One hears about the iron age and the bronze age—eras in which people discovered metallurgy. But how did that happen? Was it like:
1. Look at rock
2. See shiny
3. Try to melt the shiny out of the rock
4. Profit?
Explain it to me!
In: 1643
We don’t really know for sure, because people really didn’t (or, probably, couldn’t) write things down back then.
What likely happened is that somebody would build a fire pit using rocks with copper or tin in them, and when they built a big fire, the copper and tin melted out of the rocks. People might then have checked out the metal and found that it was nice for things like jewelry, but not really hard enough for anything else.
Later, somebody might have used both kinds of rocks, and noticed that the metals combined to make something (bronze) that was hard enough to make tools, and that those tools were easier to make (and better) than most stone tools. That’s when the Bronze Age started, because people who had bronze tools were much better off than people who did not.
It was only a shot time (in terms of history) before somebody discovered how to work iron, which requires much hotter fires, and has to be worked hot instead of cold, like copper and tin.
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