Excerpt from A Popular History of American Invention, Vol. 2: Material Resources and Labor-Saving Machines After a hundred years of iron-making in the colonies, Parlia ment, in 1750, passed a law forbidding them to build any. Mill for rolling and splitting iron, or any furnace for making steel. This confined the colonists to pig and bar iron. They could not lawfully cast anchors and kettles, or make horseshoes, ham mers, crowbars, and iron parts for farming tools, wagons, ships, and the like. Articles of steel, such as knives and scissors, and implements of rolled sheet-iron must all be imported from Eng land. This was a costly proceeding; the colonists could have made them more cheaply themselves. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.