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A History Blacksmithing began with the Iron Age, when primitive man first began making tools from iron. It began when someone noticed that a certain type of rock yielded a metal called "iron", which appeared when heated by the coals of a very hot campfire. In short, we can say that blacksmithing, the art of crafting that crude metal slag into a useable implement, has been around for a very long time. 
And for a long time after that, blacksmithing remained a crude art. You might say it took hundreds, if not thousands, of years for man to learn the science of metallurgy. And beyond the first simple tools, the first spear or arrow tips, the first cooking spit, the craft would require hundreds more years before mankind realized the magnetic properties of the forged metal. The first compass used a forged iron needle that floated in a round vial. This was a great discovery. By forging the needle as perfectly as he could, the blacksmith aligned the molecules in the iron and that is why north is north and south is south. From that point on, sailors could travel without need of stars nor sun to plot their courses around the globe. As to where and when blacksmithing evolved depended on fuel and iron ore. Charcoal was the primary fuel in many places. Where coal was found, it was converted to coke, a fuel that generated even more heat than charcoal. Iron ore, early man discovered, was present in rock strata that had a red color and the deeper the red hue, the higher the iron content. Then it became a quest to find the rock strata that gave up its iron with the least amount of work. Given the weight of the ore rock and the large amounts of fuel needed to smelt the ore, the earliest ironworks were located in areas where both ingredients were ample and in proximity to each other. The ironworks also had to be in an area where transporting the iron was practical. In early times, that often meant being near a navigable waterway. Early iron smelters consisted of an oven built from rocks that could withstand repeated heating. These ovens looked like beehives with a smoke vent in the top and an entry portal on the side. The hearth was filled with charcoal or coke, set afire, and the ore rocks were laid on top. When the temperature rose above 2000 degrees, the iron would flow from the ore and 'puddle' in the fiery coals. With large tongs, these lumps of raw iron would be pulled from the oven and placed on an anvil. A man would then hammer the lumpy piece of raw iron into a flat, rectangular bar. The bar would be folded over and hammered again to its original shape. This process would continue several more times until all impurities had been driven from the ingot. The finished ingot, bearing the layers of the folding process, was called "wrought iron". |
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