Gold Plates discovered in Hill Cumorah

[waveslider]

2 hours ago, Stargazer said:

What I was really excited by was the idea of tumbaga as what the plates were composed of.  In the book 1491 by Charles C. Mann.  He described the production of sheets of tumbaga (gold and copper alloy) by the Inca, that was intended to be wrapped around objects to give them the appearance of being solid gold.  Because of the copper, tumbaga is too reddish (especially in higher proportions of copper), so doesn't look as pretty (and the copper will corrode where it is exposed to the air), but if it is heated carefully the copper at the surface interacts with atmospheric oxygen forming a copper oxide, which can then be knocked off by hammering, leaving the non-reactive gold -- or else mild acids (like citric acid) can dissolve the copper from the surface, leaving a layer of pure gold.  

The article on Tumbaga in Wikipedia is an interesting short description of it.

That sounds very interesting. Metallurgy is a very interesting thing to me and it is always nice to learn something new. Thanks for pointing that out! Tumbaga sounds a lot like Rose Gold, only the ratios are a little different. In Rose Gold there would be about 75 percent copper, between 2-3 percent Silver, and the rest Copper. There is also Red Gold which is about 75 percent Gold and about 25 percent Copper. I have only seen these used in Jewelry and haven't heard of anyone using acid to etch out the Copper. Cool!!! Sorry for the side track from the topic everyone, but I am just fascinated by this kind of stuff. Now I'll let it get back to the topic.

[Bernard Gui]

8 hours ago, cinepro said:

 

I'm not sure how you know how many Nephites there were.  You say "a few" swords, yet Nephi himself says "many".

So yes, if we ignore what The Book of Mormon says and go with what you say, then it was a few swords.

And according to some, there were "others" in the land the converted and joined the Nephites.  How many of these people were there?  100?  1,000? 10,000?

It's not "animus."  You asked where The Book of Mormon said something, I showed you, but now you're saying "That's not what it really says."  At some point, I would expect someone to look at what they're typing and realize "Wait, it actually says that but I'm pretending it doesn't because I don't want it to!", but for some reason that never happens.  You just double down.

Skeptics also get endless grief anytime it is even hinted that we should expect anything to be found anywhere related to The Book of Mormon, but somehow you were able to type "one would expect thousands of swords" without (I suspect) even a hint of uneasiness. 

 

Here's how I know how many Nephites there were:

Quote

6 Wherefore, it came to pass that I, Nephi, did take my family, and also Zoram and his family, and Sam, mine elder brother and his family, and Jacob and Joseph, my younger brethren, and also my sisters, and all those who would go with me. And all those who would go with me were those who believed in the warnings and the revelations of God; wherefore, they did hearken unto my words.

Looks like a few dozen to me. It's only the second generation of Nephites, maybe five or six families and a couple of young men. Nephi doesn't say any more than that. I don't know how that could total hundreds or thousands. Perhaps 10 were males old enough to bear weapons. When Nephi says he made many steel swords, I understand from the context that he was not talking about more than 10 or 20 steel swords. For one man to make them, that might feel like many. Perhaps Nephi counted like Terry Pratchetts' trolls...1,2, many, lots.

I have a similar situation... Sister Gui and I, 7 children, 5 married - prospering exceedingly and multiplying in the land - and 2 single boys. At our family reunion in July, there were 34 of us. That's a few. We made sandwiches for everyone. I suppose I could say we made many sandwiches. Did we mass produce sandwiches? Possibly, but not in the context of Ed Goble asking for evidence of swords from  battles where tens of thousands of armed men were killed, which is the context in which I posed my question. Taken in context, my interpretation is certainly reasonable. Your insulting responses are not.

You have accused me of blithely ignoring and lying about what the Book of Mormon says, being duplicitous in my responses, and giving you grief for some sort of apologetic enterprise, but then you propose a population of hundreds or thousands of Nephites, not based on what the Book of Mormon says, but on what "some" claim. Speaking of uneasiness.

I still don't understand your animus, which is palpable, unnecessary, and unappreciated.

Edited September 8, 2016 by Bernard Gui

[Rajah Manchou]

3 hours ago, waveslider said:

That sounds very interesting. Metallurgy is a very interesting thing to me and it is always nice to learn something new. Thanks for pointing that out! Tumbaga sounds a lot like Rose Gold, only the ratios are a little different. In Rose Gold there would be about 75 percent copper, between 2-3 percent Silver, and the rest Copper. There is also Red Gold which is about 75 percent Gold and about 25 percent Copper. I have only seen these used in Jewelry and haven't heard of anyone using acid to etch out the Copper. Cool!!! Sorry for the side track from the topic everyone, but I am just fascinated by this kind of stuff. Now I'll let it get back to the topic.

Tumbaga has an interesting history. In som ways having plates made of tumbaga could be more symbolic of the sacred nature of the Golden Plates:

"In the Americas, the production of tumbaga was thought to awaken the camay, or living spirit of inanimate objects, which was seen in the form of the gold that appeared to rise to the surface. Tumbaga stood for the sacred and temporal power in both objects and people."

And it possibly comes with the added bonus of also providing one more piece of evidence to pre-Columbian contact:

"Wilhelm Solheim has proposed that the Nusantao seafaring network extended to the west coast of the Americas staring in 3000 BCE and that voyages across the Pacific occurred periodically for "hundreds of years." Whether this would take us to a date for the transmission of tumbaga is not clear, but in earlier works Solheim has discussed Heine-Geldern's theory that tumbaga, along with the mise en couleur technique (depletion gilding), cire-perdue casting, and granulation were carried across the Pacific by Dongson seafarers. Actually the dates of tumbaga might be older in the Americas than in Southeast Asia, but the practice of gold granulation appears to originate from early pottery practices in the latter region. In both regions, small gold balls or spheres were used to create decorations or designs on a gold base plate. These gold balls may be the origin of the piloncitos, tiny gold coins that like the barter rings were used as a type of currency in the pre-Hispanic Philippines. As depletion gilding is not archaeologically attested for Dongson culture, and granulation was a characteristic of both the Sa-Huynh-Kalanay and the entire Philippine goldworking tradition, the Sa-Huynh-Kalanay culture would seem to be a better candidate as an agent for this cultural transmission."

http://sambali.blogspot.com/2009/12/tumbaga-and-alchemy.html

[Anijen]

9 hours ago, Stargazer said:

Wait... what?  Elephants are Macaws?  I'll admit to being a bit thick sometimes, but there is a size difference here that does not explain itself.  What on earth are you saying?

Stella B in Copan, image here and here

[UtahTexan]

8 hours ago, Anijen said:

Stella B in Copan, image here and here

Been to Cpan several times...love it

[bcuzbcuz]

10 hours ago, Anijen said:

Stella B in Copan, image here and here

And all you're seeing are the long tail feathers of some elegant birds. There were no elephants in central or northern or southern America.

Think of it this way. Do the carvings represent birds that exist all over or do you stretch credibilty and choose an animal that can't be seen anywhere?

[bcuzbcuz]

17 hours ago, waveslider said:

That sounds very interesting. Metallurgy is a very interesting thing to me and it is always nice to learn something new. Thanks for pointing that out! Tumbaga sounds a lot like Rose Gold, only the ratios are a little different. In Rose Gold there would be about 75 percent copper, between 2-3 percent Silver, and the rest Copper. There is also Red Gold which is about 75 percent Gold and about 25 percent Copper. I have only seen these used in Jewelry and haven't heard of anyone using acid to etch out the Copper. Cool!!! Sorry for the side track from the topic everyone, but I am just fascinated by this kind of stuff. Now I'll let it get back to the topic.

Several who have commented here seem to have a poor definition of melting and smelting and the differences between them. Melting is the reducing into a liquid form, Smelting is often at a higher heat and means the adding or subtracting materials from the base ore.

