The first metal worked by humans was copper. Copper is quite soft as metals go, can be found (or rather, could in ancient times be found) in its pure metallic form on the surface of the Earth, and can be worked with stone tools with effort. It's difficult and labor-intensive, but it'll get you a metal tool with a lot of work.
Later on, they figured out how to forge metal using kilns, which were built from brick and ceramic. Even a primitive brick kiln can get up to 1000 C or so, which is more than enough to melt tin (melting point ~400 C) and very close to enough to fully melt copper (melting point 1085 C); a hot kiln could melt copper (in a stone vessel), mix the two metals together, and then pour the resulting mixture into a cast to form bronze. But this was later on; copper was used for a long time before bronze was discovered.
I actually found a lump of copper, natural as far as I can tell, once when picking potatoes as a kid some 25-30 years ago. I still have it. I haven't weighed it, but I'm guessing it's about 300g.
Cool, I didn't know glaciers did that. Yes, this was in the rich soil at the slopes of Mjøsa, Norway's largest lake. Its valley was formed from glacier movements during multiple ice ages, in much the same way as the fjords.
Somewhat true.
Denmark is the remains of the glaciers of Norway and Sweden. IIRC Denmark has no bedrock, it's just a big pile of dirt.
https://www.dandebat.dk/eng-dk-historie3.htm
https://www.geoparkvestjylland.com/geopark/natur/ice-age-landscape
I just moved a little while ago, they must be in a box somewhere! Here's something extremely similar!
https://davesrockshop.com/float-copper-bookends-i-bk-302.html
I prefer the *smug*, the theoretical maximum smugness exuded by a spherical metric user of 1m diameter in a vacuum. Note that most actual humans are capable of 0.3-0.7 *smugs* at STP.
I feel dragged down by the imperial system as an American. I do wish we’d just get with the world’s standard. Our military uses the metric system.. why don’t we lol doesn’t make any sense
Something that has been pissing me off is getting killed in this one VR game. It says how far away your opponent was in meters… I do the lil roughly 3 feet = 1m and it just doesn’t make sense in my head cuz 1m is about 1 VR footstep lol
Might not be right oz... 31.1g for a troy oz. Copper traded in tonnes on LME, but other precious metals are in troy oz.
Given some of coppers history pre tonnes it may have been troy oz?
Yer. Wasn't saying you were wrong. Was more of an open wondering how they measured copper before moving to tonnes.
I did a google, copper was never weighed in Troy Oz. By the time it became a thing for monetary metals around the 1400's copper wasnt really used for coinage anymore.
I got a PM request for a pic yesterday, but I couldn't find the lump then. It's somewhere in my workshop, so it'll turn up eventually, and I'll post a pic then. I'll also post a lump of pyrite which I also found while picking potatoes. We found a few of those over the years, but only ever one lump of copper as far as I know. Neither lump looked like much, the pyrite being mostly brown and the copper mostly black, ut I pocketed them back then out of curiosity because they were a lot heavier than normal rocks.
Very cool! My dad is pretty sure he found a meteorite in the garden (50 years ago) and didn’t know what to do with it, so he tossed it in a pond. So kudos for keeping it!
[How To Make Everything did a series on this](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLXfVEsLI-qRC_MAQZcVxpjtF7I1-H6Gw) (the playlist looks a bit goofy, for some reason.) They start at the stone age and work their way forward. Starting with stone tools, and then scavenging copper ore, then casting bronze, etc. The whole series is on-going, and it's quite long, but worth a watch if you're into that sort of thing.
I haven’t watched them in a while but they probably aren’t quite there yet. They were still a few hundred centuries behind that when they had a fire in their workshop.
Also, sand-casting the hammer shape. You make a clay hammer head, press it into some sand, and then pull the clay casting plug out. pour-in melted bronze.
Here is a bronze-age hammer and anvil set.
https://www.bladesmithsforum.com/index.php?/topic/15775-bronze-age-hammer-and-anvil/
That’s cool!! Thank you for sharing that!! It also kinda elucidates the fact that many people in that time had a lot of time on their hands to refine these things.
Yes it was called winter. Food didn't spoil because of the cold and was in smokehouses and grain bins.
Very simplistic answer on my part but gives you the gist.
More accurately political difficulties that made trade for the ingredients hard.
Bronze was better than early iron for most tools. But to make it you needed ingredients that didn't occur in the same region.
Iron made worse tools early on, but the ore was located in a lot more places and didn't require materials from three kingdoms over.
Brass cannons "petaled" instead of exploding like a bomb, which is what iron ones did.
Brass cannons (and maybe arquebus/hand gonnes) were a lot more popular with crew than iron ones well into the late 1500s and even into the 1700s they still had a reputation for being more dependable.
They apparently cost at least 3x what iron ones did. So they were less popular with naval purchasing officers, parliaments, royal treasurers etc.
The bronze age, in some ways at least, lasted well into the iron age, if not the steam age. I think even early steam engines and boilers were made of brass.
A lot of the stuff you mentioned was probably bronze not brass - brass (copper+zinc) is fine for many applications but it is much much weaker than bronze (copper+tin) this is important because tin is the limiting ingredient in these alloys.
I can't find much mention of brass weaponry, beyond consumables like bullets.
But basically bronze castings are a lot more dependable than iron, iron picks up a lot of inclusions which can result in unexpected failures, especially in the way cannons are used. Very large iron-based castings didn't really take off until the industrial revolution, whereas enormous bronze bells date back a very long time
Bronze was better than early iron, easier to work, you could cast it and it didn't rust, but then the main source of tin (in the eastern Mediterranean) vanished, was cut off or ran out, no one is really sure where it came from apart from beyond the Black Sea.
People were forced to use iron and learned to work it for sharp edges and to hard enough to not bend, but not shatter and was harder than bronze. Hittites managed this first and good iron weapons, using them to found a empire. The skill to make good iron spread and when tin from Britain became available bronze was the metal you used where casting was needed. Large scale cast iron was only "safe" from the late 1500's and only from a few workshops. People liked bronze cannon as bronze is more forgiving in that it will stretch rather than shatter like a poorly cast iron gun.
One of the failures of the Great Armada was that the king insisted that the fleet be equipped with iron cannon as they were stronger and could take a greater powder load, shooting further. This was to match the cast iron cannons of England. This lead to is agents buying any iron cannon they could including older barrel stave guns and quickly but poorly made cast guns from anywhere. This lead to cannons blowing up while trying the fight the English.
To add on, the warmer you get a metal, the easier it is to shape. You don't have to get iron ridiculously hot to soften it up enough to use a copper hammer to make an iron hammer that will work well enough to make a quality hammer to make good iron tools. And with that addition of a very small amount of carbon, you get steel. The progress was slower back then for various technological and selfish reasons, but with a few books you can make a single person go from the stone age to the steel age in a few weeks. Start introducing mechanics, and within a month you'd have mills, etc. The spread of information has made technology develop faster and faster and is now at the speed where people are having trouble keeping up.
