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?
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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.
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