Another problem is the heat. Iron melts at 2000 deg. F (1000 deg.C). There are reliefs in south America that show that several helpers would blow through tubes into the fire. This will definitely increaase the heat, bu the lower amount of oxygen in human breath than in surrounding air, plus that breath contains CO2 and water moisture, both ingredients that cause a reduction in heat, means that the higher temperatures are not reached. There is zero evidence in Central, north or south AMerica that bellow existed.

http://www.tf.uni-kiel.de/matwis/amat/def_en/kap_5/advanced/t5_1_4.html

A Brief History of Steel

    This is a much embellished translation of an earlier version written in German (it can be found in the Hyperscript "Matwiss I") and with some footnotes added later.
 
    In order to make steel not accidentally, but conscientiously, you obviously first need to make iron. In contrast to the noble metals like gold, silver or platinum (and the occasional find of pure copper), iron is never (?) found as an element but practically always as an oxide.
    However, in contrast to other metals found as oxides (especially Cu and Sn oxides needed to make bronze), the temperature of a "normal" fire is not sufficient to reduce iron oxide and to make the elemental iron liquid - the melting point of iron is Tm(Fe) = 1535 0C; far above the (1000 - 1100) 0C that the ancients could produce (?).
    For Copper (Cu), e.g., it is different - its melting point is Tm(Cu) = 1083 0C. Throw some copper minerals in a nice hot fire made with plenty of charcoal (producing CO which is great for reducing oxides), and liquid copper will result almost automatically.
    This happened and was noticed probably a good 6000 years ago, when early potters tried to adore their pottery with nice green malachite - a copper mineral known in antiquity and used as a gem stone. What a surprise, when one day in a particularly hot fire, instead of decorated pots they found an ingot of pure - and then extremely precious - copper in their oven. Copper was otherwise only found in small quantities (much less frequent then the (then) ubiquitous gold) in mountain ranges and river beds.
    This was a decisive discovery for mankind: Precious and shiny metals could be made from dull stones. Things could be changed from one seemingly immutable form into a completely different one - alchemy has its roots right here, and the yearning for "transmogrification" has never stopped since.
    Early metal industry and the short-lived "copper age" began to be replaced rather soon by the bronze age (Cu + (5 - 10)% Sn and often some As); and the bronze age lasted more than 2000 years (it was not abruptly replaced by the iron age, but coexisted for about 1000 years).         
Koehler
From the "Kieler Nachrichten", front page, one day after after I wrote this paragraph. It says:
On the Track of Charcoalers
Up to the 16th century, Schleswig-Holstein was woodland. Then the trees were felled to produce charcoal (among other things). How that is done will be demonstrated by Stefan Brocke in the Loher woods.
    Here we first encounter the importance of impurities: A little bit of As as an impurity atom makes bronze "harder", it doesn't deform so easily any more. Of course, nobody knew this. All that was probably known was that some sources of copper and tin ore, together with all kinds of tricks (including some magic or prayers, of course) produced superior bronze.
    It is quite natural that tin and other metals were discovered shortly after the momentous discovery of copper smelting. Once you saw that precious copper could be made from some kind of rock, everybody not completely stupid would of course try what you could get with other rocks.
    We also have the beginnings of an environmental disaster, because for metal smelting you need tremendous quantities of charcoal. First in order to obtain high temperatures but, just as important, for reducing the metal oxide according to
     
MeO + C   ⇒ M  e + CO
          
    About 100 kg charcoal are needed to smelt 5 kg of copper.
    Besides shipbuilding, charcoal production is responsible for the disappearance of large parts of European forests (the disappearance of yew trees (which were ubiquitous in antiquity) from present day forests, by the way, is due to the middle age bow-and-arrow industry - nothing beats a yew bow!). Charcoal production was a major industry and the source of the many charcoaler ("Köhler") stories in fairy tales and folklore.
    Beside Cu and Sn, Pb, Hg, Ag, and of course Au, were known and produced on an industrial scale - especially by the Romans. But the Romans (and the Chinese, and the Indians, and the ...) had also Fe - but still no fire hot enough to melt it.
    Early experience with the smelting and melting of other metals did not help in producing iron - it first came into use about 1000 years later than bronze. This must have been a kind of puzzle, because the ancients did know that iron existed. It was extremely rare and precious - because it fell from the sky in exceedingly small quantities.
 
    King Tut, matter of fact, had a little iron dagger made from meteorite iron right on his breast - obviously his most precious object. In old Sumeria, iron was called "sky metal" and the pharaohs in old Egypt knew it as "black copper from the sky".         
Tutanchamun's daggers    Meteorite of the eskimos
King Tut's daggers (Internet source "Stacey")    Meteorite stolen from the Eskimos

Of course, only pictures of his less precious and useless but more showy gold dagger are easy to find. The picture on the right shows both.
    The Eskimos in Greenland, matter of fact, made their iron tools for hundred of years from a large (30 tons) meteorite.
    Some American explorer (Admiral R. Peary) finally stole it (he wouldn't have expressed it that way, though) in the 1890s and had a hard time to transport it to the Natural History Museum in New York. Here it is:
 
    We may safely assume that the old materials scientists tried everything to smelt iron from suitable stones. They did have tricks to raise the temperature of a fire - in a 4500 old mastaba in Egypt, I took a picture of a relief showing six gold smiths (probably rather their Ph.D. students) blowing into the fire with hollow reeds. But just blowing with lung power will not do the trick for iron - maybe you get 1200 oC, but that's it.
    So in a typical fire with temperatures well beolw 1500 oC you do not get liquid iron - but you do get solid iron because reduction does take place - in a solid state reaction. What you get is an iron bloom ("Eisenblüte" in German), a mixture of fine iron particles, unreacted iron oxide, slag and charcoal residue. Here is an actual picture of some ancient bloom (from around 600 AD; I actually "found" this myself (in some museum).
 
