Page 4 - Curriculum Visions Dynamic Book

An element is a substance that cannot be broken down into a simpler substance by any known means. Each of the 92 naturally occurring elements is therefore one of the fundamental
materials from which everything in the Universe is made. This book is about iron, chromium and manganese.
Iron
Iron is one of the world’s workhorse elements, found in most of the structures we make, from bridges and skyscrapers to computers and fencing wire.
Iron is cheap to obtain, easy to shape and very strong. For all these reasons it is used more widely than any other metal. But all of the advantages of iron have to be balanced against one major disadvantage: it is a fairly reactive element, prone to rust when exposed to damp air.
Iron (whose chemical symbol, Fe,
comes from the Latin ferrum) is now one of the most commonly used metals of modern times. But it was not always so. Although the first use of iron dates back some three thousand years
to the period of archaeology called the Iron Age, until the last century iron was difficult to find and work and expensive to use.
Pure iron is a soft silvery-grey metal. It can be bent and stretched at room temperature, and at 1535°C it will melt. This temperature is much higher than the temperature at which wood burns. Earlier civilisations found iron so difficult to use because they could not produce such high temperatures to work iron.
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