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
It happened before written record so we don’t know exactly, but it probably happened by accident.
People discovered copper and tin working long before they developed iron working, and this is almost certainly due to the much lower melting point of those metals and their ores.
You can accidentally process copper ore by using it to build a fire pit, and then noticing later than some of your rocks have melted into a metallic puddle.
Then people learn that just copper or just tin are flimsy, but when you melt them together you get a metal that’s suitable for armor and weapons and tools – bronze.
Iron is more difficult to produce, and very early sources came from iron meteorites that were already relatively pure. Making iron was much less of an accident, people were already familiar with bronzeworking and meteoric iron, and instead needed to develop furnaces capable of sustaining extremely high temperatures to melt down iron and its ores.
The most likely answer is that we placed rocks in or around a fire to help us with cooking. We noticed that some of the rocks melted when exposed to heat, and when they cooled off the rocks became hard again. From there, it wouldn’t take much to realize that we can manipulate the rock while it is liquid, forming it into shapes that are useful to us when it hardens.
The most likely first substance we discovered this with is lead. Lead melts at a fairly low temperature – 327 C – which is _easily_ achieved by your average campfire. From there, it wouldn’t take much ingenuity to realize that other rocks might produce similar effects if you get them hot enough.
People started with pure metals. There is a small amount of pure gold, copper, etc. that is laying around in nugget form. There used to be a lot more of it before humans gathered it up. Iron does not last long in the environment but can be found in pure form in meteorites.
So even before smelting was discovered in an area, the people there had access to pure metals and would be familiar with metals.
They then would find ore with nuggets in them or flecks of pure metal. So they would know that the rock had metal in it.
Smelting itself probably happened by accident at first – by using ore to build fire pits and having the metal melt out. This would be incredibly rare, but keep in mind that humans are 200,000 years old and have been using fire that entire time (pre-humans learned how to control fire) and many places never learned metal smelting on their own.
It took thousands of years, and we started with rocks with relatively low melting points which were therefore easier to refine and manipulate.
It’s easy enough to imagine an ancient people stumbling upon a vein of copper. It’s relatively pure in its natural form and eye-catching.
From there it’s just a matter of discovering that it can be bent and reformed (easy enough when you can bend it with your hands or dent it with a rock), then discovering that heating it makes this easier.
It took literally thousands of years to go from low melting points metals like copper and tin to high melting points metals like iron.
I’ve always imagined it was an accident: they use a certain rock to build a camp fire and someone noticed there was some odd stuff that had melted out of it the next day. They then looked for a few more of them, and found they could see veins of metal, which they purposely tried to smelt, with success.
Two related things that haven’t been mentioned here yet:
“Heat treating” stones for tool making was already something that folks were doing way before making metal tools. Sometimes the rocks in your area aren’t ideal for making tools out of, but if they’re still the right type of rock (often a type of chert) and you bury them under your fire pit, the heat makes them easier to flake into a spear point or knife or whatnot.
And there are areas where very pure copper deposits have been found right at the surface (though many of these have been used up over the last few thousand years). These didn’t have to be smelted, but could be shaped and hardened with cold hammering techniques.
So it wasn’t entirely out of nowhere that people came up with this. They already had the idea of using intense heat to treat raw materials and change their physical qualities to make tools, and already had experience with metals
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?”
Two details most people skip. The first is that copper could be founded in natural deposit on the surface, so we see a lot of copper tools and weapons way before ore extraction was a thing. Also people could noticed that heating it made it nimble for working it and cleaned that green stuff (oxide). At that point someone could had figured that those green stones laying around near were we found natural copper are the same green that oxidized copper, so was worth a try heating them up.
The other is different places experienced different evolution, the most extreme example is some African cultures skipping cooper and bronze and jumping straight to iron, wich probably had something to do with pottery or meteorite iron
native copper
there are many places where copper desposts were found just sitting on rocks. common throught egypt.actaully. people gathered rocks to circle.fires. fire ended up making little pools of molten copper on rocks. people are very attuned to.useable.shit in the enivrronmemt. hundreds of thousands of years. people figure shit out becauae even without.formal education.human beings smart af
I’m not sure how the discovery have been made in the very beginning (probably by chance when some ore accidently get into fire), but chemist in 17 century and later acted literally like that – they tried to melt *everything* and later they tried to pass electric current through *everything* and see what would come out of that.
Trials and errors, trials and errors.
Latest Answers