Joseph Hall (1789–1862), the inventor of 'Wet Puddling', was born in 1789 and apprenticed in 1806 as a puddler to use

Henry Cort Henry Cort (c. 1740 – 23 May 1800) was an English ironware producer although formerly a Navy pay agent. During the Industrial Revolution in England, Cort began refining iron from pig iron to wrought iron (or bar iron) using innovative producti ...

's puddling process. He tried adding old iron to the charge of the

puddling furnace Puddling is the process of converting pig iron to bar (wrought) iron in a coal fired reverberatory furnace. It was developed in England during the 1780s. The molten pig iron was stirred in a reverberatory furnace, in an oxidizing environment, ...

and later puddler's bosh cinder (iron scale, that is rust) to the charge. This caused the charge (to his surprise) to boil violently. When this subsided he gathered the iron into a puddle ball in the usual way, and this proved to be good iron. In 1830, with the financial support of others he established the Bloomfield Ironworks at

Tipton Tipton is an industrial town in the West Midlands in England with a population of around 38,777 at the 2011 UK Census. It is located northwest of Birmingham. Tipton was once one of the most heavily industrialised towns in the Black Country, w ...

, the firm becoming Bailey, Barrows and Hall in 1834. In 1838, he patented the use of 'bulldog' (roasted tap cinder) to protect the iron bottom plate of the

(Patent no.7778 21 August 1838). In 1849, he moved to small house at Handsworth but continued to visit the works occasionally. He died there in 1862.

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