TechStuff Classic: Swords - The Real Cutting Edge Technology

on this episode. You can hear me and Ariel talk about geeky stuff on a podcast called Large Nerd Drown Collider. If you have not checked it out, you definitely should because we have a lot to say about geek culture and nerd news and we always take two geeky properties and then say what would happen if you mash these up together? Well, in this we're not mashing things up together. We're sly sing him apart with swords. Hope you enjoy

this classic episode of tech stuff. For people like myself and an aerial, this is beyond something that we're just interested in. The both of us have done stage combat, some extensive stage combat. Ariel, I think you prefer the broad sword to the rapier. I do. Yeah, the bigger the better. You're crazy. I'm more okay, fine, I'm more of a rapier person because I think finesse is sometimes called for uh. And also I have a body type where rapier works better than a big old sword. But

we both are interested in this source stuff. Actually, Ariel and I first met working for the Georgia Renaissance Festival back in two thousand and one. I believe that's correct. Yeah, so long time ago two thousand one we started working there to I had been there a couple of years an Ariel joined the cast and she jumped right into doing combat as soon as possible, whereas I was, I decided that was not for me. And it was one of those things where both of us have this interest

in the topic. Uh. And you know, we both like the whole swords and sorcery stuff too. So when I said let's let's cover something and we started talking about the possible topics, swords was one of those things that it's a technology that's been around for longer than longer than written history. In some cases, possibly that's debatable, but we'll get to that. So to start us off, aerial, can you walk us through Let's say you're looking at your typical sword like a Viking sword. Let's say, what

are the parts of a sword? All right, so there are lots of different kinds of swords, but um, they all basically are made the same way with the same pieces. Uh. So you've got the blade, you know, the part that you've hurt people with, and then you've got the hilt, which I guess you can hurt somebody with a help,

but it's not as fun. Um. And a lot of hilts also have a guard which protects your hand uh from other people's swords, um, which I personally know is a good thing because I've been cut open on the hand by a sword before. So there was actually a day where Ariel was doing stage combat, got hit in the hand, had to go and get stitches or staples, stitches, stitches, and then came back and finished the day. Yep, yep, worth it, so worth it. But so yeah, so a

guard is really important. Um. And then you've got a pommel which is at the very base of the sword, and that helps keep the sword from slipping out of your hand because when you're gripping on a sword and you're swinging it around, your hand gets really sweaty. Yeah. Um. And it also acts as a counterweight which balances the sword. Otherwise you're using far too much muscle and strength to

try to finesse the sword around. Um. Yeah, and that speaking from experience, that can get very tiring, even with the pommel. But if you didn't have that counterweight helping you with those uh those moves, then just the your wrist would get exhausted and your forearm in order to control the sword while making those swings, you'd be very

quickly become an ineffective swordsman. Now, the hilt in the pommel, the back end of the sword, the decorative part um is called furniture because it's furnishing the sword um and really interesting. In ancient Europe, the hilt of the sword was the entire back end from the guard to the pommel, and in uh Norse and Viking culture it just meant the lower hilt in the upper hilt, which was like

the pommel and cross guard, but not the actual grip. Now, so so the parts that were on either side of the actual grib interesting, and when we talk about blades blades also we can break that down a little bit more. Blades typically have six and sometimes seven different areas to them. Uh. First, you have the edge. This is the important part of the sword. This is the actual cutting side of the blade. Now, some swords are single edged, like the katana is a

single edged sword. A lot of different um uh swords and throughout the ages have been single edged. But others are double edged swords like long swords and a lot of short swords, and even some swords like pas or Yeah, that's true, they technically have three, although those tend to be used more for stabby stabby than cutty cutty. And then you've got the tip that would be the stabby stabby part. You've got the back of the sword. Now, the back only exists if you have a single edged blade.

The back refers to the non sharpened edge of the sword. So if you had a h you know, a scimitar, for example, is sharpened along the front side, but not the back side, so the back you don't since you don't have two edges, you do have a back on that one, whereas with a long sword. You know, your typical long sword had an edge on either side, so you don't have a back on that type of sword. There's the flat of the blade that refers to the sides,

not the edges. So if you were to slap someone with the flat of the blade, it would sting, but it wouldn't cut them, right, You just do that to be a jerk. Yeah, And actually that's a go to move from stage combat because you usually there's a Usually it's the cocky hero who, uh, while dodging a villain's attack, will slap them on the rear end with the flat of the blade. And and by the way, that does sting.

