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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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.
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