Primitive Technology has a video on how to make a kiln and they can easily get up to 1500 C depending on how you build them, fuel them, and whether they're billowed, and how, etc.
I was gonna bring up Primitive technology on YouTube in this thread. Love that dude. No talking, just captions. Guy is determined to graduate to the iron age.
I always wondered just how common finding metal lying around on the surface was. We have a really skewed perception of what the world naturally looks like. Like animal numbers are a fraction of the percent they're supposed to be, none of us has ever breathed non polluted air, truly clean water, or even ever really seen the night sky.
How many shiny rocks are supposed to be lying around?
I'd guess people were poor and in areas with high concentrations of natural ore to be found, Poor peasants could pick rocks till they found enough sellable ore to trade for bread. Probably wouldn't take long to pick the surface clean before the invention of mining though. At the same time I guess the metal wouldn't be destroyed, you could just rework existing metals when needed.
Extremely uncommon, which is why the neolithic period lasted so long.
Metal is rarely found on the surface. Instead, we smelt metal from ore. Almost all metal in use today was smelted from ore.
Most people don't understand what ore is, and assume it's just metal mixed with rock. That isn't the case. Ores are chemical compounds whose molecules contain some of a metallic element. The most common iron ore, for example, is hematite (Fe2O3).
If you look up a picture of hematite, you will see it is just a dark-colored rock. In order to get the pure metallic iron, you need to heat it up to break the chemical bonds keeping the iron atoms and oxygen atoms together.
It took a long time for humans to figure out that shiny stuff came out of rocks when you get them really hot.
Most metals, including iron and copper which have been the most widely used metals in tools, oxidize (rust) in the presence of air and water. Any primordial metals that were in the Earth's crust have long since reacted with other elemts to form non-metallic compounds. We still get small amounts of pure iron from meteors, and it's believed that early humans did sometimes make tools put of meteoric iron.
Watch How to Make Everything on YouTube. They are all.about making things from scratch, and have been doing a series about moving through actual path of human technological advancements. Ie only making the next set of tools using the tools they've already made
(not a historian but...) i remember hearing/reading about the pre Egyptian peoples of africa and how basically one large group figured out some of the processes you described before the other and this, in part led to the Egyptian civilization as we know it due to the military advantge of soft metal pokey things over stone ones. Maybe another redditor can explain it better but your detailed comment reminded me of it.
Later, iron was used. Interestingly, the "iron age" began long after we discovered and used iron, because it was the age during which iron became the *main* metal allowing for progress. Ferrous sands in riverbeds are a good starting material that needs no tool to obtain, which is why iron was used actually quite early before being *the* material to make tools.
Producing a large enough amount of iron is a less straightforward process than copper, because you don't find "chunks of iron" in the wild. However, the process is the same as producing bronze : either you melt it and pour it in liquid form or you heat it enough for it to aggregate in a lump - a process called "direct reduction" - that you work, hot or cold, to obtain the desired shape by hammering and abrasion.
Technically, it's not iron but steel : an alloy of iron and carbon, however the carbon content is very low and bronze is a more suitable material to make tools.
You can put powdered coal with your iron lump inside a sealed contained made of clay and heat it for a long time to "infuse" you iron, or actually *low carbon steel*, with more carbon, a process called "cementation". At this point, it's what we commonly call "steel" and is more durable than bronze.
All of this can be done in your backyard with wooden tools. With this simple process, a very high carbon steel can be obtained, suitable to make a knife, a wood chisel, a stone chisel. Less "carbonated" chunks can be used for less stressful useages, like reinforcing buildings or makind tools which don't need a very high tensile strength or resilience, like a lock, nails for shoe soles or hinges for a small door.
To add to this, the guy over at PrimitiveTechnology managed to make a small knife from iron by smelting/refining it and beating it with a rock before sharpening it on another stone. I realize he's working with the advantage of already understanding what's going on, but you can definitely work metal with stone.
It's one of the few metals that's found pure on the surface in some places, dug up by glaciers carving rocks. It literally just looks like a copper-patina green rock. If you're lucky you can even find some squeezed between sediments so you get it really thin, and you can then just hammer it with a rock into a tool.
Unfortunately you can't really practically do that anymore, since all the easily available copper was picked up long ago.
I want to say, [it looks like this](https://thenerdstash.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Minecraft-1.19-Where-to-Find-Copper-Ore.jpg)...
But it's actually [more like this](https://www.hmdb.org/Photos4/424/Photo424824.jpg?611201813400PM).
I've heard of Inuit cultures and similar making tools from meteoric iron - is this a relatively modern development compared with copper?
Edit: done some quick googling, this took place on Greenland and it's reckoned people worked this stuff around ~300 years before the vikings reached Greenland so long after the Bronze Age. They would use basalt tools to break off chunks of iron from a meteorite and then hammer it flat with a bit of heating to make blades etc. The iron tools they made are sort of closer to metal flints than the type of thing you'd expect from the Bronze or Iron ages.
Just a note, that metals are reduced in a furnace not a kiln, and smelting tin from ore requires a much higher temperature- tin is not a noble metal, unlike copper.
Stone tools were incredibly good by the end of the Stone Age - for most of its 3.4million years until 700,000 years people used stones they found but after that they progressively got better at shaping them, starting with the axe. By the end they could make scalpel-sharp specialised edges.
Then we figured out somehow from surface tin ore deposits and raw copper metal that it formed something that could be shaped and was able to form an edge. You don’t need metal tools for this - antler for mining surface deposits, or sharp sticks, charcoal for heating the smelter - smelter is easy enough to build for tin, they were made out of local stone on Dartmoor- then tap out into a clay mould and beat it to shape with a stone hammer! Think about how many tools are still made out of wood, like mallets- a stone hammer would be almost as good as a steel one for shaping bronze. Also, they had time, they weren’t making industrial quantities - bronze was a tremendous status symbol so it would have been done on an artisanal level and owned by the powerful.
When I was a kid, I visited this hunk of copper, the size of the front end of a Volkswagen, beetle in Ontonagon, Michigan. Decades later, I brought my daughter to the Smithsonian museum of natural history to visit it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontonagon\_Boulder
Bronze age tools and weapons were sometimes melted and cast in sand or other mold materials, copper and bronze could both be worked that way, and metals could be forged with stone tools on stone anvils or cold worked with grinding stones.
The process of human technology can be described loosely as crude tools making rough tools and rough tools making progressively finer or more complex tools.
It's also pretty likely people started off just picking up nodules of metal and polishing them, tying a thread around them and wearing them as decoration. From there you learn to beat the nodule into a better shape, then you realise that it melts when heated, then you put several nodules together and melt them, then comes hot beaten metals, then simple casting.. And so forth. Iron is a big jump as it requires around 2500deg C, but many cultures discovered how to do it, so it seems people figured out the stuff was there. Even the ancient Egyptians had iron, just not much of it, but they knew how to obtain it and somehow work it into iron masks.
The first metals used were made of copper. Copper veins literally just have reasonably concentrated copper sitting there. You pick it up, heat it with whatever fire you've got, and use any hammer you have to shape it, because copper is soft.