Then you have the fuller. Now, the fuller is a narrow groove that runs down the blade of lots of different sorts. Not all sorts have these, but a lot do. Sometimes they call it the blood groove or blood gutter. Uh. And it's not what a lot of people think it is there. I have heard folks say, oh, well, it's it's a channel for blood to flow through so that when you stab someone, the blood has a place to go, so you know, as you're stabbing them over and over

they continue to bleed out. That's not what that for. In fact, it has nothing to do with blood. It has everything to do to making a strong sword without having to use as much material to make that sword. So the the gutter that that channel actually adds structural integrity to a blade, so it is able to maintain its shape while still being a little flexible UM and is able to cut through stuff without breaking. And I guess that would mean it would also be lighter weight. Yeah,

because you don't have to use as much material. Instead of a solid steel sword, where you know, you have the whole mass made up like that, you have that channel. It means that you use less material. It means that less material means less weight. Very important, as it turns out, I mean they're not everyone is the mountain in Game of Thrones. You know, some some of us mirror mortals need a little bit of a rest. I'm the mountain. Aerial is the mountain, but I I need more, uh,

you know, a light sword I appreciate. Next we have the aang. Now, the tang is the part of the blade that is actually covered by the hilt. Uh So a sword. If you were to strip the hilt away um and take away the guard, take away the pommel, you would see a blade that on the base of it turns into almost like a rectangular solid steel um usually steel because we're talking about steel today, but solid

steel tab essentially that. If it's a full tang, it's pretty much the width of the blade and runs all the way down to where the pommel would attach. If it's a partial tang, it's maybe about half the width of the blade. It can even be more narrow than that. Um And at any rate, this is what the grip fits on top of. It's what the guard attaches to.

There's actually um a shoulder on some on some blades where that's where the guard will attach where it won't go beyond because your card wouldn't be much use if it just went right off the end of the blade. It would be you know, funny that one time I

prefer a full tang. I know that I have thought plenty of time with swords where the tang was not quite big or long enough and it's just kind of floppy in the Yeah, yeah, you can actually if it's not if the if the handle isn't properly fed to the tang, it's loose, you can feel it rattling, and that's that means you have less control, and also you're doing a lot more work. And also it's not it doesn't. It just feels unsafe. As someone who's fought with these

as well. No, I prefer a full tang sword as well. Also that affects the handling of the sword. Uh So, if you have a full tang sword, it's going to feel different in your hand, not just because of whether or not the blade is is um steady inside the you know when you're holding the handle, but it's also going to mean that's got to change the balance of the blade. So that's something else. Um. Also, some swords have was called a recasso. Is that where there's a

pretty painting on it that's kind of abstracting. No, I mean you can do at you ings on swords and stuff, but that is not what a ricosso is. A ricosso is an unsharpened portion at the base of a blade, just above the guard. So if you've ever seen a big sword where you've got the big hilt and then the blade when it first when it comes out past the guard, you can tell it's not sharp for another

you know, seven or eight inches, that's the ricosso. And those are often used for really really monstrously big swords where you're using it against pikeman or you're using it against mounted cavalry. Uh And you just you you wanted to have the ability to grip a little higher on the blade um in certain situations, but then again, you're risking getting your fingers cut off. Yes. Uh. Interesting. You saw some of the footage from the E three where

they had the Viking versus Nights game. Uh. The thing that it bugged me was that in that game, one of the characters has a finishing move where they flipped the sword around, so they're holding it by the blade and they bring bring it down almost like the hilt is acting like a bludgeon or an ax, but instead of it being a bludgeon, they hit a person just at the very base of the blade and cut into them to to to kill your opponent, and the whole

time I'm thinking your fingers would be gone. So I have a theory about this, okay, okay, because I've been thinking about this and it bothered me too. Uh. I believe that that Viking fought so long and hard that his blade was so dull that it was safe to handle. It was safe to handle, it was no longer useful for the purpose it was made for, and he had to turn it around. And the only part that's sharp now is the bit that's right above the guard. So

