It's a fair point but pragmatically a nitpick indeed - for a full four thousand years people have worked iron into tools without melting it through the wonder of a chemical reaction that sidesteps the issue.
While we're here I guess we should also point out that glass blowing furnaces don't melt silicon, they dissolve it into a flux of other stuff to make a gooey glob we call molten glass.
The original question posed was "who first decided to melt the rocks and get the iron" .. technically the rock was smelted not melted in order to remove the rock and get the iron.
The first quibble was that iron isn't melted out, my response was that a bloomery is used instead, my bad for not clarifying that they are used to smelt and not melt.
I just wanted to make sure that it's clear for everybody. People seem to think that melting iron is easy. All the time I see smiths in movies and TV shows running around with molten iron in a medieval setting and even casting swords. It drives me nuts.
While we're here I guess we should also point out that glass blowing furnaces don't melt silicon, they dissolve it into a flux of other stuff to make a gooey glob we call molten glass.
The original question posed was "who first decided to melt the rocks and get the iron" .. technically the rock was smelted not melted in order to remove the rock and get the iron.
The first quibble was that iron isn't melted out, my response was that a bloomery is used instead, my bad for not clarifying that they are used to smelt and not melt.