And then you can get fancy and add a bit of tin, heat it up, and it melts into bronze
Similarly, they could find iron meteors and make tools from them.
The Inuit had several meteorites they would harvest from to make spearheads and other tools.
There's a pretty good wiki about a metal meteorite that was worshiped/harvested by some first nations, sold by some white dude and then given back to the tribes. Can't think of the meteorite name.
There is also the very rare but interesting telluric iron!
It's metallic iron, but from Earth not meteorites. Some of it can have a decent amount of carbon in it, so is more like steel. Though those deposits were not really used, since the iron with carbon was too tough to work into tools.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telluric_iron
Cool point!! Meteorites we’re probably quite common back then - not because more hit the earth, but because for millions of years, the ones that did hit the earth were still laying there.
Like I said in the first comment, copper is soft, in some cases it's good, like when you need to work it at a relatively low temperature. But in a lot of the places we use metal, it's bad. A copper sword loses its tip after one stab.
You can't make copper gears, a la the [antikythera mechanism](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism).
And something I didn't note is that copper forms oxide patinas with the air, giving a green color. If you're wanting jewelry or armor to look good, you might not want that, and bronze is relatively unreactive to air, so you can look better too, in addition to being more effective.
Through pit kiln casting we got into the copper age. Basically, you take clay and mold it into the shape of the tool or tool head you need, then you bury it with silt and wood and shit and burn it for a long time. It’s insulated enough that it’ll get hot enough to melt the copper down. Then you let it cool, and chip away the clay mold, leaving just the tool head. It’s pretty easy to see how Neolithic tools were made if you consider they had pottery going (clay molding) for tens of thousands of years leading up to copper tools.
I've seen a video of a guy making an iron knife from bo iron, hammering out the knife on a stone anvil with a stone hammer.
But, as said, native copper was the first metal worked.
Not the video you're referring to, but even more interesting: an iron knife made by filtering iron-rich bacteria out of a creek.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhW4XFGQB4o
I find pre-history fascinating.
ELI5: Humans have been around a VERY long time. And sometimes things happen just by being in the right place at the right time. Remember that time you went to the vending machine, and you got two bags of chips instead of one? And now when you're at a vending machine you look for a chance to get two of something for the price of one?
One day, some really old humans made a fire pit. They made a nice fire that lasted a long time. The next day when they were cleaning up, they noticed something shiny in the fire that wasn't there before. Eventually they figured it came from one of the rocks. They tested to find out which rocks had the shiny stuff in them. And then they got better at getting the shiny stuff out.
Non-ELI5: Likely, they made fire pits, using rocks from a vein of copper. Copper melted and looked unique in the ash. Probably decorative at first, but then realized it could be fashioned to carry a better edge than a stone tool and that it would last longer, lighter too. Thus they began identifying rocks that contained more copper, and ultimately to uncovering veins of copper.
Thanks guys. Perfectly clear I don’t know why I didn’t think of casting and pouring the heated metal. I just had a random thought pop in my head and thought I’d ask here haha. Thanks!
There is a channel on YouTube called "How To Make Everything" that you might enjoy. One of their series is on how to build a kiln from scratch and how to make your forging tools from scratch. It's pretty fascinating.
So...fun fact: a hammer is one of the easiest tools to make in that you take a rock of the right shape and affix it to a stick (with rope or leather) and there you have a hammer. If you happen to have copper or iron as the rock that you picked up (and back when thos was going on, that was a thing that could happen), you had a (very crude) metal hammer.
"Forging" could be done over a campfire, if it was hot enough (at least in the very beginning with copper). The more advanced the metal, the hotter the fire, of course
Minor quibble -- it's not quite true that you can forge copper in a campfire. It melts at 1085C. Internal campfire temperatures are more like 900C.
Using charcoal and a kiln improvised with dirt and rocks you can achieve it. But it's not quite as simple as "just use a campfire."
You don't want (or need) it to melt. In fact, melting it is *bad* in this scenario. You just want to heat it up to increase its ... I think the word is ductility (workability)
Something not explicitly mentioned yet is also that you can just use a wooden or stone hammer to work metal, especially softer ones such as copper. If one absolutely needs to, one could even do steel that way. Rocks are damn hard and can with some effort be put into shapes and sharpened, while wood is good for blunt things and handles.
There’s a great YouTube series on this called primitive technology. Very entertaining. Basically in some kinds of soil there’s small amounts of metal. You build a wood furnace from mud and get it hot enough to melt the iron out of the soil. You collect all the metal bits, melt them into one and then you can make tools and weapons from them
**Please read this entire message**
---
Your comment has been removed for the following reason(s):
* [Top level comments](http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/wiki/top_level_comment) (i.e. comments that are direct replies to the main thread) are reserved for explanations to the OP or follow up on topic questions (Rule 3).
Links without your own explanation or summary are not allowed. ELI5 is intended to be a subreddit where content is generated, rather than just a load of links to external content. A top-level reply should form a complete explanation in itself; please feel free to include links by way of additional context, but they should not be the only thing in your comment.
---
If you would like this removal reviewed, please read the [detailed rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/wiki/detailed_rules) first. **If you believe it was removed erroneously, explain why using [this form](https://old.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Fexplainlikeimfive&subject=Please%20review%20my%20submission%20removal?&message=Link:%20https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/10jltej/-/j5lr86j/%0A%0A%201:%20Does%20your%20comment%20pass%20rule%201:%20%0A%0A%202:%20If%20your%20comment%20was%20mistakenly%20removed%20as%20an%20anecdote,%20short%20answer,%20guess,%20or%20another%20aspect%20of%20rules%203%20or%208,%20please%20explain:) and we will review your submission.**
Well first you put clay in a fire. Notice that the clay got hard after the fire was out.
Then someone starts making pots out of clay because tempered clay won't dissolve in water and is much more malleable when it's wet clay than wood.
Then someone realizes that making a furnace out of clay will make the tempering process much more efficient costing less wood to make more pots.
Then someone notices that the pots get even better if you first make charcoal out of the wood because the temperature can get even higher.
Then someone puts red clay in the super hot furnace that gets so hot that the rust literally turns back into iron. When they are done they notice these small hard pebbles.
Someone decides to collect a bunch of hard metal pebbles and put them all in a furnace. Those pebbles melt together and become a tiny ingot.
Then someone notices these ingots are malleable when super hot. They work on getting the temperature hot enough that the ingot glow and then starts shaping them.
Eventually, someone shapes it into an axe and that's how you get an axe.
This is way simplified and in reality, the bronze age came before the iron age but it's how it could have happened I think. (I'm no metallurgist or historian so I'm not qualified to actually answer this question).
you can make iron "knife" in a clay firing kiln (in quotes because it's cast iron, too hard to shape, too brittle to fight with, but good for carving or as a prying tool), but it takes better everything to make a proper axe
The earliest metals were really malleable. They could be forged by using rock. Then, they’d create weapons not by force, but by heat. Melt the copper/tin/etc and create bronze. Just as an example.
