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Recreating The Lost Art Of Damascus Steel
YouAreFatMan writes "The Chicago Tribune has an article about two researchers -- a metallurgist and a blacksmith -- who have apparently been able to reproduce the legendary Damascus steel. 'Islamic artisans used it for centuries to make swords that spurred envy and myths among Europeans--including the legend that a Damascus blade could slice a falling silk scarf in midair.'"
The technique of forging the steel was secret: there was no published work that explained it. Thus, there is no prior art.
This is actually a perfect example of why patents were created in the first place: to reveal and create a public record of secret processes to prevent technologies from disappearing. Society gets the secret information in the end, but, the inventor gets a legally-protected monopoly for a reasonable period.
If the Ottoman empire had a patent system, perhaps the secret of Damascus steel would never have been lost!
The original artisans did not leave complete instructions for making their steel, and the few written formulas are less than helpful. Some advise quenching the red-hot blade in the urine of a red-haired boy or of a goat fed nothing but ferns. Another text suggests driving the sword into the belly of a muscular slave.
Ironically, scientists also believe this is how the first versions of Windows were created.
absolutely false.
A blade formed by molding liquid steel will always be totally inferior to one forged by a traditional process of layering and pounding on an anvil.
The traditional process will yeild successive layers of metals of differing qualities. The high-points of this art are to be found in the swords of the Japanese Samurai, as well as in the Damascus-type blades.
The differing properties of different qualities of steel suit the differing requirements of the edge and body of the blade. The end-result is actually a primative composite, far superior in performance to what would result from a cast piece; an homogenous chunk of blah.
The only thing casting of steel swords allowed was crude mass-production. (skipping the labor-intensive steps of pounding, folding, pounding, etc. which required a very skilled and experienced laborer, as well as a lot of forge-time). And if casting didn't exist, then how did bladesmiths get the stock metal to begin with? So it wasn't casting per-se that the Arabs developed, but rather casting of a metal of a type that was of sufficient quality to work as a blade all by it's lonesome. But it wasn't an especially great blade.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Cough ... have you ever heard of the Ottoman Empire? With their artillery and other technical military items unmatched by Europeans for a couple of centuries?
... we still fight over the teaching of evolution because so many Americans have a bizarre
...
Yes, eventually their fortunes turned as those of France, Russia and other nations rose. Of course,
those nations found their fortunes wane as well.
Rule Britannia! The sun never sets on the British Empire!
Of course, Bismark and the Prussians brought great power to Germany (and don't forget that the Turks were still a force to be reckoned with in WW I).
And those powers waned as well, leaving the US and
Russia as the two remaining superpowers after WW II.
Now, of course, there is only one. But before we get too full of ourselves and assume we'll remain the world's most dominant force forever, consider that our bizarre unflinching adherance to ancient religious law rivals that of fundamentalist Islams .
Let's see
unflinching adherance to a literal belief in Genesis. That's not the whole story but it's not a bad place to start
The January 2001 issue, to be exact. The article's not available online ($5 to download a PDF?? WTF??) but it's right there on page 74. A fascinating read, very detailed, with lots of great pictures.
I have a positive modifier on Troll. When I mod someone Troll their karma should go UP!
Hey, yeah, thanks for nothin! ;-)
Just raise the taxes on crack.
What you describe is pattern-welded steel, a technique used to mimic the appearence of true Damascus Steel.
This article is talking about the real deal, which was made through a combinations of impurities in the stock (Vandium is what these guys used) and etching the finished blade. Persumably the reason the secret was originally lost was that there were only a few mines that produced the right stock to make it, and when they were exausted, masters stopped teaching their apprentices how to do it.
Any place you see selling non-antique Damascus steel is actually using pattern welding.
OK, lets invent our own process of making Damascus Steel, and make a bunch of swords (our slogan? We put the SLASH in /.)
Then, all of us armed with the swords will first go get Dimitry freed, then proceed to the whitehouse to make some demands.
Remember Congressmen (and the pres for that matter) wear SILK ties.
$sig=$1 if($brain =~
Back in the middle ages, the Islamic World was scientifically way beyond anything the West had seen. Historians will tell you that the information the crusaders brought back was what caused the end of the European dark ages and the beggining of the Renaissance.