I'm just gonna flip this around. Yeah. Interesting, I I like that you're an apologist. I don't know if that's true or not. It's probably not. Probably, So we wanted to look a little bit too at the history of swords because you know, it's they've been around for quite

some time. And actually when you get to a point of you know, where were the earliest swords made, there there's a lot of disagreement, and it's largely because swords are uh there there's not a rough like a very clear definition of what is the sword versus what is a dagger. Um. Generally speaking, you would say a sword is longer than a dagger and a dagger shorter than

a sword. But that's not very satisfying, right, because it's like saying a mountain is taller than a hill, like you need it would be great to have some hard numbers there. Well, there there are some it's kind of

considered that a dagger is between seventy yeah. Yeah, but um, because there is that controversy, like we don't actually know when the first swords came about, right the the There was a cool find in two thousand three where some archaeologists discovered weapons in Aslan Tepe, Turkey, and I could be complete com lately, butchering that that place name, and I apologize, it looks like a lane to me. Yeah,

that's just a total guest on my part. So they the weapons they found had been forged more than five thousand years ago. However, this was one of those cases where some of the other experts were saying, well, these aren't really swords, they're just long daggers. And again, like sometimes people argue it's whether or not the uses for attack or defense because a lot of people think of a daggers defensive weapon. Um. But but I mean, when it comes down to it, we at least know which

came first, the dagger of the sword. Yeah, yeah, the daggers came first, or or even a knife. But if you would consider a dagger or a knife a sword of a sort, um, then you can't even go back to the Stone Age because there were sharpened wood and

bone and clinton stone knives and daggers. Then yeah, and uh, I mean when we talk about daggers versus knives, even daggets can using right because some people will argue that a knife has a single cutting edge, and a dagger has two cutting edges, but it all depends upon But then a sword has a single or double And there's some people who are like, well, no, this is a knife, that's a dagger, that's a dagger, that's a knife, and

and it's you know, so I do an'tway. The reason why we're saying it's hard to nail this down is because language itself is complicated, so finding the specifics are tricky. We'll be back with more of this classic episode of tech stuff after this quick break. Getting back to that awesome archaeological find over in Turkey, the swords predated the next oldest find by about a thousand years. Yeah, a millennia past between these weapons and the next oldest weapons

that are been found. Um some means the swords woul and forged sometime around three thousand, three fifty b C, which is at the very beginning of the early Bronze Age. The if you think of the ages, the three big ones, the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, this is at the just at the end of the Stone Age, the beginning of the Bronze Age. Some people call it the Copper Age because copper was a metal that was the first metal that humans discovered. Yeah, um so, and

smithing started with copper and then turned into bronze. Yeah. In fact, the copper that was are the swords that were found were a copper alloy, right, yeah, yeah, they were a copper alloy. They had mixed arsenic with it. Um and not so if you if you cut me a die from poison. No, no, no, it wasn't. It

wasn't poisoned blades, although they might have poisoned their blades. Um. They did it to change the metal, to to change its chemistry, and it made it actually stronger, and it made the copper, because copper is pretty soft, it made it hold its shape and hold its edge. And then also three of the swords were inlaid with silver. Yeah, so they're fancy. They were their fancy swords. They weren't just you know, old like hackneyed kind of gross little things. Right.

So it be technically, if if these swords this amazing find, if they are, if we got to a point where we all said, okay, so these are not swords, when would we say swords really got their start. Well, I guess most people would say that swords really got their start closer to seventeen hundred sixteen hundred BC, which is

the middle of the Bronze age. Um, and they were made of bronze, which is alloy of copper and tin um and and the argument stems from the fact that a sword has to be strong in order to be used the way it's meant to be used, which is, you know, slicing into people or hacking things apart or whatever. Um and soft metals just don't work for that. So copper wouldn't work so well for that, especially in longer blades like swords as as opposed to daggers. Yeah, that's

it's absolutely true. Uh that's why, you know, until we got a better understanding of what alloys were and we'll talk more about what an alloy is in just a second. Uh, you know, relying on pure metal was tricky because that pure metal couldn't stand up to the rigors. I mean, you get to a point where you're in combat and you are, uh, fighting with your weapons. If your weapons are bending or breaking, then obviously you are at a distinct disadvantage. So let's talk about some of these materials

that we use. All right, So copper and alloys so copper, as I said, was first metal discovered by humans. It's very easy to shape, so that makes it incredibly useful for stuff like if you want to turn it into cookery or or jewelry, or these days if you want to turn it into wires so that you can run electricity through, because it is also a great conductor. But that's also the Trauback is because it's so easy to be shaped, it's also easy for it to bend. It