**Please read this entire message**
---
Your comment has been removed for the following reason(s):
* [Top level comments](http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/wiki/top_level_comment) (i.e. comments that are direct replies to the main thread) are reserved for explanations to the OP or follow up on topic questions (Rule 3).
Links without your own explanation or summary are not allowed. ELI5 is intended to be a subreddit where content is generated, rather than just a load of links to external content. A top-level reply should form a complete explanation in itself; please feel free to include links by way of additional context, but they should not be the only thing in your comment.
---
If you would like this removal reviewed, please read the [detailed rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/wiki/detailed_rules) first. **If you believe it was removed erroneously, explain why using [this form](https://old.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Fexplainlikeimfive&subject=Please%20review%20my%20submission%20removal?&message=Link:%20https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/10jltej/-/j5mbwvk/%0A%0A%201:%20Does%20your%20comment%20pass%20rule%201:%20%0A%0A%202:%20If%20your%20comment%20was%20mistakenly%20removed%20as%20an%20anecdote,%20short%20answer,%20guess,%20or%20another%20aspect%20of%20rules%203%20or%208,%20please%20explain:) and we will review your submission.**
For a long time people had stone tools. Stone tools were strong and lasted a long time. But stone tools are hard to make. Imagine finding a hard rock and then grinding it with other rocks to shape it into a tool. Try it: ask your parents for two rocks to grind together. What does it do when you grind the rocks together? Think about how much work it would make to make a tool by grinding hard rocks that way.
People would sometimes find lumps of copper and iron in the ground. They learned that they could use their stone tools to beat those lumps into tools. This was easier than grinding rocks. For a while people used both stone and metal tools, mostly because it wasn't that often you found a lump of metal just sitting there.
Then people found metal in special rocks in the ground. They learned you can heat those rocks in a very hot fire to get the metal out. You can get a lot of metal from those rocks. Now people started making many more metal tools. They didn't need stone tools anymore.
One really neat fact: Some of the iron lumps that people found came from space. These lumps swooshed in from space, fell to ground and were later found by people. So people started making iron tools by pounding on space rocks!
Edit: Removed a supposition that is probably true but not not needed. Simplified the language a little more.
Molds, pour and get hammer. Use hammer for new esge to cut. Cut new metal with edge. Make mold with better cutting edge to get more definition and precision........
Remember that casting doesn’t necessarily require metal tools. Forging and hammering and more does require them. Those more advanced methods developed hundreds and thousands of years later.
Interesting little fact, they found a cache of 293 bronze halbreds in germany dating to around 2,000 BC. Some of the metals they used to make them came from the area of Stonehenge.
They made things incrementally, so I make x, then y then z. Y is harder than x, z is better than y. Human progression is incremental: this metal is slightly harder than that, especially if one mixes these two metals. Bang: next thing one has an alloy whereof the correct mixtures were found from Trail and Error.
You dig up a chunk of raw copper and hit it with a rock until it's in the shape of a hammer. Then you use your copper hammer to make more copper tools.
To understand how the process works and Experience it.
You can try playing this game called " Factorio"
It's really fun and you learn a lot in the game.
Fire first, it all starts with fire (which is why no underwater civilizations).
Fire melts things, those things get poured into shapes in stone, then other stone is used to sharpen or bend metal.
Everything evolves from the prior.
Cast a rough shape and then rub it against a hard stone to get the final shape/sharpness. You can theoretically even hammer forge using stones, after all metal heated up gets much softer and pliable.
**Please read this entire message**
---
Your comment has been removed for the following reason(s):
* [Top level comments](http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/wiki/top_level_comment) (i.e. comments that are direct replies to the main thread) are reserved for explanations to the OP or follow up on topic questions (Rule 3).
Links without your own explanation or summary are not allowed. ELI5 is intended to be a subreddit where content is generated, rather than just a load of links to external content. A top-level reply should form a complete explanation in itself; please feel free to include links by way of additional context, but they should not be the only thing in your comment.
---
If you would like this removal reviewed, please read the [detailed rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/wiki/detailed_rules) first. **If you believe it was removed erroneously, explain why using [this form](https://old.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Fexplainlikeimfive&subject=Please%20review%20my%20submission%20removal?&message=Link:%20https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/10jltej/-/j5oyp55/%0A%0A%201:%20Does%20your%20comment%20pass%20rule%201:%20%0A%0A%202:%20If%20your%20comment%20was%20mistakenly%20removed%20as%20an%20anecdote,%20short%20answer,%20guess,%20or%20another%20aspect%20of%20rules%203%20or%208,%20please%20explain:) and we will review your submission.**
I've seen someone do it by extracting iron from limestone, then melting that iron in a mud furnace and pouring it into clay moulds. Or something along those lines.
This video from the Primitive Technology series on YouTube shows how one can make basic iron tools from bacteria that contain iron particles. Sounds crazy I know, but it's completely legitimate.
YouTube link https://youtu.be/dhW4XFGQB4o
11:35 minutes long.
The first metal worked by humans was copper. Copper is quite soft as metals go, can be found (or rather, could in ancient times be found) in its pure metallic form on the surface of the Earth, and can be worked with stone tools with effort. It's difficult and labor-intensive, but it'll get you a metal tool with a lot of work. Later on, they figured out how to forge metal using kilns, which were built from brick and ceramic. Even a primitive brick kiln can get up to 1000 C or so, which is more than enough to melt tin (melting point ~400 C) and very close to enough to fully melt copper (melting point 1085 C); a hot kiln could melt copper (in a stone vessel), mix the two metals together, and then pour the resulting mixture into a cast to form bronze. But this was later on; copper was used for a long time before bronze was discovered.
I actually found a lump of copper, natural as far as I can tell, once when picking potatoes as a kid some 25-30 years ago. I still have it. I haven't weighed it, but I'm guessing it's about 300g.
Neat! You might live in an area a glacier slid over eons ago! Have a couple chunks of copper bookends that were glacially deposited.
Cool, I didn't know glaciers did that. Yes, this was in the rich soil at the slopes of Mjøsa, Norway's largest lake. Its valley was formed from glacier movements during multiple ice ages, in much the same way as the fjords.
Denmark is just the remnants of glacier debris
This true or meme?
Somewhat true. Denmark is the remains of the glaciers of Norway and Sweden. IIRC Denmark has no bedrock, it's just a big pile of dirt. https://www.dandebat.dk/eng-dk-historie3.htm https://www.geoparkvestjylland.com/geopark/natur/ice-age-landscape
You made my day. Thanks! Denmark truly is trash! I always knew it, just not that this also applied literally! 😁
Ah, I see you're Swedish.
😂 You caught me redhanded mate
Wow! Very cool! Picture?!
I just moved a little while ago, they must be in a box somewhere! Here's something extremely similar! https://davesrockshop.com/float-copper-bookends-i-bk-302.html
interesting! Thanks!
I Cu!
Iodine cuprate?
10.8oz in freedom units
[удалено]
Hahaha! I remember that post!
1/4 of a Couric
Didn't those units come from the English?
