title: 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 handwritten 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.
authors.forename: Frederick G
authors.initials: FG
authors.lastname: Page
mesh_terms: D003300:Copper / Q000737:chemistry / Q000266:history*; D049671:History, 18th Century; D007501:Iron / Q000737:chemistry* / Q000266:history*; D008373:Manuscripts as Topic / Q000266:history*; D015032:Zinc / Q000737:chemistry / Q000266:history*
chemical_list: C048399:brass; D003300:Copper; D007501:Iron; D015032:Zinc