There is no doubt that the society we live in is constructed of innumerable interconnected parts. Moving one little thing moves everything else and, generally speaking, an object at motion will continue in motion until something stops it. That’s physics, that’s society and that’s generally how industry works as well. We’ve been living in a time of unparalleled motion for the last two hundred years and it shows in every facet of our lives. Today, we have wonders people couldn’t have dreamed about in previous centuries and the rate of complexity is only increasing as time goes on. But what are some of the elements that made all of this progress possible? How did the progress of civilization advance so quickly and what spurred the underlying development? Well, there is no one right answer to that question as a whole. Really, it’s a series of interconnected answers, none more right than the other. But where do we start, exactly? It all depends on the type of complexity you are talking about. One of the main ways that society is far more complex now than it used to be is due to technological complexity. Our machines are far more intricate than anything any other era of humans that we know of has ever had. But how did this start? What is it that makes our machines so special? The answer is metal. Metal, metal, metal . Metal is by no means a new discovery in human history but our metals now are stronger, lighter and more durable than ever. The metals we have now would boggle the mind of any other metallurgist or any scientist from any other scientist. How did humans get started metal working though? What makes this era of metal work different than any other? Is it our ability in steel melting, is it our abundance of spare parts or replacement parts or induction melting or our induction furnaces? Or is it something deeper? Turns out, the answers to all of these questions are just a little bit more complicated than we’d like them to be but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there. It just means we are going to have go back a little bit farther than you think to answer them in a way that makes some amount of sense.
Metalworking all over the world
No one is quite sure when humans discovered the first uses for metal or metalworking. The process isn’t that evolved at its core but it is certainly not simple by any stretch of the imagination. Despite this, there is evidence of some form of metalworking in many early civilizations, from Mesopotamia to ancient China. How these ancient peoples managed to discover heating ore into workable metal is a bit of a mystery but it’s thought that they may have gotten the idea from even older peoples who saw the properties of ores naturally and conceived of different ways to utilize them for their own purposes. This process progressed until it came to the very early large civilizations who produced a good amount of metal material on their own, enough that they had a lot of spare parts left over. Over the next couple centuries, new advancements were made in increments to metal’s hardness and durability. We progressed from bronze to iron and aluminum and eventually to other metals as well but, for the most part, they all stayed fairly separate. People didn’t start mixing alloys until a little later when they began to get curious about what the properties of metals might become when they were mixed together. Would they produce better yields overall, perhaps a surplus so great there would be even more spare parts left over? Would the metals grow even stronger? Turns out, the answer to that last question was yes. That, in fact, was how steel was first created during the early industrial revolution, through an ingenious collection of alloys and melted down spare parts. Steel itself was an enormous breakthrough in metallurgy and industry overall. Steel was the reason we could build skyscrapers and planes and metal ships. Steel is one of the cornerstones of our ever growing and ever diversifying modern world.
