I’ve recently watched a video of Tom Scott on his second channel where he made (with the help of a blacksmith) make a bottle opener.
The guy first made Tom to blacksmith a punch or whatever then he mentioned that “Blacksmiths had to make their own tools” or something among the lines anyways.
So it struck me. How did people make their first tools? Are there any records? Or were people just banging rocks to the metal, made a primitive sledgehammer then used that further on?
How did they even came up with the idea that if you put metal in fire you can *remodel* it?
In: 46
>How did they even came up with the idea that if you put metal in fire you can remodel it?
Metal would naturally find its way into man made fires either by putting a rock or heating some sort of ceramics that contained metal in them. Depending on the metal, we’d visually see it turning into liquid (as a result of the heat) and then solidifying when it cooled.
Blacksmithing typically refers to iron metal working. Before iron other metals were used. Bronze, copper, etc.
By the time we entered the iron age, clearly there were bronze tools, etc. So I believe it was a progression over the ages.
It’s not like they went from the stone age to the iron age in one day.
Probably a combination of an accident and knowledge/curiousity.
The first metal used by humans to make tools was copper.
Copper, in rare cases, could be found in metal forms on the surface. But copper ores could also be commonly found on the surface. And copper will start to soften at normal campfire temps, and could melt at the temperature of a roaring woodfire.
So, all that needs to happen is for someone to accidentally place one of these rocks near/in their fire. Or see a shiny bit of metal in a rock and put that near/in their fire.
And then notice after the first that the rock had changed and they could see shiny copper nuggets/pieces in the ore.
That random happenstance can spark curiosity, leading to more of these rocks getting put into more fire, hotter fires, these nuggets being gathered and placed in fire together. Noticing that they will melt together.
We don’t exactly know how that happened and how information spread, but it isn’t outlandish to think that this could happen.
The first metals that were discovered (copper, tin, silver and lead) are fairly easy to smelt from ore and can be cast into a mold, so they don’t need to be forged by a smith. A likely path of discovery might be pottery: Inside a wood fired pottery kiln, it’s possible to achieve the conditions where metal oxides turn into metal: high temperature and oxygen starved combustion of charcoal produces carbon monoxide, which can react with the oxygen atoms in metal ores. So they could have stumbled upon metals entirely by accident, perhaps while using some colorful minerals as glazes.
Iron is a bit more difficult. Iron oxide can be used as a glaze, but the temperature needed to smelt it is much higher. But it’s possible that it was found by accident in a too hot pottery kiln, ruining the pottery but producing iron instead.
As for the smithing: Metals like copper, silver, gold, lead, tin and soft bronze alloys can be hammered into shape using a simple stone hammer and stone or wood anvil. Heat can be used to make the metal more malleable and to prevent it from shattering. So using the same process for shaping iron would have been natural for the first people trying work with the material. However, it’s a complex process, so there is a reason that it took ~2000 years from the earliest metals to iron being a commonplace material.
It’s been a long time since I’ve reviewed the sequence but you can start with raw ore and a couple rocks and work your way up from there.
Every tool you make can be used to make the next one.
So you start with a nice rock to ue as a hand hammer. Use that to make a hammer with a handle. Use that and a fire to make copper, bronze, or iron and so on.
The first metal working was done with metals with a reasonably low melting point – things like lead (328^(o)C), tin (232^(o)C) and zinc (420^(o)C) will easily melt over an open fire. Since these melt so easily, it can happen by accident. That gives you the knowledge that metals exist and can be melted with heat. Of course, these metals are all quite soft and weak but from there you can start experimenting to find other metals that are more useful.
Silver (893^(o)C), gold (1063^(o)C) and copper (1084^(o)C) melt a bit higher than is possible over an open fire but wood is still ok a a fuel if start build a basic furnace to contain and focus the heat. Copper is relatively easy to cast and by mixing in a little of the lower melting metals (Copper + Zinc = brass, Copper + Tin = Bronze) you can lower the melting point and get different properties (Brass is corrosion resistant, looks a bit like gold and is malleable, bronze was the hardest metal in common use for a while which is a useful property for sharp tools)
The good thing about all of these metals is that they can be easily cast so you don’t need tools to make basic things out of them – you just make a mold out of something like packed sand or clay and pour it in (so long as you have purged all moisture out, otherwise it will flash to steam and the whole thing might blow up in your face)
Melting iron needs more like 1500^(o)C which is harder to reach . This is a fair bit higher than copper but still achievable in a furnace. Melting iron was recorded around 1200 BC by the Hittites who discovered black rocks that melt. Iron is a useful material but to get the most of it you have to make steel – The knowledge that you can smelt metals to get alloys was already around (see copper alloys above) but smelting steel is a more challenging process so took time to get right.
To get tools from nothing, you would probably start by casting them then use those tools to make better tools and so on. You could also use stone tools but once you’re working with decent metals, they are the way to go (imagine trying to get a smooth finish on a metal part when working with a stone tool)
> were people just banging rocks to the metal
Pretty much. We know that tribes in Michigan used stone tools to hammer and shape the plentiful native copper they had in the area into [tools and ornaments](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ad/Copper_knife%2C_spearpoints%2C_awls%2C_and_spud%2C_Late_Archaic_period%2C_Wisconsin%2C_3000_BC-1000_BC_-_Wisconsin_Historical_Museum_-_DSC03436.JPG). Iron and bronze tools could had been worked the same early on when metals were just starting to be used.
