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 because a lot of this happened in pre-history.
As an anecdote there’s an old Jewish proverb that “God gave the blacksmith the first pair of tongs” because you can’t make tongs without a set of tongs. Most likely someone figured out how to make the original metal working tools using wood or something before there were metal tongs, but the point is even 2000 years ago people had no idea how this started.
Bronze (Copper and Tin) was processed long before Iron due to the lower melting point.
It could have been as simple as “put shiny rock in a fire, and the rock melted. So like working with clay, maybe I could shape it into something?”
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