Ancient iron bloom
 
    The iron in the bloom was rather pure (and thus comparatively soft) because a solid state reaction produces only iron - carbon or other impurities have to diffuse in from the outside (if the iron would be liquid, it would just dissolve the dirt up to the solubility limit).
    The early iron smiths (probably being Hethites of some form) could "wring" the iron from this bloom by separating the iron from the rest mechanically and repeatedly hammering together what was left at high temperatures (about 800 oC; some of the slag then is liquid and gets squeezed out) with, no doubt, proper prayers to the respective gods and many (magical) tricks.
    What they finally obtained was "wrought iron" ("Schmiedeeisen"), i.e. a lump of rather pure iron consisting of small pieces welded together, with plenty of small inclusions (small, because of the hammering that breaks up large pieces of slag).
    Extreme care was necessary - from the selection of the iron ore, the reduction process and the hammering business. If you were careless, the iron oxidized again (it really "burns" at temperatures in excess of about 800 oC), and if you kept your reduction process going too long, carbon diffuses in and you may end up with cast iron (C content about 3% - 4%; melting point as low as 1130 0C). Then you actually got it liquid - "casting" was possible - but cast iron is brittle and useless (for weapons, that is).
    Somewhat later, with larger furnaces and increased experience, the bloom obtained may have contained some high-carbon melted parts on its top layer. It then consisted of a whole range of iron-carbon alloys - from rather pure wrought iron to cast iron with good steel - say 0,5 % - 1,5% carbon - in between. The art of the smith than included to pick the right pieces. This was a highly developed skill, we know about it especially from Japan; but that does not mean that the Kelts or others did not do it just as well.
    But beware. The art of making iron and steel, developed over 2000 years in many civilizations, cannot be contained in a few lines, not to mention that very little is known about that story - iron, after all, rusts (see the link showing an old sword), and not much has been found that gives detailed knowledge about how the old romans, Indian, Chinese, etc. made their steel and iron products.
    Nevertheless - the early smiths, starting with the Greek god Hephaistos (the roman Volcanos) and containing many fabulous figures like the Nordic "Wieland the smith" or "Mime" in Wagners "Ring des Nibelungen", could produce articles, especially swords, from the iron bloom that were much better than the customary bronze stuff (and than of course "Magical" swords). In other words, they sometimes succeeded in making good steel.
    What was their secret? It is rather simple - looking at it retrospectively: You need the proper concentration of C in the Fe bcc lattice at room temperature (some other impurities are helpful, too; while others - especially S and P - were harmful). Raising the about 0,1% C in wrought iron to an optimal 0,7 -0,9%, raised the hardness (or better the yield point) threefold! But if you got too much - say 2% - you were on the road to brittle cast iron not useful for swords.
    Not being able too melt iron (and thus not being able to throw some magical stuff into the brew) the only way to get carbon (or on occasion N which also "works") into the Fe lattice was diffusion via the surface. What you needed to do was to "roast" you iron (possibly the whole sword) for the right time at the right temperature in a charcoal fire. Magic and praying helped - it did indeed: How do you keep track of the time without a watch? You utter a long prayer that you learned from your master - the right ones "worked"! The rest of the magical ritual was helpful in providing reproducible conditions.
    Of course the old practitioners had no idea of what the really were doing; if they thought about it, they felt that were purifying the iron in the (more or less holy) fire. This erroneous believe (like so many others) goes back to the (from a materials science point of view somewhat questionable) philosopher Aristoteles who certainly asked the right questions about life the universe and so on, and is righteously famous for that. His answers, however, were invariably wrong - even in the few instances where he could have known better.
    Well, we have made but the first step to steel. We now must make a few more steps for good homogeneous steel - or we delve into a fascinating world of its own, the various damascene techniques, one of which is blending different kinds of steel into a compound material. More to that in the link.
    Here we look first a bit on what happens in heating up and cooling down your material. We know, after all, that going up in temperature, iron changes at 910 0C from the bcc ferrite phase to the fcc austenite phase.
    Carbon feels much more at home in austenite - its solubility is higher than in ferrite. If the smith kept his iron in a good fire very long, he now might have had a rather carbon rich austenite in the outer layers of his sword. So what happens upon cooling down?
    Well, it depends. If the iron cools down s l o w l y, the carbon rich austenite will change to carbon rich ferrite. If there is more carbon in the austenite than the ferrite can dissolve, carbon will precipitate, forming a new Fe - C phase called cementite (with a quite complicated lattice). We now have cementite particles in fcc ferrite; usually in a very typical structure - both phases appear like a stack of plates. This kind of structure is called perlite because, looking at it under a microscope, it has a luster like pearls..
    Perlite, the mixture of ferrite and cementite, however, is not much better than bronze as far as its mechanical properties are concerned. So you must prevent the phase change from austenite to perlite if you want to keep your sword "magic"! In other word, you must not allow enough time for the carbon atoms to diffuse around during cooling as would be necessary for forming precipitates. In other words: You must cool down rapidly (hopefully you did the proper exercise for calculating how fast you must cool down).
    Here we have the next big trick - after making bloom, extracting wrought iron, and carburization: Quenching - often the big secret of master smiths (there is a whole Japanese mythology to this subject). The hot sword is stuck in a liquid for some time and thus quenched - and only very unimaginative smiths would have taken common water at room temperature for that.
    If the cooling time was too short to allow Fe-C precipitate formation, we now have a supersaturation of C in the ferrite phase which then will have a strongly disturbed lattice structure. A kind of mixture between fcc and bcc phases will prevail which has its own name: "Martensite".
    Now you did it: Martensite has the fivefold "strength" of wrought iron!
    Unfortunately - if you got martensite at all, it tends to be brittle! Now the next bag of tricks is needed: Heat up your sword again - but keep the temperature moderate.
    Some of the defects that make martensite brittle anneal out and its ductility goes up. Bang it (i.e. deform it plastically), and you produce dislocations (hey, that's were we started from some time back!). Now you are manipulating a second kind of defect for optimizing mechanical properties!
    But now we stop (so does the smith). If you really want to know much more about this, use this link.
    Anyway, if everything worked, you now have a very good (and of course magical) sword which was far superior to the bronze stuff of your opponents. In particular, you could make it longer without having to worry that it might break in battle (which was about the worst health hazard imaginable then).
    And don't think that an increase in strength by a factor of 4 - 5 is not all that much. The old Gauls, Asterix and Obelix notwithstanding, were conquered by the Romans not least because their swords bent and needed straightening (over your knee) after a forceful blow - something the Roman swords did not need. (Haha - don't you believe all this Roman propaganda!)
 