The muslims had preserved much of the Greek and Roman knowldege that had been lost in Europe when the Dark ages started. Beyond that though, they made great strides on their own. Studies in astronomy, medicine, public health, nature, architecture, math, etc, in almost every field of human knowldege then known. For example, the concept of 0 comes to the West through them. Great strides in Algebra were made by them.
It is really surprising how little of this known in much of the world, besides experts in the field. Knowledge is useful, but history should also reflect where that knowledge comes from. If not for the many advances made by the Islamic world, we would be living in a really different world right now since the Dark ages would have ended god knows when.
-"Those who fought today will die tommorow."-
I don't know the source or the truth of this, but here is the legend as I have heard it told.
---
Richard the Lionhearted had been captured by Saladin, and was being held hostage for, literally, a king's ransom. During his rather luxurious imprisonment, Richard fell to boasting of the quality of his blade, claiming to Saladin that its equal was not to be found anywhere.
As proof, Richard called for an anvil, and with a mighty blow of his broadsword he smote it in two.
Saladin for his part answered this by taking a gossamer silk scarf and draping it over the edge of his blade, whereupon it fell to the floor neatly sliced in two.
To which all of Saladin's wives were heard to mutter, "men!"
---
OK I made that last bit up, but its as likely to be true as te rest.
If you are interested in the subject, a pair of metallurgists who also claim to have uncovered the secret of Damascus steel wrote and article in the Feb '85 issue of Scientific American that is well worth looking up.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
It is easy to sharpen a blade so it is sharp enough to cut through silk.
What is hard is to make it hard enough to keep that edge without making it as brittle as glass.
The Japanese katana accomplishes this. It can be polished so sharp it will cut through meat under its own (low) weight. On the battlefield, admittdly there is little need to cut through a silk scarf or to carve steaks, but one useful tricks you could do with a katana and presumably with a fine Damascus blades was to actually cut through lesser blades. Which is very useful indeed.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
More neat katana tricks: the aesthetically and functionally perfect curve of a katana doesn't form until the nearly-finished blade is quenched, and it forms naturally - it's not forged in. The differing hardness and thickness on either side of the blade causes it to cool and contract at different speeds, forming the curve. The steel on the back of the blade is also much softer than the steel of the edge, which is why you'll see people in movies deflecting and parrying with the back of the blade. This allows an enemy's weapon to bounce off the softer steel so the hard edge doesn't chip or shatter.
At least, I think so - that's what I heard from a friend who was a blacksmith for a while.
In depth article about a year back. January actually.
m ma ry.html
The Mystery of Damascus Blades
John D. Verhoeven
Centuries ago craftsmen forged peerless stell blades. But how did they do it? The author and a blacksmith have found an answer.
http://www.sciam.com/2001/0101issue/0101quicksu
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
This works for computers too!
air and light and time and space
That's not right, kenjutsu techniques rarely attempt to put blade directly against blade, ideally large flowing movements using the entire body and momentum therof are used to avoid strikes and absorb the energy of avoidance to supplement the strength of your own cuts.
;)
For example the aikido technique Ikkyo was developed from a common kenjutsu technique dealing with two opponents, one attacking from the front and one from the rear, to avoid a downward cut from the front you would step into the attack slightly and simultaneously wheel to the side with a sharp hip movement throwing your arms into the crossing attack at the opponent behind you, letting the blade strike flesh and the original attacker miss you completely with their strike, from this position a second wheel and step back and a cut from the top right to the bottom left will cause the first attacker to drop into two neat seperate segments.
Of course, all this is in theory and often in practice you would simply do everything that you could to stay alive, in ancient battlescarred blades ( and in my own katanas that I rarely use against other live blade katanas ) there is evidence of blocking with the hardened sharp edge, but in order of preference, when using a sword your options would be as follows;
1) Get out of the way and use the momentum from avoidance to deliver a counterstrike.
2) block with the flat off the blade, preferably in the center where the hardened edge fades into the more springy spine, twisting the blade at the same time will cause the block to "deflect" the attack.
3) block with the edge, you're likely to get a non fatal chip in the blade but no fatal flaws that can't be sharpened out.
4) Block with the spine, this is extremely rare as usually in combat the sharpened edge faces the enemy anyway so you would have to twist the blade a full 180 degrees in order to do this, furthermore the hardened edge would leave quite a mark on the springy spine, admittedly not compromising usability but undeniably compromising aesthetics, and seeing as the unsharpened spine was never sharpened this would be there to stay.