won't hold onto an edge very well. When we talk about holding onto an we mean that the metal has to be a special kind of hardness. It has to be hard enough so that when you give it an edge and then you hit something, that edge is maintained, but soft enough so that you can make it have an edge in the first place. So it's a delicate balance. So you can sharpen a copper blade, but once you use it it becomes dull. And actually I saw a

really cool demonstration of this. The BBC did a whole series about ancient Britain and at one point they talked about the the Bronze Age, and they made two arrow heads, and one was made out of copper and one was made out of bronze. They had a little sheet of metal. They put the copper arrowhead against the sheet of metal on a and they had a little like arrow extending

behind it. They used a hammer they hit the arrow so that the head of the tip of the arrow would press against this metal, and the copper just buckled. And then they the bronze and they did the same thing, and the bronze pierced through the metal. So it showed that bronze is a much stronger material than copper, So wasn't Copper was mostly used in weaponry as a way of giving more weight to stuff like maces and clubs,

so for the smashy smashy but not the slicy slice. Yeah, and you may go, well, but pennies are copper, and I can't bend a penny, and that's because they're made from copper alloys. Around three thousand BC, humans figured out how to make copper stronger by adding other stuff to it, um, making it an alloy, which we've already kind of talked about a little bit um. And sometimes the thing they

added is another metal. So in the instance of bronze, which is kind of what pennies really are, it's uh, copper and tin um and then sometimes like with iron which makes steel, it's a metal and a non metal like iron and carbon. Right, so when you have an alloy, you've got two main things you're thinking about. It can be more than two, by the way. You can. In fact, are some types of bronze where they add magnesium and some other stuff to it, but the basic ingredients are

are copper in ten. But your primary primary material is called the main metal. So with bronze that would be copper. Most of bronze is made up of copper. That so it's called the main metal or the base metal, or even the parent metal. So the other stuff is called the alloying agent, not the annoying agent, which is what mine is the alloying I don't have an agent, so I can say that the alloying agent. So the parent

metal can be or more of the overall substance. It can be less than that to UH, and the alloy maybe as little as one percent. The alloying agent may be as little as one percent or even less of the overall. When we start talking about steel, we'll be talking about some really amazing like you have to be super precise with adding the carbon to your iron in order to get usable steel. So most alloys are solid solutions, So that means the different atoms of material are just

mixed together, but aren't chemically bonded to each other. The easiest way to imagine this is, let's say that you actually let's say you've got a little dish and you pour pepper and salt into it. Now, the salt and pepper aren't chemically bonded together. You could, with enough patients and a fine enough pair of tweezers, pick out all the grains of salt, so they have not chemically bonded. And no matter how much you mash the salt and pepper and make it into finer and finer grounds, it's

still going to be salt, right exactly. You you could get increasingly smaller tweezers and still separated. Would you'd be wondering why I'm making you do this? And the answer is because you know, you know why. But a few alloys are actually compounds. Now, compounds are different from solutions. Compounds mean that the atoms of the parent metal and the alloying agent actually do chemically bond. So in this case, we would talk about two things that when you mix

it together and make a third thing. So salt itself is sodium and uh, you know sodium and chloride. You put those together and that makes salt. You can't separate that back out again easily. Right, It's not like you can take really tiny tweezers and like, okay, now I'm gonna put all the sodium over here and all the chloride over here. Now you would have to use fancy signs as you would. Uh. So the atoms in an

alley are in a structure called a crystalline lattice. So if you were to look at these with an electron microscope, which those are a blast to use, by the way, you'd see the atoms of both the alloy and the parent metal, and they'd be arranged in some way. So some are substitution alloys. These are pretty simple to imagine.

So let's say that we'll we'll we'll talk about Uh, let's imagine that you're talking about bronze, and you've got copper balls, and you've got ten balls like T I N T E N, and you lay out the cover balls in a grid, and then you remove some of the cover balls and replace them with the tin balls, just a few, like maybe of them. If you're Chinese, because that's what the Chinese like to do, then you

would that that would be a substitution alloy. But some of them are called interstitial alloys, and this is where the alloying agent fits into the crystalline structure and fills up gaps that are in that crystalline structure. So for this example, imagine that you have a net and the net the the holes in the net are just big enough so you could wedge a golf ball into them. And so you choose some of the holes, not every single one, but some of the holes, and you put