>How did they even came up with the idea that if you put metal in fire you can remodel it?
Some metals like tin can naturally occur as relatively pure *native* metal nuggets or pieces and have a low enough melting point that they can melt if accidentally placed or dropped into a wood campfire. Though this seems kind of farfetched to me.
For the majority of metals that humans worked with like copper, gold, and silver, it would had require a lot more heat to not only melt them, but to smelt their ores into metal. Copper ores like cuprite or malachite would had require at least 1200’C of heat to refine into metal form. You’re likely not going to reach such temperatures with a simple wood-burning bonfire.
The current thinking is that humans only were able to smelt and melt metals like copper or gold with the development of pottery kilns, which could reach these high temperatures and reductive conditions. Some potter might had been decorating unfired pots or ceramics by studding them with pretty mineral or native metal pieces, put them in the kiln, then come back to find out their malachite had turn into copper or native gold beads had melted off.
From there, it’s just a matter of a smart, curious potter being able to realize what happen and repeating the process on purpose.
I personally set the time of the modern age at the point when bronze was discovered.
Clay pots and beeswax were an early technology for storing food. You gather food in the spring, summer, and fall, but there isn’t much food to gather in the winter. You can pull clay from the side of a riverbed, which is the common method. It can harden a bit by air-drying, but if you bake it, it hardens a lot, and retains its hardness better, becoming a durable vessel. You can put barley seeds or wheat seeds in a clay pot, and seal it with a lid, using wax to keep bugs out. Without a clay pot, your stored seeds will be eaten by mice.
So…gathering clay and making pots was an early technology that was very important. Archaeologists have identified the earliest copper smelting and tool-casting region, and it appears that when baking clay pots that use a greenish clay that is high in copper oxide, little copper nuggets would melt out of the clay and collect in the fire-pits.
You can melt copper at camp-fire temperatures, and by making a form in some sand, you can pour molten copper into the sand to create a copper axe-head. Someone discovered that if you hammer copper, it hardens and becomes more useful as a tool. Then when it dulls to the point of no longer being useful, you simply re-cast it into being a new axe-head.
Tin-oxide nuggets were likely discovered the same way. Tin is the main ingredient in modern solder, and it also melts at a low temperature. Tin is soft compared to copper but apparently it was cast into various items for some use, but not tools.
Here is the magic event that changed everything. Regardless of what copper and tin were used for, heating the raw material to get the copper to melt out of it and then cast copper into an ingot was an industry unto itself. People would trade just about anything that was available to get some copper. Tin was also smelted to some degree in the same area.
The casting of ingots was done with clay crucibles, and even though it is likely that the crucibles used for copper and tin were kept separate (customers wanted a pure product, not contaminated), at some point copper was cast with a crucible that still had a little tin in it. For reasons found in physics, mixing one part tin with roughly six parts of copper results in an alloy that is harder and lasts longer as a weapon/tool that copper by itself. Bronze.
Spearheads, daggers, axe-heads. Everyone wanted bronze. It was not difficult to imagine the copper smelters mixing-in tin in various ratios to see what worked best. Once they had the recipe identified, they became rich very fast.
Here’s the thing. Working stones was well understood. Smelting copper and forming tools was well-understood. Same with tin. However, all of a sudden if you mix two things together in a specific ratio, you get a third product that is different, and VERY beneficial. Their entire world-view changed.
Iron meteorite nuggets covered the Earth. They weren’t brittle like stone. But they also didn’t melt in a campfire. That is, until they added forced draft (I forget the term about adding a chimney to pull fresh air into the bottom of a smelter). The invention of bronze started a burst of experimentation to find out what else was possible.
1. The first metals that were made into tools were metals that have lower melting temps — copper, tin, etc. They were likely just found as ores, and normally used as stone tools (knapping). People probably didn’t realize these rocks were very different at first.
2. There are numberous ways to have discovered that these metal ores can be smelted — maybe the toolmaker’s hut burned down, and they found pools of metal in the ruins. Or maybe they used old stone tools to build fire pits, and somebody noticed some weird stuff going on with the ores. At any rate, it was discovered.
3. People share knowledge. Tool makers experiment, eventually figure out that not only can you melt this stuff, you can *shape it*. MINDS BLOWN. Suddenly all kinds of tools are being made, and settlements are prioritizing finding ores. Early tools would be very simple shapes, like a rod or a sharpened triangle/dagger shape.
4. Later, people figure out that even stronger materials can be made when you mix metals in certain amounts. We get bronze and other alloys. People learn how to make hotter fires (kilns, furnaces, etc) as well, to heat these metals. Shaping the tools becomes more and more complex — they use tools to make tools.
5. Eventually… you have blacksmiths who specialize in iron and then steel.
This all occurs over thousands of years of accident, experiment, trial and error.
They used ceramics and clay to form molds, and everything else comes from that. You can progressively create harder and harder metals.
Latest Answers