

Carbon nanotechnology in a 17th century Damascus sword - ph0rque
http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2008/09/carbon_nanotechnology_in_an_17th_century_damascus_sword.php

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iamwil
I remember reading somewhere(?) about attempts at reproduction, where the
experimenters grounded leaves into the mix. I can't find it now (i.e. can't
back it up)

But anyway, there's apparently lots of attempts at reproduction. Here's one
interesting read I found about the spectral analysis of the swords

[http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/9809/Verhoeven-9809.htm...](http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/9809/Verhoeven-9809.html)

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river_styx
How in the world did they come up with this process in the first place, if 400
years later we still can't really reproduce it? Either there was serious
genius at work there or they made one hell of an accidental discovery.

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iamwil
From the link I posted: "Based on our studies, it is clear that to produce the
damascene patterns of a museum-quality wootz Damascus blade the smith would
have to fulfill at least three requirements.

1) the wootz ingot would have to have come from an ore deposit that provided
significant levels of certain trace elements, notably, Cr, Mo, Nb, Mn, or V.
...believe the blades with good patterns were only produced from wootz ingots
made in southern India, apparently around Hyderabad.

2) ...wootz Damascus blades with good patterns are characterized by a high
phosphorus level. This means that the ingots of these blades would be severely
hot short, which explains why Breant's9 19th century smiths in Paris could not
forge wootz ingots.

3) a smith who developed a heat-treatment technique that allowed the hot-short
ingots to be forged might still not have learned how to produce the surface
patterns, because they do not appear until the surface decarb region is ground
off the blades; this grinding process is not a simple matter. "

A combination of the right technology along with the right materials set the
stage to allow trial and error to make incremental discoveries.

Besides, back then, there was a commercial need for swords, so people worked
on it day and night for hundreds of years. You can get pretty good at
something when you work on it long enough. Nowadays, our effort is put into
semiconductors, among other things.

Maybe one day, when a new technology surpasses semiconductors is being used,
and the 'art of semiconductors is lost', people of the future might wonder how
we built things that were so damn small and hot with [yet unnamed or not
understood physics effect].

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davidw
There were a few bits about this stuff in Neil Stephenson's Baroque Cycle.

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pfedor
The description in the Baroque Cycle involved cooling the hot metal extremely
slowly, from which I understand that Stephenson assumed the process was
similar to what simulated annealing simulates (AFAIK the creation of diamonds
is based on similar principle.)

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rkowalick
Nanotechnology + Swords = Awesome

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reazalun
(Nanotechnology = Awesome - Swords)?

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Hexstream
And there you have it: the pitfalls of operator overloading.

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MaysonL
Here's another article: Continuing Study of Damascus Steel: Bars from the
Alwar Armory

[http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa5348/is_200409/ai_n2...](http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa5348/is_200409/ai_n21355815)

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palish
This was surely alien technology.

(ducks)

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quasimojo
dama steel is not that amazing, you can buy straight razors and kitchen knives
made from damascus steel aka "wootz"

but guess what? for most uses it SUCKS. why? because it is almost impossible
to sharpen

most surgical-quality steels are more than hard enough, but soft enough to
actually be sharpened on a garnet (belgian coticule) or synthetic hone. my
best straight razors are the ones from the 20s and 30s....before people knew
how to make even today's surgical steel. i can actually sharpen them. harder
steel requires hours of honing and doesn't work any better.

look at some web forums for straight razors....very few fans of damasteel can
be found

