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Alfred Pendray appeared in Muse, Volume 2, Number 2, pp. 35-43, April 1998.
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than a thousand years before steel as good
Not only were Damascus swords was made in the West. Wootz was the first
sharp and beautiful, they were also objects high-quality steel made anywhere in the
of mystery. The best European bladesmiths world.
from the Middle Ages on up weren’t able to
make them, even though they carefully Steel is a mixture of iron and carbon. To
studied examples of blades made in the East. make wootz steel, the craftsman melted iron
Damascus blades became even more and materials that contain carbon, such as
mysterious when the art of making them charcoal, wood or leaves. They did this in a
actually died out. The last Damascus sealed crucible, which is simply a melting
swords were made in the early 1800s. pot able to withstand high temperatures.
When the cooled and hardened steel was
Over the years metallurgists (people taken out of the crucible, it was in the shape
who study metals) have suggested many of a cake. The wootz cakes (which were
different ways of making the swords, but about the size of hockey pucks and weighed
when they were tested, none of the methods about four pounds) were then shipped to
made blades that matched the Damascus Damascus, where smiths made them into
swords in the museums. The recipe for a beautiful blades.
Damascus sword was a puzzle that
challenged people for centuries. With all the To shape the cake into a blade, the smiths
knowledge and technological advances of repeatedly heated and hammered it until it
the 20th century, people still couldn’t figure was stretched and flattened into a blade
out how to make these swords. What was shape. As the metal was heated and beaten,
the secret? I’m a metallurgist who teaches the wavy pattern somehow formed on the
about metals at Iowa State University. I surface of the blade.
became interested in Damascus swords
when I read an article about them that one of One of the major problems we faced in
my students gave to me. Alfred Pendray, making a Damascus sword was to get the
my coauthor, is a blacksmith in Williston right pattern on the surface. And in order to
Florida, who also became interested in the get the right pattern on the outside of the
swords by reading about them. We worked sword, you had to have the right structure
on the problem independently until a mutual inside the sword. In steel, some carbon
friend put us in touch. For a year, we wrote chemically combines with iron to form a
back and forth, and in 1989 we finally met new kind of chemical called iron carbide.
and decided to try to solve the mystery These iron carbide particles are surrounded
together. At first, we tried methods for by metal that is almost pure iron. But it is
making Damascus swords that had been the arrangement of these carbide particles
published in science journals. But those that cause the famous Damascus pattern.
methods didn’t give us blades that matched
the old blades. So we decided to go back to The interesting thing is that the carbide
the very beginning. We would trace step by particles aren’t scattered randomly
step how the swords were made in ancient throughout the Damascus blade. If you
times and see if we could figure out how the sawed the sword blade in half and looked at
ancient craftsmen did it. the cut surface under a microscope, you’d
see how the carbide particles arrange
According to reports of travelers to the East, themselves in rows. This is called banding.
the swords were made by forging small
cakes of steel that were manufactured in These bands of carbide particles form the
southern India. This steel was called wootz pattern you see on Damascus swords. When
steel. Wootz steel first appeared in India the steel is beaten with a rounded hammer,
between 300 BC and AD 500. It was more the bands of carbides near the surface are
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But what kind of impurities did
Damascus steel have? In the past 100 years,
scientists have analyzed the ingredients of
10 Damascus blades, and these analyses
have shown that wootz steel contains small
amounts of four impurity elements, sulfur,
phosphorous, silicon and manganese. So
why couldn’t people recreate a Damascus
blade if they had the recipe and knew how
the blade was prepared? Well, we guessed
that there might have been other impurity
elements in the steel that people missed.
The impurities could have been present in
such small amounts that they were
undetectable. Nowadays we can analyze
elements at lower levels than before, so we
pushed up and down until they look like thought there was a chance that we might
waves instead of bands. not have all the right ingredients.
