who discovered iron actually?
It is widely believed iron came into the Earth along with meteors. There is evidence that we have been using iron for the last 5000 years. The Eskimos in Greenland, matter of fact, made their iron tools for hundred of years from a large (30 tons) meteorite.
We don't know who discovered iron, it was discovered before written history. We only know that mankind knew how to smelt iron in the second millennium BCE. The Chinese were able to cast iron in 550 BCE, and the Europeans produced wrought iron during the medieval period.
There's so much iron on this planet they didn't discover it, they stumbled over it. Stumbled over it so many times it was inevitable they'd eventually notice it. Nobody knows who the first person to notice it was, but it's thought to have been a tribe, rather than a single individual. The name of the tribe can't be pronounced nor spelled in English, so nobody knows what it was. There was no point in memorizing it because they couldn't pronounce it to one another and ask it of students on tests. What's a lot more interesting is how the Chinese almost certainly 'discovered' carbon steel when a slave fell into the vat of molten ore and it was concluded by observation and testing that a human body in the mix made a far better alloy for weapons than iron without a human body incinerated in it. It worked and became the earliest tried and true method. Great illustration of assuming too much with too little data.
