I wrote a book and it's about philosophy
wait now where are you going come come
back click the link when everybody
thinks that they're the protagonist of
history it's only natural that those
players will come into conflict to
achieve their goals now we've talked a
fair bit about the causes motivations
and outcomes of these conflicts but what
about the tools today we'll dive into
the production and fabrication of steel
the material of choice for weaponry
throughout much of the past 1,000 years
to talk about this I'm joined by none
other than Matt and ilya of baltimore
knife and sword who you may know from
the show man-at-arms reforged or their
new channel that works they'll be
jumping into this video to share some of
their extensive smithing knowledge with
us so I'm extremely excited to have them
here now there's a lot of Steel to cover
in one video but my pathological need
for context commands me to touch on
stone bronze and iron essentially as
soon as early humans were making tools
we were making weapons starting from
axes arrowheads and spear points with
handy materials like sharpened stone and
obsidian leading up to bronze the
benefit of metal is that it's harder to
break and holds an edge better but it's
also way harder to produce in the first
place
bronze was most widespread around the
Mediterranean and China from the 3rd to
1st millennium BC and iron came around
as a stronger alternative in the first
several centuries BC and AD but there
are a lot of problems with dating entire
eras do you go from the first recorded
use of a technology or its widespread
adoption and are you thinking only in
one local area or are you trying to have
a global perspective so you'll have to
forgive me for some fuzzy chronology
so how was all of this stuff made well
there are a couple of ways to go about
the thing with iron is that when you
mine it or collect an iron meteorite
that falls out of the sky you're almost
never getting pure iron it's often some
mix of oxidized iron the best way to
separate out the junk is to heat it up
and the problem with that is that metals
need a lot of heat to melt and the
standard ancient metalworking furnaces
just weren't hot enough to do the trick
blue marie's were able to partially
purify iron by melting off some of its
oxides and you can see the resulting
iron bloom is porous from where the
impurities with lower melting points all
drained out as what's called slack but
it's still needed the old smacker root
to get rid of all the faff still stuck
inside and to get it into the desired
shape and purified metal is really
important because you don't want to go
charging into battle if you know that
10% of your sword is made of paper mache
the other common furnace was the crew
which ideally gives you a nice melty
iron soup that completely drains out the
impurities but it ran into the same
problem of heating in the early days so
it wasn't all that widely used with the
huge exception of India will double back
to that later but first we need to get
from iron to steel and for that we'll
turn to Ilya ladies and gentlemen dear
viewer welcome to a brief history of
steel steel is a combination of iron and
carbon in proportions of no less than
0.2% to no more than two percent the
first iron and steel production is dated
back probably approximately 3,000 years
ago in the region of modern-day India
and Java from there on it moves on to
the Middle East for example the Pharaoh
Tutankhamen had two famous daggers one
made out of pure gold and the other one
was made out of iron it is very likely
that in the Middle East first iron was
used in the form of meteorite as space
rocks when the collapse onto the ground
I discovered to actually contain almost
pure iron and nickel and that material
would have been highly prized
however digging around in hopes of
finding space rocks meteorite would have
been a very inefficient and one needed
to produce a way of making iron so it is
very likely that the first manufacturers
of iron would have been Potter's as
potters utilize iron ore as a glazing on
top of their pots or other where so it's
very likely that some Potter putting too
much careless or on the surface of their
thought in the morning discovered after
burning it that there's a small silver
ish nugget at the bar and that's
probably how iron production began
especially in India one has to note that
the first manufacturers of iron are also
cultures that have a sophisticated
technology of producing pottery one
piece of indirect evidence to the
ceramic origin of iron manufacture is
that the earliest places to manufacture
iron the region of modern-day India are
also the ones that utilize the
crucible steel method of manufacturing
steel and iron in the early ages and as
you know a crucible is basically a pot
with some ore in it and that crucible
steel and iron later be known as roots
like Ilya said southern India had an
incredible iron and steel industry in
the 1st millennium BC because anyone
making iron will create trace amounts of
Steel unintentionally and it's not hard
to see how astute blacksmiths could
recognize this and make progress into
full steel blades not very long after in
the Near East - we have evidence of
carburized and even tempered steel tools
and blades from as early as the 11th
century BC in the Bronze Age some
Mesopotamian and Indian cultures were
producing high-quality steel over 2,000
years ahead of nearly everybody else to
the rest of the world these weapons were
so strong they might as well have been
straight-up magic and that's just
flat-out cool so now that we have steel
let's talk about how people used it and
how the design of weapons evolved over
the past two millennia essentially there
is always an arms race if someone has a