    Well, making a good steel sword was lots of work, lots of knowledge, and lots of luck. Considering what could go wrong, it is quite remarkable that the old smiths actually did produce superior steel swords now and then. Of course, probably more often then not, only the outer layer was steel, while the inside was still soft wrought iron - the sword was made from compound materials, in fact.
    This gives us (and possibly also the old smithies) the idea of doing that from the start: Weld together soft and hard layers, carefully picked from the bloom or made by carburization, and hope that the result will combine the positive properties of both materials. We are talking damascene techniques here.
    However, the word "damascene techniques" is a collective identifier of several very different technologies. Most people associate it with a kind of compound technology where two different kinds of steel were put together in layers and then forged into a sword or whatever. While this is something that was done - especially by the Kelts and other North Europeans - it was not what the guys in Damascus did, the purported source of the famous damascene blades.
    As far as we know today, the "true" damascene technique actually worked with a famous kind of steel, so called "wootz" which was produced in India for maybe a 1000 years in a kind of closely guarded monopoly. Wootz was rich in carbon (about 2%; there was a secret carburization technique) and the trick was to precipitate the surplus carbon in a pattern of fine FeC3 precipitates.
    A fascinating world unfolds behind the catch word "damascene technique", if you like you can browse the following links
    Damascene Technique in Metal Working
    Literature to Damascene (and Other) Techniques in the Production of Iron and Steel From the Internet
    A Cross-Linked Glossary of Some Terms from the History of Metal Working
    Steel technology was not confined to the Mediterranean and the European North West. India may well have been at the apex of steel technology and China had its own technology centered around cast iron, used not so much for warfare but for civil objects like pots and pans.
    And lets not forget the Haya, a people who lived in what is now Tanzania. They had a highly developed Fe technology and used it for beautiful sculptures, too. Their myths and fairy tales contain many stories relating to the making of iron, using a vocabulary that was heartily enriched with expressions relating to the making of humans.
    There is even some evidence - collected recently (and, of course, being discussed controversially), that the old Africans had the highest temperatures of all, even reaching the melting point of iron some 2000 years ago (long before everybody else did)
    Whatever happened whenever and wherever, during the millennia, and despite the many difficulties, iron and steel became common materials. At some time in the middle ages or Renaissance, the melting temperature could be reached, but the mass production of good steel still had to wait for the 19th century. Before, only "thin" objects - the paradigmatic "sword" or katana, scimitar, saif, shamshir, tachi, tulwar, yatagan,.. - could be made by in-diffusion of carbon.
    Charcoal was replaced in the 17th century with coal, but not without unpleasant surprises. Iron that was smelted with coal instead of charcoal was very brittle and completely useless. We now know, of course, that minute amounts of sulfur in the Fe lattice - it segregates in grain boundaries - are sufficient to make Fe brittle, and S, like other harmful impurities, is contained in regular coal in rather large concentrations.
    The solution to this problem, surprisingly, did not come from the military related strata of society, but from the second most important enterprise dear to the hearts of men: beer brewing. Brewers had tried to use coal instead of charcoal for roasting the barley - and produced a stinking abominable brew. Thusly coke was invented: Roast coal in an environment deprived of oxygen - the stinky stuff will evaporate and what remains is clean carbon - called coke - which could not only be used to brew beer, but was also usable for the iron smelting industry.
    The beginning of the industrial revolution was severely hampered by the lack of a large-scale process for the production of good steel. (Just imagine how the Si revolution would have fared without large dislocation free and rather perfect Si crystals). The (at least in German and French) paradigmatic Eisenbahn (chemin de fer in French), the rail road, needs rails; with regular wrought iron or cast iron the rails had to be renewed every 6 month because they deformed under the load (or cracked). Accidents were frequent and often catastrophic.
    The production of large amounts of iron was common by then - the essential part was blowing large amounts of air into the fire with the aid of mechanical bellows powered by steam engines. The leading British production accounted for 2,5 million tons of iron in 1850, but the production of steel was still a cumbersome and expensive business, accounting for a few percent of the total production.
    It was also known for sure since 1786 that steel had something to do with carbon; the first person suspecting this was one Tobern Bergmann in 1774 (other sources, however, refer to Vandemonte, Berthollet and Monge from France).
    Still, all efforts to produce iron with the proper carbon content (and the right structure) "from scratch", were in vain. Sometimes things worked, sometimes they didn't - there was no large-scale, reliable, and reproducible process. And thus no big bridges, sky scrapers, safe railroads, big ships, efficient engines, and so on - one rarely reflects how much cheap steel changed the world!
    This time, however, progress came from the military industrial complex. It became simply too embarrassing that the big canons (made from cast iron) had a tendency to explode. Something had to happen.
    It was Henry Bessemer who was especially interested in good steel for big canons, because he had just invented a new kind of projectile that received some spin even from smooth bore guns (and thus was harder to destabilize during flight). Unfortunately, the canons couldn't take the additional pressure building up while the projectile was building up spin as well as speed- they exploded more than ever. So Bessemer was looking for large amounts of cheap steel.
    He was then the first person (so it was believed for a while) who had the genius idea of making steel by getting carbon out of cheap, carbon rich cast iron, instead of using the cumbersome way of getting carbon into low-carbon wrought iron. The way to "drive out" the surplus carbon was to blast large amount of oxygen through the cast iron melt (which, by the way, definitely needed the steam engine; quite hard to do this through a reed). CO will form in the melt which not only burns off to CO2 upon hitting the air, but by doing this supplies the heat to increase the temperature of the melt because the melting point will go up with decreasing carbon content. If you stop at the right time (looking at the color of the flame), you will be able to adjust the carbon content of a large amount of iron to just the right value and thus produce large amounts of good steel.
    Mr. Bessemer, who was not exactly unknown before (he already had some fame as the inventor of the "lead" pencil (which in reality contains graphite), after publishing his finding on Aug. 12th, 1856 became very famous - and very rich - quickly; everybody wanted his process. The London Times went as far as printing the whole paper two days later.
    But point defects were fighting back. The industrial realization of the Bessemer process with large quantities of ore and coke yielded a big and very unpleasant surprise: Bessemer steel from large size production, in contrast to the Bessemer steel from "laboratory" experiments, was brittle and not fit for anything. Bessemer felt like "being hit by a flash of lightning from the blue sky"; the descend from the Olympic heights of top inventors to desperation was quick and brutal.
    But Bessemer was a good materials scientist and engineer; if it worked once, it must work again. There must be reasons for what happened, and with diligence, one can find out what is going wrong. What had happened?
    Well, Bessemers work, and the work of many others, supplied the (here much simplified) answer. Bessemer used Swedish iron ore for his experiments (you always use the best in lab experiments), while his industrial country fellows used English ore - and this stuff contained some phosphorous. The Bessemer process (possibly in contrast to the old-fashioned steel making process) did not remove the phosphorous, and small amounts of P are sufficient to render steel brittle. As we know now, P segregates in the grain boundaries and changes the local properties in a detrimental way.
    Phosphorous had to be removed (if you lived in merry old England, out on a conquest to assemble an empire, you did not want to have your steel production depend on the supply of Swedish iron ore). Two cousins, Sydney Gilchrist Thomas and Percy Carlyle Gilchrist, found the way in 1875: Take (among other things) chalk stone for the lining of the Bessemer converter and even add some to the melt. The phosphorus would react with the CaO of the burnt chalk and end up in the slag which could be skinned from the liquid steel, or stuck to the lining.
    There were plenty of other problems - on occasion, e.g., some oxygen remained in the steel and rendered it useless. Mr. Mushet, another Englishman coming to the aid of his country, found the solution: Add some "Spiegeleisen" (an iron - manganese alloy found somewhere in Germany) and your problems are gone. The Mn reacts with the surplus O and forms slag. It also neutrlizes any sulfur in the mix, which would otherwise create real trouble.
    So besides Bessemer, many people were involved in bringing large scale steel production to fruition. And, as it practically always will turn out with great inventions, somebody else did it before. In this case it was one Mr. Kelly from the USA, who had the "Bessemer" idea 10 years before Bessemer himself. While he made a mint over patent hassles, the name Bessemer remains attached to steel, and Kelly is quite forgotten as a materials scientist.
    After the Bessemer process was sufficiently debugged, steel production took off and became supremely important strategically.
    Siemens in Germany and Martin in France developed the "Siemens-Martin process" and so on and so forth. The world production of steel grew exponentially (like Si or chips today): 22 kto in 1867, 500 kto in 1870, 1 Mto in 1880 and 28 Mto around the turn of the century. Today we are in excess of 500 Mto a year.
    In 1970 politicians generally still believed, that the wealth of a nation (and thus its power to subdue others) was directly coupled to its steel production (and thus to the degree of the nations prowess in manipulating point defects in Fe).
    You may feel now that we are talking chemistry here, and the typical urge of the chemist to produce pure substances. Nothing could be farther from the truth. We are exclusively discussing the dramatic influence of point defects on certain properties of a crystal lattice, like its resistance to the generation and movement of dislocations.
    If you would like to read more about this subject, refer to the splendid books of S. Sass, I. Amato und R. Hummel.
 
      
    Polybius was the guy who wrote about those bending swords of the gauls. The gauls as all other celts, unfortunately, did not write anything. "Publish or perish" is not a new invention
    That the swords of the gauls / celts were inferior to those of the romans is about as believable as the existence of wepaons of mass destruction in Iraq 2000 years later: It was and is propaganda, stupid!
    It probably was the other way around. The celtish long sword made from damascene steel was far superior to the roman short sword, and eventually (around 300 AD) was adopted as the roman "spatha".
    One is tempted to generalize: maybe the famous roman technology was mostly adopted from other folks? Be that as it may, the way the Romans used technology - based on discipline, organization and large-scale production - was unprecedented and instrumental in conquering most everybody.
 
    Here are most modules dealing with the subject as a list:
    Steel from a Materials Science and Engineering point of view
    Details to Damascene Technologies with many links to more sites.
    A "magical" Sword
    In German: Magische Schwerter (und japanische Schwerter)
    In German: Gruselige Schmiedegeschichten (mit Magie).
    In German: Der Ring des Nibelungen Zur Schmiedekunst und Siegfrieds Schwert
 

THe site atated above may be easier to read and it also contains pictures.

Please comment if you've managed to read this far. 

[waveslider]

1 hour ago, bcuzbcuz said:

Several who have commented here seem to have a poor definition of melting and smelting and the differences between them. Melting is the reducing into a liquid form, Smelting is often at a higher heat and means the adding or subtracting materials from the base ore.

Another problem is the heat. Iron melts at 2000 deg. F (1000 deg.C). There are reliefs in south America that show that several helpers would blow through tubes into the fire. This will definitely increaase the heat, bu the lower amount of oxygen in human breath than in surrounding air, plus that breath contains CO2 and water moisture, both ingredients that cause a reduction in heat, means that the higher temperatures are not reached. There is zero evidence in Central, north or south AMerica that bellow existed.

http://www.tf.uni-kiel.de/matwis/amat/def_en/kap_5/advanced/t5_1_4.html

A Brief History of Steel

    This is a much embellished translation of an earlier version written in German (it can be found in the Hyperscript "Matwiss I") and with some footnotes added later.
 
