My website: books for self-development, Soviet textbooks: https://razgadki-istorii.ru/ Telegram: https://t.me/razgadki Boosti: https://boosty.to/razgadki *** Version on the Unofficial History channel: • Metallurgy of the past, a complete explanation... *** We will share our observations about the blast furnace: The blast furnace is really huge, and once it was even bigger, this can be seen from the remains of the walls on both sides of the furnace. The blast furnace is reinforced with metal rods, this is done because this is an industrial building, during operation, the blast furnace is subject to increased vibration loads from the operating mechanisms. In addition, ties are needed because the furnace heats up during operation, the brick expands and to compensate for temperature deformations, such buildings are reinforced with metal. A river flows nearby, on which there was a dam, hammers and other mechanisms of the blast furnace worked from the water. Now the dam has been repaired, so to speak, with pieces of concrete and walls that were simply thrown into the riverbed. There is a two-story brick building next to the blast furnace. Local residents said that in this building there was a club and a cinema in Soviet times. They even added 4 columns to it, but then the building was abandoned. On old plans, this building is indicated as residential. However, this building has very thick walls reinforced with ties. We can assume that this building also housed some mechanisms related to production. Pieces of molten metal and slag are found everywhere in the rooms of this building. Let's conduct a detailed analysis of the blast furnace. The dating of the blast furnace raises questions. We think that this furnace can safely be added 200 or even 500 years, the blast furnace has very old masonry made of natural stone. The diameter of the furnace at the bottom is about 4 meters. Blast furnace production is round the clock and has not stopped for several years or even decades. Just imagine what volumes of ore and coal are needed for the continuous operation of a furnace of this scale. This ore and coal must be continuously mined, transported and loaded into the blast furnace. There were no official railways before, so was all this transported on carts and horses? If the iron ore was nearby, practically at hand, then the issue with coal is not entirely clear. Usually blast furnaces run on coke or anthracite. It is not clear where they got the huge volumes of anthracite or coke in the Ryazan region, which have not yet been officially invented. There is brown coal in the Ryazan region, but it is not suitable for smelting metal. In the blast furnace itself, we found coal resembling anthracite. It is not clear how long it lies in the blast furnace. It is also not clear from the available official data how long the blast furnace worked, since in the description of the blast furnace for the 19th century, historians focus on the machine-building plant, and it is not entirely clear whether the blast furnace was operating at the end of the 19th century or was already closed. In another place, right on a country road leading to the Vyatichi settlement, which dates back to the 12th century, we found coal. Where it came from - we do not know. We can assume that there was a metallurgical furnace in the settlement, to which coal was transported, and what we found spilled during transportation. In the settlement, we found a large number of bricks in one of the pits. We have our own version of the appearance of the settlement and its dating - there will be a separate film about this. Judging by the fact that we found coal in 2 places, perhaps coal was mined in the Ryazan region at one time, but now there is no information about this. If you know anything about this, write in the comments. Another important question - why was a huge blast furnace built in a small village? Where was the huge amount of smelted metal spent? Earlier it was said that in Kolentsy there was a needle factory, did all the metal produced really go to needles? From the historical background, we learned that in addition to the blast furnace, there is a machine-building plant in Istye, and this plant began producing rails, wheels and other railway equipment in 1874. Why was a railway built to this plant? And what did this machine-building plant do before that? Was it really true that the huge blast furnace in Istye only produced metal for needles for over 150 years, and that the remaining metal was made into ingots and sold somewhere further? We came to the conclusion that the blast furnace was originally built to supply metal to the machine-building plant, which had long been producing rails and railway equipment. Then the construction of a blast furnace in a small village can be explained. If the enterprise produced rails and railway equipment,