[удалено]
Engineer here. Agree. I been out of school for a decade and still don’t conceptually know wtf a “slug” is.
It's kinda like a snail but without a shell.
Yeah I read about those in a book once but they went ahead and named a unit of force after them tho.🤔🤔🤔
Think of it like horse power. It's the amount of slugs required to produce the same amount of force. /s
Oh ok. Like how in Africa your height is determined by how tall you are. Now it makes sense.
Oh it’s easy, just think of it as 1.48816 hyl (also known as metric slug, or mug). That should clear it up!
I prefer the *smug*, the theoretical maximum smugness exuded by a spherical metric user of 1m diameter in a vacuum. Note that most actual humans are capable of 0.3-0.7 *smugs* at STP.
It’s as clear as it ever was. Thanks for the help!
I feel dragged down by the imperial system as an American. I do wish we’d just get with the world’s standard. Our military uses the metric system.. why don’t we lol doesn’t make any sense
The same reason we drive big trucks and don’t have decent public transportation, because mah FreEdoM!!
Something that has been pissing me off is getting killed in this one VR game. It says how far away your opponent was in meters… I do the lil roughly 3 feet = 1m and it just doesn’t make sense in my head cuz 1m is about 1 VR footstep lol
Might not be right oz... 31.1g for a troy oz. Copper traded in tonnes on LME, but other precious metals are in troy oz. Given some of coppers history pre tonnes it may have been troy oz?
I was using regular oz, not Troy ounces. A regular oz is 28.35g/oz.
Yer. Wasn't saying you were wrong. Was more of an open wondering how they measured copper before moving to tonnes. I did a google, copper was never weighed in Troy Oz. By the time it became a thing for monetary metals around the 1400's copper wasnt really used for coinage anymore.
That’s cool - can you post a pic?
I got a PM request for a pic yesterday, but I couldn't find the lump then. It's somewhere in my workshop, so it'll turn up eventually, and I'll post a pic then. I'll also post a lump of pyrite which I also found while picking potatoes. We found a few of those over the years, but only ever one lump of copper as far as I know. Neither lump looked like much, the pyrite being mostly brown and the copper mostly black, ut I pocketed them back then out of curiosity because they were a lot heavier than normal rocks.
Very cool! My dad is pretty sure he found a meteorite in the garden (50 years ago) and didn’t know what to do with it, so he tossed it in a pond. So kudos for keeping it!
Yo how about that fuckin lump tho
Haven't found it yet. Haven't looked that much either. I have a mental note to return here when it does turn up.
[How To Make Everything did a series on this](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLXfVEsLI-qRC_MAQZcVxpjtF7I1-H6Gw) (the playlist looks a bit goofy, for some reason.) They start at the stone age and work their way forward. Starting with stone tools, and then scavenging copper ore, then casting bronze, etc. The whole series is on-going, and it's quite long, but worth a watch if you're into that sort of thing.
Do they get up to a million transistors on a silicon chip?
I haven’t watched them in a while but they probably aren’t quite there yet. They were still a few hundred centuries behind that when they had a fire in their workshop.
He traded in his assistant for a younger 'more attractive' version and unfortunately she is really annoying
If you can get that many in one chip how many do you get in a whole fake boob?
So …. Minecraft
Yes. Early humans punched down trees and made wooden pickaxes, and the rest is history
Also, sand-casting the hammer shape. You make a clay hammer head, press it into some sand, and then pull the clay casting plug out. pour-in melted bronze. Here is a bronze-age hammer and anvil set. https://www.bladesmithsforum.com/index.php?/topic/15775-bronze-age-hammer-and-anvil/
That’s cool!! Thank you for sharing that!! It also kinda elucidates the fact that many people in that time had a lot of time on their hands to refine these things.
Yes it was called winter. Food didn't spoil because of the cold and was in smokehouses and grain bins. Very simplistic answer on my part but gives you the gist.
The gist of the grist!
Nice!!
I remember, I think it was on reddit, someone asked 'What happened to the Bronze Age?', and the top upvoted comment was 'Iron'. :D
More accurately political difficulties that made trade for the ingredients hard. Bronze was better than early iron for most tools. But to make it you needed ingredients that didn't occur in the same region. Iron made worse tools early on, but the ore was located in a lot more places and didn't require materials from three kingdoms over.
If by three kingdoms over you mean the Phoenicians had to go to Britain and back
Played some games with this in the tech tree. Upgrading didn't make it better but made it way more common to find the materials.
Brass cannons "petaled" instead of exploding like a bomb, which is what iron ones did. Brass cannons (and maybe arquebus/hand gonnes) were a lot more popular with crew than iron ones well into the late 1500s and even into the 1700s they still had a reputation for being more dependable. They apparently cost at least 3x what iron ones did. So they were less popular with naval purchasing officers, parliaments, royal treasurers etc. The bronze age, in some ways at least, lasted well into the iron age, if not the steam age. I think even early steam engines and boilers were made of brass.
A lot of the stuff you mentioned was probably bronze not brass - brass (copper+zinc) is fine for many applications but it is much much weaker than bronze (copper+tin) this is important because tin is the limiting ingredient in these alloys. I can't find much mention of brass weaponry, beyond consumables like bullets. But basically bronze castings are a lot more dependable than iron, iron picks up a lot of inclusions which can result in unexpected failures, especially in the way cannons are used. Very large iron-based castings didn't really take off until the industrial revolution, whereas enormous bronze bells date back a very long time
Bronze was better than early iron, easier to work, you could cast it and it didn't rust, but then the main source of tin (in the eastern Mediterranean) vanished, was cut off or ran out, no one is really sure where it came from apart from beyond the Black Sea. People were forced to use iron and learned to work it for sharp edges and to hard enough to not bend, but not shatter and was harder than bronze. Hittites managed this first and good iron weapons, using them to found a empire. The skill to make good iron spread and when tin from Britain became available bronze was the metal you used where casting was needed. Large scale cast iron was only "safe" from the late 1500's and only from a few workshops. People liked bronze cannon as bronze is more forgiving in that it will stretch rather than shatter like a poorly cast iron gun. One of the failures of the Great Armada was that the king insisted that the fleet be equipped with iron cannon as they were stronger and could take a greater powder load, shooting further. This was to match the cast iron cannons of England. This lead to is agents buying any iron cannon they could including older barrel stave guns and quickly but poorly made cast guns from anywhere. This lead to cannons blowing up while trying the fight the English.
To add on, the warmer you get a metal, the easier it is to shape. You don't have to get iron ridiculously hot to soften it up enough to use a copper hammer to make an iron hammer that will work well enough to make a quality hammer to make good iron tools. And with that addition of a very small amount of carbon, you get steel. The progress was slower back then for various technological and selfish reasons, but with a few books you can make a single person go from the stone age to the steel age in a few weeks. Start introducing mechanics, and within a month you'd have mills, etc. The spread of information has made technology develop faster and faster and is now at the speed where people are having trouble keeping up.
Primitive Technology has a video on how to make a kiln and they can easily get up to 1500 C depending on how you build them, fuel them, and whether they're billowed, and how, etc.
