Zoomed Vinay Special · First-person editorial
Michael Faraday Tried to Copy Indian Steel in 1819 and Failed. The Best Answer Yet: Traces as Small as 40 Parts Per Million of Something Nobody Could See
In 1795 the Royal Society was handed a cake of Indian crucible steel, called wootz, that its best smiths could barely forge. This Investigation follows the trail from the furnaces of Konasamudram and Magadi to Faraday's laboratory and a 1998 paper that gave the best explanation yet of the watered pattern of the Damascus blade, and marks clearly where the evidence stops.
The point of view
On 11 June 1795 a London physician named George Pearson read a paper to the Royal Society about a lump of steel from India. Each cake was about five inches across and a little over two pounds. His hammer could not dent it cold. A doctor in Bombay had written that the smiths there treated working it as "a separate art from that of forging iron". Twenty-four years later Michael Faraday dissolved a piece in acid, found almost nothing but iron and carbon, tried to make his own, and admitted he had "not yet been very successful". What was in it?
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H. W. Voysey, "Description of the Native Manufacture of Steel in Southern India", Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 1 (June 1832), pp. 245-247
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Francis Buchanan, A Journey from Madras through the Countries of Mysore, Canara, and Malabar, vol. 1 (London, 1807), pp. 170, 174-175 (entry of 13 June 1800)
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M. Faraday, "An Analysis of Wootz, or Indian Steel", Quarterly Journal of Science, Literature and the Arts 7 (1819), pp. 288-290
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M. Reibold, P. Paufler, A. A. Levin, W. Kochmann, N. Pätzke and D. C. Meyer, "Carbon nanotubes in an ancient Damascus sabre", Nature 444 (2006), p. 286, (abstract and figure…
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G. Juleff, "Crucible steel at Hattota Amune, Sri Lanka, in the first millennium AD: archaeology and contextualisation", in S. Srinivasan, S. Ranganathan and A. Giumlia-Mair…
os.pennds.org
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S. Srinivasan and S. Ranganathan, India's Legendary Wootz Steel: An Advanced Material of the Ancient World (NIAS and IISc, Bangalore, 2004), pp. 44, 49, 55-56, 81, 84, 86,…
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