    In order to make steel not accidentally, but conscientiously, you obviously first need to make iron. In contrast to the noble metals like gold, silver or platinum (and the occasional find of pure copper), iron is never (?) found as an element but practically always as an oxide.
    However, in contrast to other metals found as oxides (especially Cu and Sn oxides needed to make bronze), the temperature of a "normal" fire is not sufficient to reduce iron oxide and to make the elemental iron liquid - the melting point of iron is Tm(Fe) = 1535 0C; far above the (1000 - 1100) 0C that the ancients could produce (?).
    For Copper (Cu), e.g., it is different - its melting point is Tm(Cu) = 1083 0C. Throw some copper minerals in a nice hot fire made with plenty of charcoal (producing CO which is great for reducing oxides), and liquid copper will result almost automatically.
    This happened and was noticed probably a good 6000 years ago, when early potters tried to adore their pottery with nice green malachite - a copper mineral known in antiquity and used as a gem stone. What a surprise, when one day in a particularly hot fire, instead of decorated pots they found an ingot of pure - and then extremely precious - copper in their oven. Copper was otherwise only found in small quantities (much less frequent then the (then) ubiquitous gold) in mountain ranges and river beds.
    This was a decisive discovery for mankind: Precious and shiny metals could be made from dull stones. Things could be changed from one seemingly immutable form into a completely different one - alchemy has its roots right here, and the yearning for "transmogrification" has never stopped since.
    Early metal industry and the short-lived "copper age" began to be replaced rather soon by the bronze age (Cu + (5 - 10)% Sn and often some As); and the bronze age lasted more than 2000 years (it was not abruptly replaced by the iron age, but coexisted for about 1000 years).         
Koehler
From the "Kieler Nachrichten", front page, one day after after I wrote this paragraph. It says:
On the Track of Charcoalers
Up to the 16th century, Schleswig-Holstein was woodland. Then the trees were felled to produce charcoal (among other things). How that is done will be demonstrated by Stefan Brocke in the Loher woods.
    Here we first encounter the importance of impurities: A little bit of As as an impurity atom makes bronze "harder", it doesn't deform so easily any more. Of course, nobody knew this. All that was probably known was that some sources of copper and tin ore, together with all kinds of tricks (including some magic or prayers, of course) produced superior bronze.
    It is quite natural that tin and other metals were discovered shortly after the momentous discovery of copper smelting. Once you saw that precious copper could be made from some kind of rock, everybody not completely stupid would of course try what you could get with other rocks.
    We also have the beginnings of an environmental disaster, because for metal smelting you need tremendous quantities of charcoal. First in order to obtain high temperatures but, just as important, for reducing the metal oxide according to
     
MeO + C   ⇒ M  e + CO
          
    About 100 kg charcoal are needed to smelt 5 kg of copper.
    Besides shipbuilding, charcoal production is responsible for the disappearance of large parts of European forests (the disappearance of yew trees (which were ubiquitous in antiquity) from present day forests, by the way, is due to the middle age bow-and-arrow industry - nothing beats a yew bow!). Charcoal production was a major industry and the source of the many charcoaler ("Köhler") stories in fairy tales and folklore.
    Beside Cu and Sn, Pb, Hg, Ag, and of course Au, were known and produced on an industrial scale - especially by the Romans. But the Romans (and the Chinese, and the Indians, and the ...) had also Fe - but still no fire hot enough to melt it.
    Early experience with the smelting and melting of other metals did not help in producing iron - it first came into use about 1000 years later than bronze. This must have been a kind of puzzle, because the ancients did know that iron existed. It was extremely rare and precious - because it fell from the sky in exceedingly small quantities.
 
    King Tut, matter of fact, had a little iron dagger made from meteorite iron right on his breast - obviously his most precious object. In old Sumeria, iron was called "sky metal" and the pharaohs in old Egypt knew it as "black copper from the sky".         
Tutanchamun's daggers    Meteorite of the eskimos
King Tut's daggers (Internet source "Stacey")    Meteorite stolen from the Eskimos

Of course, only pictures of his less precious and useless but more showy gold dagger are easy to find. The picture on the right shows both.
    The Eskimos in Greenland, matter of fact, made their iron tools for hundred of years from a large (30 tons) meteorite.
    Some American explorer (Admiral R. Peary) finally stole it (he wouldn't have expressed it that way, though) in the 1890s and had a hard time to transport it to the Natural History Museum in New York. Here it is:
 
    We may safely assume that the old materials scientists tried everything to smelt iron from suitable stones. They did have tricks to raise the temperature of a fire - in a 4500 old mastaba in Egypt, I took a picture of a relief showing six gold smiths (probably rather their Ph.D. students) blowing into the fire with hollow reeds. But just blowing with lung power will not do the trick for iron - maybe you get 1200 oC, but that's it.
    So in a typical fire with temperatures well beolw 1500 oC you do not get liquid iron - but you do get solid iron because reduction does take place - in a solid state reaction. What you get is an iron bloom ("Eisenblüte" in German), a mixture of fine iron particles, unreacted iron oxide, slag and charcoal residue. Here is an actual picture of some ancient bloom (from around 600 AD; I actually "found" this myself (in some museum).
 
Ancient iron bloom
 
    The iron in the bloom was rather pure (and thus comparatively soft) because a solid state reaction produces only iron - carbon or other impurities have to diffuse in from the outside (if the iron would be liquid, it would just dissolve the dirt up to the solubility limit).
    The early iron smiths (probably being Hethites of some form) could "wring" the iron from this bloom by separating the iron from the rest mechanically and repeatedly hammering together what was left at high temperatures (about 800 oC; some of the slag then is liquid and gets squeezed out) with, no doubt, proper prayers to the respective gods and many (magical) tricks.
    What they finally obtained was "wrought iron" ("Schmiedeeisen"), i.e. a lump of rather pure iron consisting of small pieces welded together, with plenty of small inclusions (small, because of the hammering that breaks up large pieces of slag).
    Extreme care was necessary - from the selection of the iron ore, the reduction process and the hammering business. If you were careless, the iron oxidized again (it really "burns" at temperatures in excess of about 800 oC), and if you kept your reduction process going too long, carbon diffuses in and you may end up with cast iron (C content about 3% - 4%; melting point as low as 1130 0C). Then you actually got it liquid - "casting" was possible - but cast iron is brittle and useless (for weapons, that is).
    Somewhat later, with larger furnaces and increased experience, the bloom obtained may have contained some high-carbon melted parts on its top layer. It then consisted of a whole range of iron-carbon alloys - from rather pure wrought iron to cast iron with good steel - say 0,5 % - 1,5% carbon - in between. The art of the smith than included to pick the right pieces. This was a highly developed skill, we know about it especially from Japan; but that does not mean that the Kelts or others did not do it just as well.
    But beware. The art of making iron and steel, developed over 2000 years in many civilizations, cannot be contained in a few lines, not to mention that very little is known about that story - iron, after all, rusts (see the link showing an old sword), and not much has been found that gives detailed knowledge about how the old romans, Indian, Chinese, etc. made their steel and iron products.
    Nevertheless - the early smiths, starting with the Greek god Hephaistos (the roman Volcanos) and containing many fabulous figures like the Nordic "Wieland the smith" or "Mime" in Wagners "Ring des Nibelungen", could produce articles, especially swords, from the iron bloom that were much better than the customary bronze stuff (and than of course "Magical" swords). In other words, they sometimes succeeded in making good steel.
    What was their secret? It is rather simple - looking at it retrospectively: You need the proper concentration of C in the Fe bcc lattice at room temperature (some other impurities are helpful, too; while others - especially S and P - were harmful). Raising the about 0,1% C in wrought iron to an optimal 0,7 -0,9%, raised the hardness (or better the yield point) threefold! But if you got too much - say 2% - you were on the road to brittle cast iron not useful for swords.
    Not being able too melt iron (and thus not being able to throw some magical stuff into the brew) the only way to get carbon (or on occasion N which also "works") into the Fe lattice was diffusion via the surface. What you needed to do was to "roast" you iron (possibly the whole sword) for the right time at the right temperature in a charcoal fire. Magic and praying helped - it did indeed: How do you keep track of the time without a watch? You utter a long prayer that you learned from your master - the right ones "worked"! The rest of the magical ritual was helpful in providing reproducible conditions.
    Of course the old practitioners had no idea of what the really were doing; if they thought about it, they felt that were purifying the iron in the (more or less holy) fire. This erroneous believe (like so many others) goes back to the (from a materials science point of view somewhat questionable) philosopher Aristoteles who certainly asked the right questions about life the universe and so on, and is righteously famous for that. His answers, however, were invariably wrong - even in the few instances where he could have known better.
    Well, we have made but the first step to steel. We now must make a few more steps for good homogeneous steel - or we delve into a fascinating world of its own, the various damascene techniques, one of which is blending different kinds of steel into a compound material. More to that in the link.
    Here we look first a bit on what happens in heating up and cooling down your material. We know, after all, that going up in temperature, iron changes at 910 0C from the bcc ferrite phase to the fcc austenite phase.
    Carbon feels much more at home in austenite - its solubility is higher than in ferrite. If the smith kept his iron in a good fire very long, he now might have had a rather carbon rich austenite in the outer layers of his sword. So what happens upon cooling down?
    Well, it depends. If the iron cools down s l o w l y, the carbon rich austenite will change to carbon rich ferrite. If there is more carbon in the austenite than the ferrite can dissolve, carbon will precipitate, forming a new Fe - C phase called cementite (with a quite complicated lattice). We now have cementite particles in fcc ferrite; usually in a very typical structure - both phases appear like a stack of plates. This kind of structure is called perlite because, looking at it under a microscope, it has a luster like pearls..
    Perlite, the mixture of ferrite and cementite, however, is not much better than bronze as far as its mechanical properties are concerned. So you must prevent the phase change from austenite to perlite if you want to keep your sword "magic"! In other word, you must not allow enough time for the carbon atoms to diffuse around during cooling as would be necessary for forming precipitates. In other words: You must cool down rapidly (hopefully you did the proper exercise for calculating how fast you must cool down).
    Here we have the next big trick - after making bloom, extracting wrought iron, and carburization: Quenching - often the big secret of master smiths (there is a whole Japanese mythology to this subject). The hot sword is stuck in a liquid for some time and thus quenched - and only very unimaginative smiths would have taken common water at room temperature for that.
    If the cooling time was too short to allow Fe-C precipitate formation, we now have a supersaturation of C in the ferrite phase which then will have a strongly disturbed lattice structure. A kind of mixture between fcc and bcc phases will prevail which has its own name: "Martensite".
    Now you did it: Martensite has the fivefold "strength" of wrought iron!
    Unfortunately - if you got martensite at all, it tends to be brittle! Now the next bag of tricks is needed: Heat up your sword again - but keep the temperature moderate.
    Some of the defects that make martensite brittle anneal out and its ductility goes up. Bang it (i.e. deform it plastically), and you produce dislocations (hey, that's were we started from some time back!). Now you are manipulating a second kind of defect for optimizing mechanical properties!
    But now we stop (so does the smith). If you really want to know much more about this, use this link.
    Anyway, if everything worked, you now have a very good (and of course magical) sword which was far superior to the bronze stuff of your opponents. In particular, you could make it longer without having to worry that it might break in battle (which was about the worst health hazard imaginable then).
    And don't think that an increase in strength by a factor of 4 - 5 is not all that much. The old Gauls, Asterix and Obelix notwithstanding, were conquered by the Romans not least because their swords bent and needed straightening (over your knee) after a forceful blow - something the Roman swords did not need. (Haha - don't you believe all this Roman propaganda!)
 