spear you'll want a shield and perhaps a
longer spear and soon enough Alexander
the Great's successors are throwing
armies of sirisha wielding hoplites at
each other it's always a game of action
reaction between armor and weapons
something to consider is that swords
with a few feet of steel blade are much
more labor-intensive than slapping a
sharp three-inch point on a wooden stick
and calling it a day swords are actually
rather tricky to mass-produced so it's
primarily in large or mercantile
societies that you see consistent
production of iron to support all of
those sorts at the start of the medieval
period the Romans spatha and its cousins
like the Vikings fared was the go-to
blade the single handed sword gradually
acquired a longer cross guard and became
the cruciform arming sword at the same
time chainmail armor was on the rise as
a simple but effective protection
against the single-handed sword or axe
to cope swords went into a few different
directions for raw power swords got
bigger and bigger as one-handed arming
swords became two-handed long swords
additionally the need to pierce between
chainmail hastened the development of
precise thrusting weapons like the
halberd and pike back to the swords for
finesse and personal use the
double-edged arming sword shifted focus
all on one cutting edge becoming the
falchion and Messer in the civilian
world wear armor wasn't as common
self-defense ends dueling swords
developed more elaborate
and protection from simple cross guards
all the way up to the swept hilt and
bellegarde
similarly the lack of armor meant that
you wanted to be as far away from your
opponent as possible so blades became
longer and thinner as we got to the
classic rapier but at the end of the day
the weapons you're using however well
designed for the situation will mean
nothing if they all shatter on contact
so how is the production of Steel
evolving through the Middle Ages and
Beyond in Europe around the time of high
Middle Ages the technology improves in
what is known as the blast furnace I
mentioned before that the smelter
normally doesn't develop enough
temperature to fully melt the iron while
the blast furnace fixes that by
preheating the stream of air that feeds
the fire and as the air is preheated
that rising heat gets transferred on to
one to one ratio to the fire at the
bottom giving it just enough oomph to
fully melt the material a little bit
later in around three centuries the
blast furnace develops a further
modification that is it starts utilizing
something known as stone coal or coal
that comes out of the ground the only
problem with using that material was
that it often enough contains a lot of
sulfur which is very detrimental to the
manufacture of steel so the way the
alchemists fix that as they were the
ones experimenting with new materials
all the time is introducing some
manganese and newly discovered magical
substance and that would purify the
material by sucking out some of the
sulfur they improve quality of the steel
improved its reliability and the
modification to the blast furnace
increase the amounts that are being
yielded as a result machines could be
made almost entirely of iron cast iron
or steel upon the craftsmen selection a
couple of centuries after European steel
production really hated stride the
battlefield transformed with the
widespread adoption of gunpowder and
firearms while this somewhat closes the
book on the history of European sword
making there's still another hugely
important metalworking culture to
consider so bust out your curved blades
and cut up your island into several
dozen warring States because it's time
to talk about Japan of course the
classic Japanese weapon is the katana
but much like year up there were several
different weapons in variants the
wakizashi short sword worked well
indoors with low ceilings the Adachi a
great sword was impressively huge and
the naginata polearm was effective for
fighting on or a
cavalry as you can see there are a lot
of similar situational variants though
curiously next to no double-edged blades
but for convenience let's just address
the katana right off the most striking
aspect of this sword is the edge and the
means of producing that legendary
cutting edge is quite elaborate it all
starts with the smelting process now as
the technology of producing iron and
steel moves out to the east to China
Korea and in Japan a process called the
kara or a smelter starts being utilized
and it's basically a chimney stack were
a big box made out of clay brick we're
in succession layers of [ __ ] and then
charcoal and then Oregon are being put
on top while the fire is burning at the
bottom and it's being heated up by a
series of bellows in this process as the
ore is being heated up it separates into
iron and slag slag is basically molten
glass and molten sand with all kinds of
trash in it the smelter doesn't develop
enough temperature inside to fully melt
the iron so little grains off iron fall
down the charcoal picking up some carbon
here or there and form a ugly bread like
mass at the very bottom called a carrot
now this method at first didn't produce
enough material as it would produce a
bread loaf or a head sized piece that a
Smith or a craftsman later have to pull
out beat on wooden hammer
boom-boom-boom to consolidate it and
then make a tool to as we move in the
east to approximately let's say the 15
16th century they care all of these
smelter becomes bigger and utilizes more
bellows and utilizes more charcoal as
well as or producing a bigger bigger
mass so we've got our iron now comes
forging the blade since the Tatara
furnace wasn't able to completely purify
the or Japanese Smith's also folded
steel during the forging process to
manually work out the impurities that
