Start here
A History of Metalworking Techniques
A plain-language survey of how people smelted, cast, forged and rolled metal, from native copper and bronze to blast furnaces, steel and modern alloys.
Tools and Industry
Metallurgy and Metalworking
How people smelted, alloyed and shaped metals across the ages.
Aluminum Smelting and the Hall-Heroult Process
How aluminum went from a rare, costly curiosity to an everyday metal after Charles Hall and Paul Héroult developed electrolytic smelting in 1886.
Bronze Making and the Bronze Age
How tin-copper bronze was made, why it beat pure copper, and how long-distance tin trade shaped the Bronze Age across Europe, Asia and the Mediterranean.
Crucible Steel and Wootz
How South Asian and Central Asian smiths melted iron and carbon in sealed crucibles to make wootz, the patterned steel behind famous blades.
Early Iron Smelting and the Bloomery
How early smiths turned iron ore into workable metal in small clay furnaces called bloomeries, without ever melting the iron, long before the blast furnace.
Rolling Mills and Wire Drawing
How metal came to be pressed into flat sheet and pulled into wire, from hand-drawn gold thread to water-powered mills and industrial rolling of rails and plate.
Stainless Steel and Rustproof Alloys
How early twentieth-century work on chromium steels in Sheffield, Germany and the United States led to stainless steel, and why chromium resists rust.
The Bessemer Process and Cheap Steel
How blowing air through molten pig iron made steel cheap in the 1850s, and how open-hearth, Thomas-Gilchrist and oxygen processes later improved on it.
The Blast Furnace and Cast Iron
How tall furnaces with strong air blasts produced liquid iron in volume, from early Chinese cast iron to coke smelting in Britain and the rise of pig iron.
Related topics
More in tools and industry
Light and Radiation Bulbs, LEDs, lasers and radiation detectors. Ancient Engineering Wheels, mills, sewers and an ancient geared computer. Electric Machines and Batteries Motors, power tools, batteries and powered personal devices. Advanced Materials and Biochips Graphene and miniature biological chips from lab discovery toward products. 3D Printing and Scanning Additive manufacturing and 3D measuring, from first machines to metal and aerospace parts. Robotics From clockwork automata to the first factory robot arms. Farm Tools and Agriculture How plows, harvesters and seed tools changed how people grow food. Textile Machinery Spinning, weaving and knitting machines that drove early industry. Clocks and Timekeeping Devices that measured hours, from shadows to atomic frequencies.