golf balls through it. That's gonna make the net behave differently than it would if there were nothing in those holes. The same sort of thing, but on atomic scale. For this. Yeah, Now, even though making an alloy makes the metal stronger, there there's a disadvantage because it also makes it harder to work with. Yeah. Generally speaking, you you trade off malleability, which is the ability to work a metal for a stronger material. You do um, And so now we're gonna

talk about how you make an alloy. Basic metal metallurgy involves melting the components together. So you take your tin and you take your copper, and you melt them together and you mix it up so they're all nicely mixed and thoroughly mixed, and then you come out with bronze. So it doesn't always involve melting, but for bronze it

certainly did. In fact, I saw a really really in that same video, the BBC one, they actually demonstrated how an ancient uh metall ergist would or even a blade smith would create a bronze blades by melting the copper and the tin down, pouring it into a mold and going from there. So that's pretty cool. We've more to say in this classic episode of tech stuff after these quick messages. So we do have copper alloys like the copper arsenic alloy we mentioned earlier, and bronze was the

one that really changed things. Uh That, as we've SAIDs like an alloy of copper and tin, So does you have other elements in there. It's more flexible than copper, it's stronger than copper. It's able to hold an edge longer than copper. So this was the first time we actually had a material that had the qualities necessary to make a sword a practical weapon. Yeah, but bronze, the

ratio of copper to tin varied by region. So in China, uh, they preferred higher concentrations of tin about twenty or so, which made a harder alloy, but it was more brittle. Um. And because bronze could still bend, particularly in places that favored to mixture of around late and percent tin. Yeah, sword designs also tended to have our sword designs tended to have a wide curve shape to them to help with the bending, to keep from bending too, I see. So that way, if you encounter a force when the

sword hits something, it distributes it along greater surface area. Yeah. A popular design was called the leaf blade sword, which had a blade that curved out just a little bit before the hill. Right. So if you look at ancient grease, uh, and you look at the swords that were produced in ancient Greece, you will often see this leaf blade also. Uh, it's one that was used a lot in uh in Lord of the Rings, Like there are some of the Lord of the Rings weapons head sort of this leaf

blade look to it. And so you've got this kind of um blade. It's a short sword typically, so it's it's a fairly you know, wide blade that comes out tapers to a point, but just before you hit the handguard it it curves outward a bit, so it's got

this sort of leaf shape to it. The pretty cool. Now, a sword maker working with this bronze alloy would heat it in coals until it was molten um, and then it would he would pour the molten mixture into a sword mold and then cool it down until the bronze was hardened, and then the mold would be broken away and you'd have your sword, and then you finish it and shape it right right, yeah, Because you would essentially have a sword, a a sword shaped hunk of bronze,

and you would obviously it wouldn't be ready to go immediately because you would still need to um. You would still need to to sharpen it and shape it a little bit. Had a hilt very important. The next big material humans used to make weapons from was iron. So the Bronze Age transitioned into the Iron Age at different times for various regions, just as the Bronze Age head transitioned at different times for different regions from the Stone Age.

So in other words, it wasn't like one day there was a Wednesday where everyone woke come and said, welcome to the Iron Age. That's not how it work. It would have been fun, there'd be a great musical involved. But no, it was not that way. The way it worked was that certain certain regions began to develop technology with iron more early earlier, not more early Jonathan needs more coffee earlier than other regions. Uh. In fact, India

was a big one. India they started working with iron very early, so did uh some other areas of Asia. But giving a range for the Iron Age is pretty tough. Um. In general, you could say it began around four b C and Asia Minor, which is now Turkey. Big surprise, that's actually where we also found the copper alloy swords. Now, making a sword out of iron isn't as easy as it sounds. First of all, you have to get iron ore and then smelt it so that you can even

work with it in the first place. So you can't just be like, oh, here's my here's a big hunk of iron stickles on the ground. Yeah, I just pulled it out of the ground. Now I'm good to go. No, anyone who's played Minecraft knows you gotta you gotta throw that sucker enough furnace first. Yeah. And in the good old days, this was called bloomery yeah, because it would make like a little bubbly bloom of metal. Yeah. Essentially, a blacksmith would use charcoal and bellows to heat up

the iron ore. Not only would let would this let the iron like heat up and become melty, but it would add carbon from the charcoal and carbon monoxide uh into it, um into the process, and that would add carbon to the metal and what you get is a spongey pores material called a bloom yep. And so this this was different from bronze and that they weren't melting it. You know, you have to you have to go hot, much hotter with iron than you do with copper in order to melt it. So they were not getting it