would otherwise stay trapped inside the
myth of folding steel is that having
more layers makes it intrinsically
stronger but there's just as much metal
there anyway what really matters is how
the folding process better clears out
the junk to leave pure iron next in the
process came heat treatment now there's
just enough chemistry here to give me
very unpleasant flashbacks but
essentially the repeated process of
heating
and cooling in specific ways helps
substantially strengthen the blade
starting from pure iron or ferrite
heating up the blade rearranges the
molecules into austenite which better
receives the carbon that will create the
steel if the blade cools slowly the
carbon will distribute unevenly into
higher and low-density pockets and the
blades composition won't be uniform this
is why Smith's will quickly quench the
hot blade in water or oil to bring the
metals temperature down fast enough to
keep the carbon evenly distributed this
process produces martensite which is
extremely hard it's sometimes called
tool steel because it's great for files
and drills the problem though is that
it's rather fragile and prone to
snapping like glass when an encounter
strain nowadays we temper our blades by
heating the back up to three hundred
degrees Celsius to relax some of the
tension and turn the entire blade into
spring steel like its name suggests it's
super flexible and durable and makes an
incredible blade but back in medieval
Japan the Smiths didn't have this
technique so to compromise they modified
the quenching process to differentially
harden the blade before the first big
heat a thicker layer of clay was applied
to the back of the blade so that it
would cool slower than the front during
the quench the resulting cutting edge
was a super hard martensite while the
back and spine of the blade were more
flexible iron resulting in that gorgeous
jamón line that separates the hard edge
from the soft back so not only was it
incredibly practical but it was also
ridiculously pretty now I would be
remiss if I didn't mention Damascus
steel which I can't help but have a soft
spot for because I'm a comparatively
squishy human and Damascus steel is made
of freaking steel yo and really good
steel at that it's a bit of a confusing
subject because there are actually a
couple kinds of Damascus steel
originally it referred to steel made or
sold in the Levantine city of Damascus
which had trading links with the South
Indian blacksmiths making that
high-quality crucible wood steel we
talked about earlier this steel was cast
into shape and has that beautiful wavy
pattern that we all know and love
unfortunately the original technique for
this has been lost but sometimes
research reveals that not only do the
blades look super cool and magic kind of
like liquid metal they've actually been
shown to contain carbon nanotubes
carvings goddamn nanotubes how does that
even happen
by contrast to the modern Damascus steel
that you might see is simply different
types of Steel pattern welded and folded
together which produces a similar
demoscene pattern when forged and then
etch tin acid but
it's not the same stuff still though it
looks mad cool
but speaking of modern steelwork brings
about to the end of the 18th century in
the beginning of 19th century where the
fully metal lathe made in France now a
lathe would have been utilized even in
ancient Egypt but it would have been
made out of wood and it was fairly
rickety not allowing for high degree of
precision the lathe behind me is made
out of melt what a metal lathe allows
people to do is to reliably make precise
round objects that allow for better
machinery to be used in steel
manufacture making more and better steel
again and the cycle continues that
brings about the industrial age where
entire roads would have been made out of
Steel
known as the railroad the railroad
improves trade across countries and that
sparks more industrialization more
improvement and we have the 20th century
the 20th century also known as the Space
Age brings about better alloying
elements for steel for example we have
the introduction of molybdenum vanadium
tungsten so on and so forth nickel to
the Steel's allowing for the buyers
choice over the features that you would
like in your material for example the
introduction of nickel and chrome
together allows us to make stainless
steel which is resistant to corrosion
while the introduction of molybdenum
vanadium and tungsten makes the steel
very very tough and act much like
something else other than steel in fact
modern Steel's almost don't behave like
Steel's at all at least like the
old-school Steel's as they are very
often resistant to corrosion resistant
to tear have a very high stress yield
and at the same time are less subjected
to thermal destruction and that is a
very quick look at the history of steel
hell was made and how it was used over
the centuries as you've seen it is a
deeply complex subject and we should
recognize not only the work that goes
into each individual blade but the
millennia of incremental advancements
and refinements that have brought us to
modern innovations like spring steel I
think it's especially neat to see this
history as a nexus of culture
craftsmanship trade and warfare and come
on you know you can't say no to so
it's once again huge thanks to Matt and
Illya from that works for lending us a
hand with this video like I said at the
start that works is the new channel for
the folks at Baltimore knife and sword
and though Men At Arms reforged was
unfortunately a casualty of the defined
media collapse last year they're still
making some incredible content and
gorgeous blades on their new channel so
I highly highly recommend you subscribe
to that works to see more amazing
blacksmithing