides; in matte smelting,...
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