Thomas Botfield FRS (14 February 1762 – 17 January 1843) was an English metallurgist, geologist, magistrate and deputy-lieutenant of Shropshire, and inventor of a method of smelting and making iron using the principle of "gas flame or heated air in the blast of furnaces".
[1] Botfield's 1828 patent seems to have anticipated most of the elements of the blast furnace as it was used in the 1830s and 1840s.
[2] His father was Thomas Botfield (1738–1801) who acquired a fortune from collieries and iron manufacture, his mother Margaret, only daughter of William Baker of Bromley, Worfield, Shropshire.
Thomas Botfield, the younger, born at Dawley, Shropshire, in 1762, was educated at the endowed school of Cleobury Mortimer.
[1]In 1842, the year before his death, he was appointed treasurer of the Salop Infirmary in Shrewsbury.