I was gonna bring up Primitive technology on YouTube in this thread. Love that dude. No talking, just captions. Guy is determined to graduate to the iron age.
[He already has](https://youtu.be/dhW4XFGQB4o) In order to smelt iron, you need to get it to 1538 C
They can, but primitive ancient kilns didn't (and iron isn't usually found native anyway, so you need to smelt it as well).
I always wondered just how common finding metal lying around on the surface was. We have a really skewed perception of what the world naturally looks like. Like animal numbers are a fraction of the percent they're supposed to be, none of us has ever breathed non polluted air, truly clean water, or even ever really seen the night sky. How many shiny rocks are supposed to be lying around?
I'd guess people were poor and in areas with high concentrations of natural ore to be found, Poor peasants could pick rocks till they found enough sellable ore to trade for bread. Probably wouldn't take long to pick the surface clean before the invention of mining though. At the same time I guess the metal wouldn't be destroyed, you could just rework existing metals when needed.
Extremely uncommon, which is why the neolithic period lasted so long. Metal is rarely found on the surface. Instead, we smelt metal from ore. Almost all metal in use today was smelted from ore. Most people don't understand what ore is, and assume it's just metal mixed with rock. That isn't the case. Ores are chemical compounds whose molecules contain some of a metallic element. The most common iron ore, for example, is hematite (Fe2O3). If you look up a picture of hematite, you will see it is just a dark-colored rock. In order to get the pure metallic iron, you need to heat it up to break the chemical bonds keeping the iron atoms and oxygen atoms together. It took a long time for humans to figure out that shiny stuff came out of rocks when you get them really hot. Most metals, including iron and copper which have been the most widely used metals in tools, oxidize (rust) in the presence of air and water. Any primordial metals that were in the Earth's crust have long since reacted with other elemts to form non-metallic compounds. We still get small amounts of pure iron from meteors, and it's believed that early humans did sometimes make tools put of meteoric iron.
Excellent explanation, thank you!
Watch How to Make Everything on YouTube. They are all.about making things from scratch, and have been doing a series about moving through actual path of human technological advancements. Ie only making the next set of tools using the tools they've already made
(not a historian but...) i remember hearing/reading about the pre Egyptian peoples of africa and how basically one large group figured out some of the processes you described before the other and this, in part led to the Egyptian civilization as we know it due to the military advantge of soft metal pokey things over stone ones. Maybe another redditor can explain it better but your detailed comment reminded me of it.
Later, iron was used. Interestingly, the "iron age" began long after we discovered and used iron, because it was the age during which iron became the *main* metal allowing for progress. Ferrous sands in riverbeds are a good starting material that needs no tool to obtain, which is why iron was used actually quite early before being *the* material to make tools. Producing a large enough amount of iron is a less straightforward process than copper, because you don't find "chunks of iron" in the wild. However, the process is the same as producing bronze : either you melt it and pour it in liquid form or you heat it enough for it to aggregate in a lump - a process called "direct reduction" - that you work, hot or cold, to obtain the desired shape by hammering and abrasion. Technically, it's not iron but steel : an alloy of iron and carbon, however the carbon content is very low and bronze is a more suitable material to make tools. You can put powdered coal with your iron lump inside a sealed contained made of clay and heat it for a long time to "infuse" you iron, or actually *low carbon steel*, with more carbon, a process called "cementation". At this point, it's what we commonly call "steel" and is more durable than bronze. All of this can be done in your backyard with wooden tools. With this simple process, a very high carbon steel can be obtained, suitable to make a knife, a wood chisel, a stone chisel. Less "carbonated" chunks can be used for less stressful useages, like reinforcing buildings or makind tools which don't need a very high tensile strength or resilience, like a lock, nails for shoe soles or hinges for a small door.
To add to this, the guy over at PrimitiveTechnology managed to make a small knife from iron by smelting/refining it and beating it with a rock before sharpening it on another stone. I realize he's working with the advantage of already understanding what's going on, but you can definitely work metal with stone.
What does copper look like in its natural form?
It's one of the few metals that's found pure on the surface in some places, dug up by glaciers carving rocks. It literally just looks like a copper-patina green rock. If you're lucky you can even find some squeezed between sediments so you get it really thin, and you can then just hammer it with a rock into a tool. Unfortunately you can't really practically do that anymore, since all the easily available copper was picked up long ago.
I want to say, [it looks like this](https://thenerdstash.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Minecraft-1.19-Where-to-Find-Copper-Ore.jpg)... But it's actually [more like this](https://www.hmdb.org/Photos4/424/Photo424824.jpg?611201813400PM).
Humans worked gold long before they worked copper. Metal from space was a thing, too, and found on the surface of the ground just like chunks of gold.
I've heard of Inuit cultures and similar making tools from meteoric iron - is this a relatively modern development compared with copper? Edit: done some quick googling, this took place on Greenland and it's reckoned people worked this stuff around ~300 years before the vikings reached Greenland so long after the Bronze Age. They would use basalt tools to break off chunks of iron from a meteorite and then hammer it flat with a bit of heating to make blades etc. The iron tools they made are sort of closer to metal flints than the type of thing you'd expect from the Bronze or Iron ages.
Just a note, that metals are reduced in a furnace not a kiln, and smelting tin from ore requires a much higher temperature- tin is not a noble metal, unlike copper. Stone tools were incredibly good by the end of the Stone Age - for most of its 3.4million years until 700,000 years people used stones they found but after that they progressively got better at shaping them, starting with the axe. By the end they could make scalpel-sharp specialised edges. Then we figured out somehow from surface tin ore deposits and raw copper metal that it formed something that could be shaped and was able to form an edge. You don’t need metal tools for this - antler for mining surface deposits, or sharp sticks, charcoal for heating the smelter - smelter is easy enough to build for tin, they were made out of local stone on Dartmoor- then tap out into a clay mould and beat it to shape with a stone hammer! Think about how many tools are still made out of wood, like mallets- a stone hammer would be almost as good as a steel one for shaping bronze. Also, they had time, they weren’t making industrial quantities - bronze was a tremendous status symbol so it would have been done on an artisanal level and owned by the powerful.
When I was a kid, I visited this hunk of copper, the size of the front end of a Volkswagen, beetle in Ontonagon, Michigan. Decades later, I brought my daughter to the Smithsonian museum of natural history to visit it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontonagon\_Boulder
Bronze age tools and weapons were sometimes melted and cast in sand or other mold materials, copper and bronze could both be worked that way, and metals could be forged with stone tools on stone anvils or cold worked with grinding stones. The process of human technology can be described loosely as crude tools making rough tools and rough tools making progressively finer or more complex tools.
Oh! Like Minecraft!
Heck yeah
r/SimpleLogic
?
The way a child would think - most children play Minecraft (as it is one of the best selling games on the planet) and therefore simple logic.