The wavy pattern in true Damascus Was our guess about impurities
blades only turns up in the beating and right? Only trying to make a blade would
hammering of the steel cake into a blade. tell. Although our early attempts to make
No one could figure out how this pattern Damascus steel mostly failed, once in a
was formed. People tried to create the while we succeeded in making a presentable
pattern in many ways. Smiths tried to copy Damascus blade. Like cooks perfecting a
the pattern by etching or carving the metal. recipe, we started to experiment with our
They also tired welding different types of ingredients, adding different amounts of
steels together to create a patterned look. impurities and carefully watching and
And some of the patterns they created were controlling the heating of the metal.
beautiful. But if you looked closely, you
could see the surfaces of these objects didn’t Our big break came when we started
really look like the surfaces of true to make our steel using a type of commercial
Damascus blades. And since they didn’t iron called Sorel iron, which is refined from
have the right pattern, they didn’t have the a special ore deposit in Canada. Once we
right structure on the inside either. started using this iron we began to obtain
much better results. We analyzed it and
So what caused the pattern to found very small amounts of two carbide
appear? We guessed that impurities in the forming elements called titanium and
steel might have something to do the carbide vanadium. When these two elements were
banding. In plain steel, any element that present we got improved results. Eventually
isn’t carbon or iron is an impurity. By we got to the point where we could make
today’s standards cooking steel in a crucible Damascus steel that could be forged into
is a dirty process; the finished steel is likely good blades on nearly every try. So to get
to contain small amounts of many different an internal structure consisting of bands of
impurities from the iron ore or from the carbide particles, the steel had to contain
walls of the crucible. Perhaps there was a small amounts of vanadium and titanium--
special impurity in Damascus steel that but as we found out particularly vanadium.
made the pattern.
Genuine Damascus blades are
considered treasures, so their owners usually
don’t allow metallurgists to cut them up.
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You can imagine how excited we were when both the external surface patterns and the
a museum in Switzerland recently gave us internal structure of ancient Damascus
small pieces of several original blades for blades. And, yes, our blades can cut a silk
study. We found that they all contained scarf in half as it falls to the ground.
very small amounts of vanadium. This
agrees with our discovery that vanadium is a Our solution to the puzzle also
key impurity element for making Damascus suggests an answer to an interesting
steel. question: why was this art lost in the first
place? The answer may be that only certain
There are still things we don’t deposits of iron ore in India contained the
understand about Damascus steel. For necessary impurities. When these ore
example, despite all our science, we still deposits were used up, and when
don’t know why vanadium makes the bladesmiths began to use steel from other
carbide particles line up in rows when other areas of India, the secret ingredients were
impurities do not. But our method has missing, the magic was lost, and with it, the
passed the crucial practical test: we are now secret of Damascus steel.
consistently able to make blades that have
I worked by myself on Damascus steel had a lot to teach each other, and we
for almost five years. Then a friend told weren’t ashamed or embarrassed to ask
me that John Verhoeven, a metallurgy each other questions.
professor, was working on the same
problem. In 1987, we started writing to To make Damascus steel, I take charcoal
each other. Then I visited his lab. John and mix it with an iron that has the
and I made a good match because I knew impurities we need to form the
forging and he knew metallurgy. We Damascus pattern. I also use green
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leaves, just like the old bladesmiths did. records of how the early smiths broke
Hydrogen (which comes from the water down the steel cake into a blade. I
in the leaves) helps the carbon from the would have loved to have been a fly on
charcoal mix better with the iron. the wall of one of those early shops so I
could have seen how early smiths
I try to do everything as close to worked. It took a lot of trial and error to
the original procedures as possible, but I figure out how the blade should be
do use some modern technology when I forged: we had to figure out the right
know it won’t make a difference in the temperatures, and how the metal was
steel. For example, I use power hammered and beaten.
hammers that can hit hard or soft. I also
use a modern gas forge that can control As far as I know, I’m the only
temperature very accurately. The bladesmith who makes Damascus steel.
original bladesmiths didn’t have any When you compare my blades to
fancy instruments to tell them what to original blades, pretty much everything’s
do—they had to look at the color and the same. I make so many blades today
feel the metal to figure out what was that I often forget how many years it
happening. And I had to teach myself to took to figure out. All I can say is that it
do the same, because there were no been a really fun experiment.
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