    Well, making a good steel sword was lots of work, lots of knowledge, and lots of luck. Considering what could go wrong, it is quite remarkable that the old smiths actually did produce superior steel swords now and then. Of course, probably more often then not, only the outer layer was steel, while the inside was still soft wrought iron - the sword was made from compound materials, in fact.
    This gives us (and possibly also the old smithies) the idea of doing that from the start: Weld together soft and hard layers, carefully picked from the bloom or made by carburization, and hope that the result will combine the positive properties of both materials. We are talking damascene techniques here.
    However, the word "damascene techniques" is a collective identifier of several very different technologies. Most people associate it with a kind of compound technology where two different kinds of steel were put together in layers and then forged into a sword or whatever. While this is something that was done - especially by the Kelts and other North Europeans - it was not what the guys in Damascus did, the purported source of the famous damascene blades.
    As far as we know today, the "true" damascene technique actually worked with a famous kind of steel, so called "wootz" which was produced in India for maybe a 1000 years in a kind of closely guarded monopoly. Wootz was rich in carbon (about 2%; there was a secret carburization technique) and the trick was to precipitate the surplus carbon in a pattern of fine FeC3 precipitates.
    A fascinating world unfolds behind the catch word "damascene technique", if you like you can browse the following links
    Damascene Technique in Metal Working
    Literature to Damascene (and Other) Techniques in the Production of Iron and Steel From the Internet
    A Cross-Linked Glossary of Some Terms from the History of Metal Working
    Steel technology was not confined to the Mediterranean and the European North West. India may well have been at the apex of steel technology and China had its own technology centered around cast iron, used not so much for warfare but for civil objects like pots and pans.
    And lets not forget the Haya, a people who lived in what is now Tanzania. They had a highly developed Fe technology and used it for beautiful sculptures, too. Their myths and fairy tales contain many stories relating to the making of iron, using a vocabulary that was heartily enriched with expressions relating to the making of humans.
    There is even some evidence - collected recently (and, of course, being discussed controversially), that the old Africans had the highest temperatures of all, even reaching the melting point of iron some 2000 years ago (long before everybody else did)
    Whatever happened whenever and wherever, during the millennia, and despite the many difficulties, iron and steel became common materials. At some time in the middle ages or Renaissance, the melting temperature could be reached, but the mass production of good steel still had to wait for the 19th century. Before, only "thin" objects - the paradigmatic "sword" or katana, scimitar, saif, shamshir, tachi, tulwar, yatagan,.. - could be made by in-diffusion of carbon.
    Charcoal was replaced in the 17th century with coal, but not without unpleasant surprises. Iron that was smelted with coal instead of charcoal was very brittle and completely useless. We now know, of course, that minute amounts of sulfur in the Fe lattice - it segregates in grain boundaries - are sufficient to make Fe brittle, and S, like other harmful impurities, is contained in regular coal in rather large concentrations.
    The solution to this problem, surprisingly, did not come from the military related strata of society, but from the second most important enterprise dear to the hearts of men: beer brewing. Brewers had tried to use coal instead of charcoal for roasting the barley - and produced a stinking abominable brew. Thusly coke was invented: Roast coal in an environment deprived of oxygen - the stinky stuff will evaporate and what remains is clean carbon - called coke - which could not only be used to brew beer, but was also usable for the iron smelting industry.
    The beginning of the industrial revolution was severely hampered by the lack of a large-scale process for the production of good steel. (Just imagine how the Si revolution would have fared without large dislocation free and rather perfect Si crystals). The (at least in German and French) paradigmatic Eisenbahn (chemin de fer in French), the rail road, needs rails; with regular wrought iron or cast iron the rails had to be renewed every 6 month because they deformed under the load (or cracked). Accidents were frequent and often catastrophic.
    The production of large amounts of iron was common by then - the essential part was blowing large amounts of air into the fire with the aid of mechanical bellows powered by steam engines. The leading British production accounted for 2,5 million tons of iron in 1850, but the production of steel was still a cumbersome and expensive business, accounting for a few percent of the total production.
    It was also known for sure since 1786 that steel had something to do with carbon; the first person suspecting this was one Tobern Bergmann in 1774 (other sources, however, refer to Vandemonte, Berthollet and Monge from France).
    Still, all efforts to produce iron with the proper carbon content (and the right structure) "from scratch", were in vain. Sometimes things worked, sometimes they didn't - there was no large-scale, reliable, and reproducible process. And thus no big bridges, sky scrapers, safe railroads, big ships, efficient engines, and so on - one rarely reflects how much cheap steel changed the world!
    This time, however, progress came from the military industrial complex. It became simply too embarrassing that the big canons (made from cast iron) had a tendency to explode. Something had to happen.
    It was Henry Bessemer who was especially interested in good steel for big canons, because he had just invented a new kind of projectile that received some spin even from smooth bore guns (and thus was harder to destabilize during flight). Unfortunately, the canons couldn't take the additional pressure building up while the projectile was building up spin as well as speed- they exploded more than ever. So Bessemer was looking for large amounts of cheap steel.
    He was then the first person (so it was believed for a while) who had the genius idea of making steel by getting carbon out of cheap, carbon rich cast iron, instead of using the cumbersome way of getting carbon into low-carbon wrought iron. The way to "drive out" the surplus carbon was to blast large amount of oxygen through the cast iron melt (which, by the way, definitely needed the steam engine; quite hard to do this through a reed). CO will form in the melt which not only burns off to CO2 upon hitting the air, but by doing this supplies the heat to increase the temperature of the melt because the melting point will go up with decreasing carbon content. If you stop at the right time (looking at the color of the flame), you will be able to adjust the carbon content of a large amount of iron to just the right value and thus produce large amounts of good steel.
    Mr. Bessemer, who was not exactly unknown before (he already had some fame as the inventor of the "lead" pencil (which in reality contains graphite), after publishing his finding on Aug. 12th, 1856 became very famous - and very rich - quickly; everybody wanted his process. The London Times went as far as printing the whole paper two days later.
    But point defects were fighting back. The industrial realization of the Bessemer process with large quantities of ore and coke yielded a big and very unpleasant surprise: Bessemer steel from large size production, in contrast to the Bessemer steel from "laboratory" experiments, was brittle and not fit for anything. Bessemer felt like "being hit by a flash of lightning from the blue sky"; the descend from the Olympic heights of top inventors to desperation was quick and brutal.
    But Bessemer was a good materials scientist and engineer; if it worked once, it must work again. There must be reasons for what happened, and with diligence, one can find out what is going wrong. What had happened?
    Well, Bessemers work, and the work of many others, supplied the (here much simplified) answer. Bessemer used Swedish iron ore for his experiments (you always use the best in lab experiments), while his industrial country fellows used English ore - and this stuff contained some phosphorous. The Bessemer process (possibly in contrast to the old-fashioned steel making process) did not remove the phosphorous, and small amounts of P are sufficient to render steel brittle. As we know now, P segregates in the grain boundaries and changes the local properties in a detrimental way.
    Phosphorous had to be removed (if you lived in merry old England, out on a conquest to assemble an empire, you did not want to have your steel production depend on the supply of Swedish iron ore). Two cousins, Sydney Gilchrist Thomas and Percy Carlyle Gilchrist, found the way in 1875: Take (among other things) chalk stone for the lining of the Bessemer converter and even add some to the melt. The phosphorus would react with the CaO of the burnt chalk and end up in the slag which could be skinned from the liquid steel, or stuck to the lining.
    There were plenty of other problems - on occasion, e.g., some oxygen remained in the steel and rendered it useless. Mr. Mushet, another Englishman coming to the aid of his country, found the solution: Add some "Spiegeleisen" (an iron - manganese alloy found somewhere in Germany) and your problems are gone. The Mn reacts with the surplus O and forms slag. It also neutrlizes any sulfur in the mix, which would otherwise create real trouble.
    So besides Bessemer, many people were involved in bringing large scale steel production to fruition. And, as it practically always will turn out with great inventions, somebody else did it before. In this case it was one Mr. Kelly from the USA, who had the "Bessemer" idea 10 years before Bessemer himself. While he made a mint over patent hassles, the name Bessemer remains attached to steel, and Kelly is quite forgotten as a materials scientist.
    After the Bessemer process was sufficiently debugged, steel production took off and became supremely important strategically.
    Siemens in Germany and Martin in France developed the "Siemens-Martin process" and so on and so forth. The world production of steel grew exponentially (like Si or chips today): 22 kto in 1867, 500 kto in 1870, 1 Mto in 1880 and 28 Mto around the turn of the century. Today we are in excess of 500 Mto a year.
    In 1970 politicians generally still believed, that the wealth of a nation (and thus its power to subdue others) was directly coupled to its steel production (and thus to the degree of the nations prowess in manipulating point defects in Fe).
    You may feel now that we are talking chemistry here, and the typical urge of the chemist to produce pure substances. Nothing could be farther from the truth. We are exclusively discussing the dramatic influence of point defects on certain properties of a crystal lattice, like its resistance to the generation and movement of dislocations.
    If you would like to read more about this subject, refer to the splendid books of S. Sass, I. Amato und R. Hummel.
 