As for legends of falling silk scarves being cut by flashing damascene scimitar blades, this is not an impressive feat, a sharp blade is not difficult to achieve, renaissance rapiers were extremely sharp (high carbon steel) but quite brittle, in the rare occasion that one of these glasslike blades came into contact with a lower hardness steel with more spring in it with any considerable force, the likelihood of a break would be very high.
Japanese steel in a katana is forged by heating the blade white hot after hundreds of folds and covering the spine with clay and gradiating down to a thin layer on the front and plunging the blade into water (causing the spine to cool slower than the edge, resulting in a martensite/bainite/pearlite gradient from edge/center/spine and as pointed out in the parent post, causing the curve.)
Not mentioned in the parent post is the misty pattern often polished onto imitation oriental swords, this is not actually decoration on a functional katana, it is a result of the complex tempering process and is evidence of a well forged blade, on a real sword it actually goes the entire way through the blade and gives a visual record of the area of the sword which is hardest (the misty part will follow the edge up to the point, that is the hardened edge).
In my view the impressive thing about damascene steel, even though compared to the above process for the purpose only of making swords with a single edge and an unsharpened spine (which the scimitar was, also) it is quite inferior, is that damascene steel did not rely on a gradiation in tempering, it was a single solid pillar of power compared to contemporary steels and not gradiated like the japanese blade.
All in all quite a bit of media sensationalism in the article but there you go, not that new.
The Japanese have been using this method for centuries to make their swords.
Each swords has 32,768 layers of microthin metal, confering to their blades superior strength.
Why 32,768 layers exactly? Well, that's what you get when you flatten a piece of steel, fold it in two, and stretch it back while hammering it 15 times...
"Sometimes I'd have to tell him, `I don't care if you've got a PhD, you don't understand what the hell's going on here,'" Pendray said.
Someone get this man a slashdot account.
I mean I can't count the number of times I've been in battle and needed to slice through falling silk in mid air... geesh, I wish I had one of those
~ now you know
"Although Verhoeven and Pendray have patented their technique and received some funding from Nucor Steel Inc."
Steel wants to be FREE, people, and Nucor wants to keep this technology to themselves to help further their globalized corporate profitmaking.
This is an outrage to the Open Source community, and I am hereby calling upon all Linux geeks to band together and produce their own Open-Source version of Damascus Steel. It's high time we show these people we are not going to tolerate their greedy ballyhooing at the expense of poor Dimitry and sweatshop workers in Malaysia. Write your congressman today and request, nay, DEMAND that the DMCA and CSS and DVDA be repealed so we can steal MP3's again.
Remember: Steel wants to be free!!
Free Dimitry!!
"Technically, a cat locked in a box may be alive or dead." -Kurt Cobain
Which, oddly enough, is probably the most succinct description of the DMCA that I've ever seen...
--Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
...can you hear it? That's the sound of a few thousand rabid Highlander fanatics drooling over their own piece-together Damascus-steel Kurgan sword.
Or, for the ladies, a Damascus-steel Xena death-frisbee.
Robotiq.com is heavily tested on animals
I certainly encountered more than my fair share of professors in undergrad and in grad school who had tenure and all kinds of honors, but didn't understand how a real computer works. Case in point: Algorithm analysis. We analyze the performance of algorithms based on a model where every memory access can take the same amount of time. But anyone who understands modern virtual memory knows that's not the case. And it turns out that although that won't take an algorithm in polynomial time and move it into exponential time, an algorithm that on the surface is O(N^3) can actually be O(N^5) (according to one of the examples Larry Carter at the University of California-San Diego gave in a lecture).
In academia, people write papers on doing nifty things, while in the real world, people actually do them. It's kind of like the article below where a CS professor writes about DOOM and it becomes clear (at least to me) that he doesn't really know the first thing about what John C. actually does.
I'm not pissing on degrees; I certainly recognize the value of my degrees now that I have a job. But it took me a while to un-learn the habit I'd acquired in grad school of thinking ideas into the ground without actually doing anything with them. For a while I had to force myself to just DO things and worry about whether I was doing them "right" later. Only then did the education start to prove its worth.
I think it's common to think that people with Ph.D.'s are brilliant. They may be smarter than average, but getting a Ph.D. is more a matter of working VERY hard towards a goal than it is about being a genius.