cut and shaped into bars and extrusions and heat-treated to produce a final product.

Today,
approximately 96% of steel is continuously cast, while only 4% is produced as ingots.[13]
The ingots are then heated in a soaking pit and hot rolled into slabs, billets, or blooms. Slabs are hot
or cold rolled into sheet metal or plates. Billets are hot or cold rolled into bars, rods, and wire.
Blooms are hot or cold rolled into structural steel, such as I-beams and rails. In modern steel mills
these processes often occur in one assembly line, with ore coming in and finished steel products
coming out.[14] Sometimes after a steel's final rolling, it is heat treated for strength; however, this is
relatively rare.[15]

History of steelmaking[edit]
Main articles: History of ferrous metallurgy and History of the steel industry (1850–1970)

Bloomery smelting during the Middle Ages

Ancient steel[edit]
Steel was known in antiquity and was produced in bloomeries and crucibles.[16][17]
The earliest known production of steel is seen in pieces of ironware excavated from
an archaeological site in Anatolia (Kaman-Kalehöyük) and are nearly 4,000 years old, dating from
1800 BC.[18][19] Horace identifies steel weapons such as the falcata in the Iberian Peninsula,
while Noric steel was used by the Roman military.[20]
The reputation of Seric iron of South India (wootz steel) grew considerably in the rest of the
world.[17] Metal production sites in Sri Lanka employed wind furnaces driven by the monsoon winds,
capable of producing high-carbon steel. Large-scale Wootz steel production in Tamilakam using
crucibles and carbon sources such as the plant Avāram occurred by the sixth century BC, the
pioneering precursor to modern steel production and metallurgy.[16][17]
The Chinese of the Warring States period (403–221 BC) had quench-hardened steel,[21] while
Chinese of the Han dynasty (202 BC – 220 AD) created steel by melting together wrought iron with
cast iron, gaining an ultimate product of a carbon-intermediate steel by the 1st century AD.[22][23]
There is evidence that carbon steel was made in Western Tanzania by the ancestors of the Haya
people as early as 2,000 years ago by a complex process of "pre-heating" allowing temperatures
inside a furnace to reach 1300 to 1400° C.[24][25][26][27][28][29]