      
    Polybius was the guy who wrote about those bending swords of the gauls. The gauls as all other celts, unfortunately, did not write anything. "Publish or perish" is not a new invention
    That the swords of the gauls / celts were inferior to those of the romans is about as believable as the existence of wepaons of mass destruction in Iraq 2000 years later: It was and is propaganda, stupid!
    It probably was the other way around. The celtish long sword made from damascene steel was far superior to the roman short sword, and eventually (around 300 AD) was adopted as the roman "spatha".
    One is tempted to generalize: maybe the famous roman technology was mostly adopted from other folks? Be that as it may, the way the Romans used technology - based on discipline, organization and large-scale production - was unprecedented and instrumental in conquering most everybody.
 
    Here are most modules dealing with the subject as a list:
    Steel from a Materials Science and Engineering point of view
    Details to Damascene Technologies with many links to more sites.
    A "magical" Sword
    In German: Magische Schwerter (und japanische Schwerter)
    In German: Gruselige Schmiedegeschichten (mit Magie).
    In German: Der Ring des Nibelungen Zur Schmiedekunst und Siegfrieds Schwert
 

THe site atated above may be easier to read and it also contains pictures.

Please comment if you've managed to read this far. 

That was a lot to read..... Whew! I'm glad that's over.

I never studied the history of smelting a whole lot, but I do know how to smelt a pretty good blade from iron sand and yes, charcoal. I don't need a reed or a blower. I just need to make a rocket type of stove, only making sure that it doesn't have any leaks in it apart from a small opening at the bottom to allow the natural convection of the air to go through it, all the way up to the top opening. If the whole thing is kept full of charcoal, and letting the iron sand filter through it as it burns, all day, while making sure that the air hole doesn't clog up. I will end up with a pretty good bloom, when I break up the rocket stove type of smelter to retrieve it.

If I take that bloom and use yet more charcoal to forge it into steel, cutting and folding it, it eventually turns into some pretty good steel to be forged into a blade. I am able to even differentiate between the high carbon (which it gains from being burned and in contact with the carbon produced from the charcoal) and low carbon parts as I hammer them and watch what type of sparks fly out. After a lot of work forging it into a blade, If I then quench my blade in some oil, that is heated to around 500 degrees or so, I can take it out and if it has any bends in it, all I need to do is wedge the blade between the slightly open jaws of my bench vice and bend it back before it cools too much and straighten it without causing damage to the structure of the steel. Then if I draw it back to temperature a little bit, after it has finished cooling, until it is a yellowish color, about the color of straw, it will not be too brittle yet will be hardened enough to keep a really good edge on it. It is a lot of work but it can be done, by a singe person if needed. No need to have reeds to blow through or anything.

That said I am not trying to say that this is proof that anyone in the book of Mormon was really making steel bladed swords, or not, just that it is a very real possibility if they knew how to do it. So it can't be discounted no matter how hard, or magical it seems to be. It is actually a very doable process if you don't mind working long and hard at it. To be honest I don't feel like getting drawn into a bunch of conjecturing as to the authenticity of things because I don't need to find proof that the BoM is real, I have had a very convincing answer to all of that already and the rest is only interesting details that don't sway me one way or the other.

 

[cdowis]

3 hours ago, bcuzbcuz said:

And all you're seeing are the long tail feathers of some elegant birds. There were no elephants in central or northern or southern America.

Think of it this way. Do the carvings represent birds that exist all over or do you stretch credibilty and choose an animal that can't be seen anywhere?

But there were woolly mammoths.     http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/25/first-images-of-mexican-mammoth-skeleton-emerge/
This particular fossil is 12KYA, and appears to have died as a result of volcanic activity.

Woolly mammoths were roughly about the size of modern African elephants. A male woolly mammoth’s shoulder height was 9 to 11 feet tall and weighed around 6 tons.

Although, most of the woolly mammoth population died out by 10KYA, a small population of 500-1000 woolly mammoths lived until 1650 BC. 

