🔥The Greats

For Hampton Court's river garden Tijou produced a screen of twelve monumental wrought-iron panels, dense with masks, thistles, fleurs-de-lis and acanthus — repoussé work in iron that few smiths since have matched. The crown was a slow payer, and records show large sums owed him for years after the work was done. After about 1712 he disappears from English records entirely: the greatest ironworker England had employed left no known grave, portrait or documented death.

For the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, completed in 1924, Yellin's Arch Street studio forged roughly 200 tons of ironwork — gates, grilles, lanterns and tellers' screens — probably the largest decorative wrought-iron commission ever executed in the United States. When the Depression dried up building work, he kept his best craftsmen on the payroll forging one-off study pieces with no client at all, work now held by museums; he called the shop his laboratory and refused to let the skill disperse.

At Helfštýn, a ruined castle in Moravia, Habermann was among the masters who from the early 1980s built an annual metalworkers' meeting into Hefaiston — now the largest blacksmithing gathering in the world, drawing hundreds of demonstrating smiths and thousands of visitors behind medieval walls each August. In a communist Czechoslovakia with little room for ornamental craft, a castle courtyard full of forges became the place an isolated trade re-taught itself, with Habermann demonstrating at the anvil.

Brim's signature came from a question nobody at the anvil had thought to ask: can steel be inflated? She forge-welds two sheets shut around their edges, brings the sealed envelope to forging heat, and blows it up with compressed air so the metal balloons like pastry — producing steel pillows soft enough in appearance that viewers reach out to touch them. Developed at Penland, the "pillow" method is now taught internationally and widely known simply as Brim's technique.

Woodall began work in 1913, three years after around 800 women chainmakers of Cradley Heath — organised by the union leader Mary Macarthur — won a ten-week strike that roughly doubled their pay under Britain's first minimum-wage law, the Trade Boards Act. She went on forging chain at an open hearth through two world wars and into the machine-chain era, retiring only in 1969; by then oral historians and folk musicians were recording her, and her recollections became a key record of the vanished trade.

After Bowie died at the Alamo in 1836, everyone on the frontier wanted "a knife like Bowie's," and Black's blades commanded premium prices — until 1839, when a brutal beating by his former father-in-law left him nearly blind and ended his career. Decades later, old and sightless in the home of Daniel Webster Jones, a future Arkansas governor, Black finally sat down to dictate his secret forging and tempering process — and discovered the memory was gone. Jones recorded his despair: the secret died in that room.

In June 1842 a Glasgow newspaper reported a "gentleman from Dumfries-shire" on a velocipede "of ingenious design" who had ridden some seventy miles into the city, knocked over a small girl in the crowd, and was fined five shillings — by tradition, the world's first bicycle traffic offence. Bicycle historians identify the rider as Macmillan, but the report names nobody, which is exactly why his claim to the invention, assembled decades later by a campaigning relative, is still argued over.