Steve's History of Things 10 - Smoothing Irons
Using something hot and smooth to get the wrinkles out of washed fabrics goes back about 3,000 years to ancient China, where they just lobbed hot stones into an open pan and rubbed the creases out. Fast forward to the 15 th century and the charcoal iron was invented. This was an iron box, flat at one end and pointed at the other, which you filled with hot charcoal. It had a handle at the top and a flat base. Various other attachments such as flues, doors and catches made this pretty cumbersome to use. Charcoal iron Image attribution: By Vincent de Groot - http://www.videgro.net - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=647050 Box iron slug or ox-tongue There was also the problem of charcoal dust being transferred to the fabric and the simple solution to this, was to heat a slug of iron and put that in the box. Thus, the box iron came into existence. Because of the shape of the iron slug, these were also known as ox-tongue iron s. Apart from solv