1. J. G. James, ‘Russian Iron Bridges to 1850’,TNS, 54 (1982–83), 79–104.
2. F. Trevithick,Life of Richard Trevithick, 1 (1872), 10 has an old engineer saying that the only large bar obtainable in the 1780s was Spanish, which was ‘red-short and difficult to work’, or ‘Swedish or Danish bar said to come from Siberia’. In those days the Urals were regarded as part of Siberia. Boulton & Watt preferred Russian iron for their boiler plates (H. W. Dickinson and R. Jenkins,James Watt and the Steam Engine(1927), pp. 236–37.
3. The Walkers of Rotherham, who made the Paddington and Sunderland bridges, were regular importers of Russian bar as were the Carron Company and most other large concerns.
4. J. Percy,Metallurgy: Iron and Steel(1864), p. 738. Russian iron had outstanding malleability and ductility.
5. Foreign historians, naturally interested in feats of their ownémigrés, have always emphasized outside influences on Russia, particularly German technology which was encouraged by a series of Germanic rulers in the eighteenth century. Pre-revolutionary Russian writers drew heavily on western historians (because of the paucity of early Russian published sources) thus perpetuating the view that Russians were generally second-rate copyists. In modern times there has been a laudable attempt by Soviet writers to rescue Russian names from oblivion and restore national amour-propre via archival research. Many valuable books and papers were published in the 1930s and 1940s but during the cold war of the 1950s a progressively nationalistic view of history took over and many will recall how Russian claims to have invented almost everything became at that time a music-hall joke. The inevitable happened and a violent counterblast appeared from a German author: W. Keller,Ost minus West = Null(Munich, 1960), translated into English asAre the Russians Ten Feet Tall?(1961). Thankfully, a more balanced attitude has returned and much historical mist has been blown away in recent years.