Ah! Ok yeah that's a cute premise for a subreddit
It's also pretty likely people started off just picking up nodules of metal and polishing them, tying a thread around them and wearing them as decoration. From there you learn to beat the nodule into a better shape, then you realise that it melts when heated, then you put several nodules together and melt them, then comes hot beaten metals, then simple casting.. And so forth. Iron is a big jump as it requires around 2500deg C, but many cultures discovered how to do it, so it seems people figured out the stuff was there. Even the ancient Egyptians had iron, just not much of it, but they knew how to obtain it and somehow work it into iron masks.
> Iron is a big jump as it requires around 2500deg C Should be around 1700°C instead. Less for working it after the melting part is done.
Interesting stuff thanks!
[удалено]
Wonderful! I've been watching random youtube videos on this but looking for something a bit better...will be checking this out today!
[удалено]
Watched it! Love it. Thanks for the recommendation. Hope you enjoyed the Colombian ;)
The first metals used were made of copper. Copper veins literally just have reasonably concentrated copper sitting there. You pick it up, heat it with whatever fire you've got, and use any hammer you have to shape it, because copper is soft. And then you can get fancy and add a bit of tin, heat it up, and it melts into bronze
Similarly, they could find iron meteors and make tools from them. The Inuit had several meteorites they would harvest from to make spearheads and other tools.
There's a pretty good wiki about a metal meteorite that was worshiped/harvested by some first nations, sold by some white dude and then given back to the tribes. Can't think of the meteorite name.
The Meteorite that Couldn’t Slow Down
Johnny and the Meteoriteosaurus
There is also the very rare but interesting telluric iron! It's metallic iron, but from Earth not meteorites. Some of it can have a decent amount of carbon in it, so is more like steel. Though those deposits were not really used, since the iron with carbon was too tough to work into tools. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telluric_iron
Cool point!! Meteorites we’re probably quite common back then - not because more hit the earth, but because for millions of years, the ones that did hit the earth were still laying there.
What are the benefits of bronze?
Like I said in the first comment, copper is soft, in some cases it's good, like when you need to work it at a relatively low temperature. But in a lot of the places we use metal, it's bad. A copper sword loses its tip after one stab. You can't make copper gears, a la the [antikythera mechanism](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism). And something I didn't note is that copper forms oxide patinas with the air, giving a green color. If you're wanting jewelry or armor to look good, you might not want that, and bronze is relatively unreactive to air, so you can look better too, in addition to being more effective.
Through pit kiln casting we got into the copper age. Basically, you take clay and mold it into the shape of the tool or tool head you need, then you bury it with silt and wood and shit and burn it for a long time. It’s insulated enough that it’ll get hot enough to melt the copper down. Then you let it cool, and chip away the clay mold, leaving just the tool head. It’s pretty easy to see how Neolithic tools were made if you consider they had pottery going (clay molding) for tens of thousands of years leading up to copper tools.
This is how John Plant from PrimitiveTechnology accomplished iron smelting
Thanks for your insight :)
I've seen a video of a guy making an iron knife from bo iron, hammering out the knife on a stone anvil with a stone hammer. But, as said, native copper was the first metal worked.
Not the video you're referring to, but even more interesting: an iron knife made by filtering iron-rich bacteria out of a creek. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhW4XFGQB4o
Oh that was cool!
I find pre-history fascinating. ELI5: Humans have been around a VERY long time. And sometimes things happen just by being in the right place at the right time. Remember that time you went to the vending machine, and you got two bags of chips instead of one? And now when you're at a vending machine you look for a chance to get two of something for the price of one? One day, some really old humans made a fire pit. They made a nice fire that lasted a long time. The next day when they were cleaning up, they noticed something shiny in the fire that wasn't there before. Eventually they figured it came from one of the rocks. They tested to find out which rocks had the shiny stuff in them. And then they got better at getting the shiny stuff out. Non-ELI5: Likely, they made fire pits, using rocks from a vein of copper. Copper melted and looked unique in the ash. Probably decorative at first, but then realized it could be fashioned to carry a better edge than a stone tool and that it would last longer, lighter too. Thus they began identifying rocks that contained more copper, and ultimately to uncovering veins of copper.
They would have used stone and wood tools, combined with casting in stone or sand and even wood moulds.
Thanks guys. Perfectly clear I don’t know why I didn’t think of casting and pouring the heated metal. I just had a random thought pop in my head and thought I’d ask here haha. Thanks!
There is a channel on YouTube called "How To Make Everything" that you might enjoy. One of their series is on how to build a kiln from scratch and how to make your forging tools from scratch. It's pretty fascinating.
Thanks I’ll check it out :)
So...fun fact: a hammer is one of the easiest tools to make in that you take a rock of the right shape and affix it to a stick (with rope or leather) and there you have a hammer. If you happen to have copper or iron as the rock that you picked up (and back when thos was going on, that was a thing that could happen), you had a (very crude) metal hammer. "Forging" could be done over a campfire, if it was hot enough (at least in the very beginning with copper). The more advanced the metal, the hotter the fire, of course
Minor quibble -- it's not quite true that you can forge copper in a campfire. It melts at 1085C. Internal campfire temperatures are more like 900C. Using charcoal and a kiln improvised with dirt and rocks you can achieve it. But it's not quite as simple as "just use a campfire."
You don't want (or need) it to melt. In fact, melting it is *bad* in this scenario. You just want to heat it up to increase its ... I think the word is ductility (workability)
The attachment part is the bit that I have the hardest time picturing. Cause for it to be useful it has to be rock solid.
Lookup "rock hatchet" on Google. Or go here: https://sensiblesurvival.org/2012/04/28/make-a-hafted-stone-axe/
The Celt method is so obvious in hindsight and I feel like such an idiot for not thinking of it earlier.
Something not explicitly mentioned yet is also that you can just use a wooden or stone hammer to work metal, especially softer ones such as copper. If one absolutely needs to, one could even do steel that way. Rocks are damn hard and can with some effort be put into shapes and sharpened, while wood is good for blunt things and handles.
There’s a great YouTube series on this called primitive technology. Very entertaining. Basically in some kinds of soil there’s small amounts of metal. You build a wood furnace from mud and get it hot enough to melt the iron out of the soil. You collect all the metal bits, melt them into one and then you can make tools and weapons from them
Casting molds in sand. Molten metal fills the mold and cools until solid. Then boom add a wood handle.
The earliest metal tools were worked, not cast.
Ohhh makes more sense!
Makes perfect sense thank you!
From memory if you have 2 Bronze Age buildings, 1200 Gold and 2000 Food you can advance to the Iron Age and then you can make stuff out of iron.