"Elephants" are mentioned in the Book of Mormon only in the context of the Jaredites in Ether chapter 9.

Edited September 9, 2016 by cdowis

[piccione]

For an interesting read on reformed Egyptian there is a free book on www.caractors.org

[piccione]

A detailed analysis of the metallurgy is had in the book Ziff, Magic Goggles, and Golden Plates which is actually available for free download at www.caractors.org

 

[Calm]

If you don't do more than just point people to your book, you will probably get banned FYI.

[waveslider]

22 minutes ago, piccione said:

A detailed analysis of the metallurgy is had in the book Ziff, Magic Goggles, and Golden Plates which is actually available for free download at www.caractors.org

 

You peaked my interest and I am checking out this book. I skipped to Chapter 2 to start and I only got to the second page before I found a mix up in what constitutes Brass and Bronze. You may want to have the author fix his mistake. It seems they are back wards. Brass is usually Copper and Zinc and Bronze is usually Copper and Tin, but these are very rudimentary definitions of them because they both can be made with Zinc, or Tin in the mix as well as a combination of both. There is a grey area where Brass and Bronze cross each other and there is no distinct line when one alloy becomes the other. When I create my own Bronze for instance I use a lot of Copper and mix in small amounts of Zinc, Tin and Lead, but I use my own recipe because I like the way it comes out better than most, and I can manipulate the color by changing the amounts I put into the mix. When I make Brass I usually just use a little less Copper than when I make Bronze and mix in Zinc. If I want to make it softer so it can be machined easily I'll add a little Lead as well and if I want it to be really hard I skip the Lead altogether.
 

[waveslider]

1 hour ago, piccione said:

A detailed analysis of the metallurgy is had in the book Ziff, Magic Goggles, and Golden Plates which is actually available for free download at www.caractors.org

 

It also said, at the very end that the brass might have been protected by oil. It wouldn't really need to be protected though, since when Brass patinas it protects the rest of the Brass under the top layer of patina, from further erosion, like a protective shell. It would only get ruined if it were subject to certain, really strong acids. Just a quick observation from a quick scan of that book.

[Calm]

Waveslider, being a relative newbie, you may not know the poster is the author:

 

[waveslider]

11 hours ago, Calm said:

Waveslider, being a relative newbie, you may not know the poster is the author:

 

I kind of had a feeling it was so, but I figured I would give him the benefit of the doubt just in case my assumption was wrong.

[notHagoth7]

Spelunking a Double Standard

People looking for and expecting extensive evidence of a vast Nephite battle from over 1500 years ago?

Perhaps I'm still looking for thousands of swords, helmets and shields at Thermopylae, Marathon, Salamis, Carthage, Gaugamela/Arbela, Metaurus, Chalons, Tours, etc.. Perhaps my entire faith in Cicero's claim that Herodutus was the Father of History, or my faith in other ancient/medieval chronicles/events, or even my entire belief structure in the very idea of history, hinges on such discoveries.  What would some skeptics/critics of the Nephite record say to me about such expectations?

Some might wish to counter and say something to the effect that "Well, we have proof of such things as Greek and Roman civilizations....etc, but none for Nephite (or Jaredite)..." Not so fast please. Building materials often determine how much evidence for a people is left behind. Consider, for example, the Germanic peoples that initially stopped the Roman Empire in its tracks (back when Jesus of Nazareth was a young man), and later completely conquered and divided the Empire up among themselves (shortly after the end of what many call Nephite civilization). Where is the extensive archaeological evidence for those Germanic battles? Where is the *extensive* evidence that their *vast* civilizations ever existed north of the Roman Empire? 

In the relative vacuum, millions of people over the centuries have had zero problem believing the assertion that such secular things actually happened. Nor has it been common for believers in such things to be criticized. As such, for a number of better reasons, I will very confidently hold on to assertion that events did happen largely as described, both in the Old World, *and* in the Americas.

Me loves me some history/archaeology.

Edited September 24, 2016 by notHagoth7

[notHagoth7]

On 9/8/2016 at 5:14 PM, bcuzbcuz said:

Several who have commented here seem to have a poor definition of melting and smelting and the differences between them....

...THe site atated above may be easier to read and it also contains pictures.

Please comment if you've managed to read this far. 

Makes me think of a number of related things:

• Iron production in northern Europe. Such is said to have taken off in northern Europe during the 1st century BC (in the wake of the likes of Hagoth).
• Also contemporary with Hagoth, beginning with Julius Caesar, Roman rulers/emperors began to enlist the armed people from that region as their elite, trusted bodyguards. In Palestine, Herod the Great followed suit.
• Saxons. Not recorded in history exactly when they first emerged in Europe under that name, but were first mentioned under that name in writing ca. 150 AD. Most believe that they got their name from the Germanic word seax, sax, saex, sex, (latinized sachsum) for a type of sword or dagger typical of Germanic peoples...
• King Arthur - famed to have drawn a sword from a stone, which supposedly demonstrated his right to be king. I happen to believe he, like Nephi, simply had the relatively rare, sometimes-closely-guarded, and therefore-sometimes-deemed-mystical skill to draw ore from the earth to help arm/defend/lead his people...hence the oft-misunderstood symbolism in his legend.
• Consider also  Wayland the Smith (Weland, Volundr, Velentr, Wiolant). That smith is mentioned repeatedly throughout northern lore, also depicted on the Franks Casket alongside such events as the Magi who visited the young boy Jesus, the founding of Rome, and the capture of Jerusalem under Titus in 70 AD. It is quite notable that a smith, which in modern times is much less mysterious, was just as noteworthy in *their* culture as the Magi, the founding of an Empire, and the capture of Jerusalem under that Empire. Weland's name literally means "battle-brave". Possibly linguistic influence/artifact - Wayland (Wiolant) may well be the etymological origin of the modern word "violent", which once used to mean "having a marked or powerful effect." 

Thoughts?

Edited September 24, 2016 by notHagoth7

[notHagoth7]

15 minutes ago, notHagoth7 said:

Makes me think of a number of related things:

• Iron production in northern Europe. Such is said to have taken off in northern Europe during the 1st century BC (in the wake of the likes of Hagoth).
• Also contemporary with Hagoth, beginning with Julius Caesar, Roman rulers/emperors began to enlist the armed people from that region as their elite, trusted bodyguards. In Palestine, Herod the Great followed suit.
• Saxons. Not recorded in history exactly when they first emerged in Europe under that name, but were first mentioned under that name in writing ca. 150 AD. Most believe that they got their name from the Germanic word seax, sax, saex, sex, (latinized sachsum) for a type of sword or dagger typical of Germanic peoples...
• King Arthur - famed to have drawn a sword from a stone, which supposedly demonstrated his right to be king. I happen to believe he, like Nephi, simply had the relatively rare, sometimes-closely-guarded, and therefore-sometimes-deemed-mystical skill to draw ore from the earth to help arm/defend/lead his people...hence the oft-misunderstood symbolism in his legend.
• Consider also  Wayland the Smith (Weland, Volundr, Velentr, Wiolant). That smith is mentioned repeatedly throughout northern lore, also depicted on the Franks Casket alongside such events as the Magi who visited the young boy Jesus, the founding of Rome, and the capture of Jerusalem under Titus in 70 AD. It is quite notable that a smith, which in modern times is much less mysterious, was just as noteworthy in *their* culture as the Magi, the founding of an Empire, and the capture of Jerusalem under that Empire. Weland's name literally means "battle-brave". Possibly linguistic influence/artifact - Wayland (Wiolant) may well be the etymological origin of the modern word "violent", which once used to mean "having a marked or powerful effect." 

Thoughts?

And for clarity, I'm not insisting that knowledge of iron production was widespread in Nephite society. 

From the Nephite record itself, it's unclear how widespread (or closely guarded) such knowledge/practice actually was.

Consider, for example, how cement expertise didn't take off until Nephites migrated elsewhere, and local necessity in *that* new land became the mother of invention/innovation/expansion.

Edited September 24, 2016 by notHagoth7