But much like salt or for that matter glass, iron remains one of those materials whose production, archaic and industrial as it might often seem, turns out to provide the bedrock for the world as we know it. Steel may seem like a technology of the past, but it remains a thing of the present and a substance without which we cannot construct the future. Having said all of that, witnessing its production today nonetheless feels like a journey back in time, into the Middle Ages.