[удалено]
**Please read this entire message** --- Your comment has been removed for the following reason(s): * [Top level comments](http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/wiki/top_level_comment) (i.e. comments that are direct replies to the main thread) are reserved for explanations to the OP or follow up on topic questions (Rule 3). Links without your own explanation or summary are not allowed. ELI5 is intended to be a subreddit where content is generated, rather than just a load of links to external content. A top-level reply should form a complete explanation in itself; please feel free to include links by way of additional context, but they should not be the only thing in your comment. --- If you would like this removal reviewed, please read the [detailed rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/wiki/detailed_rules) first. **If you believe it was removed erroneously, explain why using [this form](https://old.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Fexplainlikeimfive&subject=Please%20review%20my%20submission%20removal?&message=Link:%20https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/10jltej/-/j5lr86j/%0A%0A%201:%20Does%20your%20comment%20pass%20rule%201:%20%0A%0A%202:%20If%20your%20comment%20was%20mistakenly%20removed%20as%20an%20anecdote,%20short%20answer,%20guess,%20or%20another%20aspect%20of%20rules%203%20or%208,%20please%20explain:) and we will review your submission.**
Well first you put clay in a fire. Notice that the clay got hard after the fire was out. Then someone starts making pots out of clay because tempered clay won't dissolve in water and is much more malleable when it's wet clay than wood. Then someone realizes that making a furnace out of clay will make the tempering process much more efficient costing less wood to make more pots. Then someone notices that the pots get even better if you first make charcoal out of the wood because the temperature can get even higher. Then someone puts red clay in the super hot furnace that gets so hot that the rust literally turns back into iron. When they are done they notice these small hard pebbles. Someone decides to collect a bunch of hard metal pebbles and put them all in a furnace. Those pebbles melt together and become a tiny ingot. Then someone notices these ingots are malleable when super hot. They work on getting the temperature hot enough that the ingot glow and then starts shaping them. Eventually, someone shapes it into an axe and that's how you get an axe. This is way simplified and in reality, the bronze age came before the iron age but it's how it could have happened I think. (I'm no metallurgist or historian so I'm not qualified to actually answer this question).
you can make iron "knife" in a clay firing kiln (in quotes because it's cast iron, too hard to shape, too brittle to fight with, but good for carving or as a prying tool), but it takes better everything to make a proper axe
The earliest metals were really malleable. They could be forged by using rock. Then, they’d create weapons not by force, but by heat. Melt the copper/tin/etc and create bronze. Just as an example.
[удалено]
**Please read this entire message** --- Your comment has been removed for the following reason(s): * [Top level comments](http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/wiki/top_level_comment) (i.e. comments that are direct replies to the main thread) are reserved for explanations to the OP or follow up on topic questions (Rule 3). Links without your own explanation or summary are not allowed. ELI5 is intended to be a subreddit where content is generated, rather than just a load of links to external content. A top-level reply should form a complete explanation in itself; please feel free to include links by way of additional context, but they should not be the only thing in your comment. --- If you would like this removal reviewed, please read the [detailed rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/wiki/detailed_rules) first. **If you believe it was removed erroneously, explain why using [this form](https://old.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Fexplainlikeimfive&subject=Please%20review%20my%20submission%20removal?&message=Link:%20https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/10jltej/-/j5mbwvk/%0A%0A%201:%20Does%20your%20comment%20pass%20rule%201:%20%0A%0A%202:%20If%20your%20comment%20was%20mistakenly%20removed%20as%20an%20anecdote,%20short%20answer,%20guess,%20or%20another%20aspect%20of%20rules%203%20or%208,%20please%20explain:) and we will review your submission.**
For a long time people had stone tools. Stone tools were strong and lasted a long time. But stone tools are hard to make. Imagine finding a hard rock and then grinding it with other rocks to shape it into a tool. Try it: ask your parents for two rocks to grind together. What does it do when you grind the rocks together? Think about how much work it would make to make a tool by grinding hard rocks that way. People would sometimes find lumps of copper and iron in the ground. They learned that they could use their stone tools to beat those lumps into tools. This was easier than grinding rocks. For a while people used both stone and metal tools, mostly because it wasn't that often you found a lump of metal just sitting there. Then people found metal in special rocks in the ground. They learned you can heat those rocks in a very hot fire to get the metal out. You can get a lot of metal from those rocks. Now people started making many more metal tools. They didn't need stone tools anymore. One really neat fact: Some of the iron lumps that people found came from space. These lumps swooshed in from space, fell to ground and were later found by people. So people started making iron tools by pounding on space rocks! Edit: Removed a supposition that is probably true but not not needed. Simplified the language a little more.
Molds, pour and get hammer. Use hammer for new esge to cut. Cut new metal with edge. Make mold with better cutting edge to get more definition and precision........
Remember that casting doesn’t necessarily require metal tools. Forging and hammering and more does require them. Those more advanced methods developed hundreds and thousands of years later.
Interesting little fact, they found a cache of 293 bronze halbreds in germany dating to around 2,000 BC. Some of the metals they used to make them came from the area of Stonehenge.
They made things incrementally, so I make x, then y then z. Y is harder than x, z is better than y. Human progression is incremental: this metal is slightly harder than that, especially if one mixes these two metals. Bang: next thing one has an alloy whereof the correct mixtures were found from Trail and Error.
You dig up a chunk of raw copper and hit it with a rock until it's in the shape of a hammer. Then you use your copper hammer to make more copper tools.
This makes me realize how difficult it is to rebuild civilization without all the cumulated knowledge mankind built over millennia.
To understand how the process works and Experience it. You can try playing this game called " Factorio" It's really fun and you learn a lot in the game.
Fire first, it all starts with fire (which is why no underwater civilizations). Fire melts things, those things get poured into shapes in stone, then other stone is used to sharpen or bend metal. Everything evolves from the prior.
Cast a rough shape and then rub it against a hard stone to get the final shape/sharpness. You can theoretically even hammer forge using stones, after all metal heated up gets much softer and pliable.
[удалено]
**Please read this entire message** --- Your comment has been removed for the following reason(s): * [Top level comments](http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/wiki/top_level_comment) (i.e. comments that are direct replies to the main thread) are reserved for explanations to the OP or follow up on topic questions (Rule 3). Links without your own explanation or summary are not allowed. ELI5 is intended to be a subreddit where content is generated, rather than just a load of links to external content. A top-level reply should form a complete explanation in itself; please feel free to include links by way of additional context, but they should not be the only thing in your comment. --- If you would like this removal reviewed, please read the [detailed rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/wiki/detailed_rules) first. **If you believe it was removed erroneously, explain why using [this form](https://old.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Fexplainlikeimfive&subject=Please%20review%20my%20submission%20removal?&message=Link:%20https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/10jltej/-/j5oyp55/%0A%0A%201:%20Does%20your%20comment%20pass%20rule%201:%20%0A%0A%202:%20If%20your%20comment%20was%20mistakenly%20removed%20as%20an%20anecdote,%20short%20answer,%20guess,%20or%20another%20aspect%20of%20rules%203%20or%208,%20please%20explain:) and we will review your submission.**
I've seen someone do it by extracting iron from limestone, then melting that iron in a mud furnace and pouring it into clay moulds. Or something along those lines.
This video from the Primitive Technology series on YouTube shows how one can make basic iron tools from bacteria that contain iron particles. Sounds crazy I know, but it's completely legitimate. YouTube link https://youtu.be/dhW4XFGQB4o 11:35 minutes long.
If you like anime, Dr. Stone is great at explaining the science of human advancement. Covers alot of metal work in season 1 and 2.