This post from some weeks back was great if you like reading about blades: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25010280 It has a great write-up of how wootz steel was made. It also disputes the commonly seen claim (including in the submitted article) that the production process for damascus was lost.
> Nor did wootz production mysteriously vanish either – there is evidence for extensive production of crucible steel in Hyderabad in the 17th century; early 19th century accounts by British and Russian writers also describe the process It was never lost! D. Mushet patented what was, as Craddock notes, “clearly a copy of the Indian process” in 1800 (Craddock, op. cit. 283) in Britain. My impression, though none of my sources quite say this directly, is that the remaining Indian steelmaking industry subsequently withered away due to competition with British steel and (perhaps more decisively) a British desire to keep steel production (with its obvious implications for weapon production) in Britain and not in the (potentially rebellious) colonies.
It seems like the process was lost only relatively briefly, or simply unknown. maybe this is just a terminology question.
I think it is more a question of how lost and for how long. The authors write "modern bladesmiths have been unable to use the methods to reproduce the blades", where the context suggests that "modern" refers to the preceding two centuries. The implication seems to be that, despite the surviving information about the process, it could not be successfully replicated, which strikes me as a reasonable definition of 'lost'.
Once the studies described in the article revealed details of the chemical and physical structure of the blades, and, in particular, of the necessity for trace elements to promote the formation of carbides, the authors successfully replicated the process.
This leads the authors to suggest that the decline in quality and eventual disappearance of the practice of making such steels was due to the exhaustion of ores yielding iron containing the necessary trace elements. The manufacturers, having no knowledge of the existence, let alone importance, of these elements, were in the dark about how they might rectify the situation.
I imagine that all the factors you mention were also relevant, including the relative cheapness of Bessemer-process steel, the relative ease of creating good quality knives from it, and the supplanting of the sword by the gun.
> The manufacturers, having no knowledge of the existence, let alone importance, of these elements, were in the dark about how they might rectify the situation.
This is an interesting story for anyone who may find themselves in a present or recent state of success at any endeavor, given that any sufficiently complex endeavor probably includes inputs that you don't fully understand or may be entirely unaware of.
Probably goes double at the organizational level; brains tend to be distributed roughly about 1 per person and institutional knowledge with it, absent substantial effort to spread it around. But even that hits its limits: there are almost certainly things that no one knows why they're working and could change or stop.
It seems like this article has a different definition for "Wootz Steel" than Devereaux, though. Here, it specifically refers to the banded patterning on the blades, and it's talking about the metallurgy that produces them. Apparently it's not only the crucible process that's required, but a specific range of alloys that produce the required separation when melted. And that actually did disappear, no one was making these for quite some time, and (apparently) routine crucible steel (which still works very well for weapons) from other ores doesn't show the same pattern.
> Nor did wootz production mysteriously vanish either – there is evidence for extensive production of crucible steel in Hyderabad in the 17th century; early 19th century accounts by British and Russian writers also describe the process It was never lost! D. Mushet patented what was, as Craddock notes, “clearly a copy of the Indian process” in 1800 (Craddock, op. cit. 283) in Britain. My impression, though none of my sources quite say this directly, is that the remaining Indian steelmaking industry subsequently withered away due to competition with British steel and (perhaps more decisively) a British desire to keep steel production (with its obvious implications for weapon production) in Britain and not in the (potentially rebellious) colonies.
It seems like the process was lost only relatively briefly, or simply unknown. maybe this is just a terminology question.