Metalworking

Metalworking is the craft and practice of working with metals to create individual parts, assemblies, or large scale structures. The term covers a wide range of work from large ships, bridges and oil refineries to delicate jewelery. more...

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It therefore includes a correspondingly wide range of skills and the use of many different types of metalworking processes and their related tools.

Metalworking is an art, hobby, industry, and trade. It relates to metallurgy, a science, jewelery making, an art-and-craft, and as a trade and industry with ancient roots spanning all cultures and civilizations. Metalworking had its beginnings millennia in the past. At some imprecise point in the distant past humankind discovered that certain rocks now called ores could be smelted, producing metal. Further, they discovered that the metal product was malleable and ductile and thus able to be formed into various tools, adornments and put to other practical uses. Humans over the millennia learned to work raw metals into objects of art, adornment, practicality, trade, and engineering.

Prehistory

Metalworking predates history.

No one knows with any certainty where or when metalworking began. The earliest technologies were impermanent to say the least and were unlikely to leave any evidence for long. The advance that brought metal into focus was the connection of fire and metals. Who accomplished this is as unknown as the when and where.

Not all metal required fire to obtain it or work it. Isaac Asimov speculated that gold was the "first metal." His reasoning is that gold by its chemistry is found in nature as nuggets of pure gold. In other words, only gold, as rare as it is, is found in nature as the metal that it is. There are a few exceptions as a result of meteors. All other metals are found in ores, a mineral bearing rock, that require heat or some other process to liberate the metal. Another feature of gold is that it is workable as it is found, meaning that no technology beyond eyes to find a nugget and a hammer and an anvil to work the metal is needed. Stone hammer and stone anvil will suffice for technology. This is the result of gold's properties of malleability and ductility. The earliest tools were stone, bone, wood, and sinew. They sufficed to work gold.

At some unknown point the connection between heat and the liberation of metals from rock became clear, rocks rich in copper, tin, and lead came into demand. These ores were mined where ever they were recognized. Remnants of such ancient mines have been found all over what is today the Middle East. The end of the beginning of metalworking occurs sometime around 6000 BCE when copper smelting became common in the Middle East.

The ancients knew of seven metals. Here they are arrange in order of their oxidation potential:

Read more at Wikipedia.org