Metal is essential in our world but how did early humans noticed that that shiny “rock” is usefull
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Metallic copper can be found as is, as can gold and some others
Other metals can be refined from their ores with intense heat. Tin and lead are very easy to melt, and we can combine them with other metals to get bronze and peuter.
It was just kind of trial and error, but once you find the right rocks, you can replicate the process with similar looking rocks.
When we get to iron, that’s when metallurgy really took off. It takes much more heat to melt iron than it does copper, lead, or tin, some needed to find how to make a hotter fire first. Bellows had existed for some time, but you need a lot of air flow to get a wood fire hot enough to melt iron. Coal would help immensely in getting fires that hot
Aluminum was an incredibly hard metal to make, despite being the most common metal in the Earth’s crust. The Washington Monument is capped with aluminum, and Napolean had a set of aluminum silverware because it was so valuable. Once we harnessed electricity, we could refine aluminum through the Bayer process, making aluminum super cheap.
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