The Little Known Mineral and Chemical History of Iron and A History of Brass by an Eighteenth-Century Technologist, William Lewis (1708–1781)

Abstract

Sometime during the 1920s, Cardiff Public Libraries (later to become Cardiff Central Library) acquired a six-volume handwritten manuscript collection entitled Mineral & Chemical History of Iron. The author of the manuscripts is named as William Lewis. Now uniformly bound in half-leather and cloth boards, this impressive holding provides, in more than a thousand hand-written pages, an early attempt to produce a full-scale treatise in English on the history of iron. This note traces the route by which the collection reached Cardiff, and also presents evidence for the existence of a hitherto unknown work on the history of brass by the same author.