quite to that temperature. But the blooms, the spongy kind of looking stuff. Uh, it had holes in it. And part of the reason that holes in it is that the iron ore had a lot of oxygen in it and that carbon, some of it went, would transfer over into the iron, some of it would combine, uh, like the carbon monoxide given off by the the charcoal would combine with the oxygen that was inside the iron, and

you would get carbon dioxide as a byproduct. So you would hammer and shape the bloom, which would help remove some of the impurities. Uh. But even then, once you had shaped the iron, iron actually is, in the grand scheme of things, a pretty soft metal. So it also does not hold an edge very well. You have to continuously, you know, re sharpen your blade because you would dull it as you would use it. So typically the early

iron swords were made by heating the bloom. You would hammer it, you'd let it cool, and then you'd start that process all over again. And this was called work hardening because you are actually using physical work, the hammering, to get the iron into a state suitable for use as a sword. Um. There's a different type of hardening that's used later, but the early versions were work hardened sore us um. And so these were kind of marginal

improvements over bronze swords. In fact, you could argue that a bronze weapon might be superior in some cases to an iron one. However, iron ones became incredibly popular, and it wasn't because they were better. It was because ten was relatively rare. Copper was everywhere people could find copper. What they couldn't find was tin. And since you needed to add the tin to the copper to make bronze and then iron, all you had to do was heat it up and then smack it around with a hammer,

iron one out. Yeah, and yeah, you'd want iron over just copper, but you'd want steel over both of those. Uh. And that actually brings us to the last huge advance and sword making, which came about when they discovered that you could add specific amounts of carbon to the iron to create the alloys steel um, and in the smelting process, some carbon would be introduced to the iron um, the carbon from the charcoal. Uh. But it's tricky, you know.

Obviously you're guessing with that. Yeah, it's it's very imprecise. And in fact, there's a lot of there's a lot of scholarships suggesting that early steel swords were created purely by chance. That it wasn't that someone said, hey, I bet if I added some of this stuff to some of this stuff, it will be way better. It just because of the way swords were made. Some swords were

more iron and some swords were more steel. Uh. In Europe, they used patterned welding to the early Middle Ages, where they would take iron and steel rods of different harnesses and twist them and fold them together. And that was kind of a pre early way of trying to get that. Yeah, so when we say the mixture being just right, we are talking about tiny amounts of carbon added to the iron in order to create steel, typically between point two and one point five per cent of the overall alloy.

That's yeah, that's hard, you know, like you know, it's not not the simplest thing in the world to do. And it was so tricky that it was pretty latent to the medieval era before more than a few swordmakers outside of India could produce steel reliably. Um So, if you look at the earliest discoveries of steel. Also, steel was resistant to oxidation, which means it would not rust the way iron would. It can rust, but it does so less readily. Um So, it was it was a

very valuable metal. But in India people had figured out how to make it fairly reliably, and outside of India it was much more touch and go all the way up into the Middle Ages and even into the Middle Ages for some areas. So the earliest method of attempting to produce steel reliably was called sementation. So they would take iron and they put that inside a container made from something that had a lot of car been in it,

and that container would be heated in a furnace. And sometimes this would go on for days, sometimes just for hours, but sometimes you put it in a furence and leave it there for days. During that heating process, some of the carbon from the container would migrate and enter the iron, and at the end of the process, if everything went well, you had steel. Now you see when you said cementation, I thought you meant you put the iron into a cement block and then you threw it into the ocean.

That's pretty much the way I would have to do it, because I know that I would never I mean to me, it's amazing that anyone ever figured this stuff out, Like it's a you know, we we take it for granted today, but somebody, somebody somewhere in the past had to figure out that this is how you make it happen. And that is phenomenal. So it's steel is way harder than iron or bronze. It can keep an edge longer than either of those. It's also flexible if you make the

steel properly. Obviously, if if you put too much carbon in it, it can become brittle so that you don't want that in either armor or weapons. But with the right amount, it was flexible as resistant to corrosion rust compared to iron, So it's pretty much the better material to iron in every single important way. And out of all the types of steel used in all the swords in the world, there's probably one steel that is the most legendary, and that is Damascus steel. Yeah, which was

it made in Syria? It was made in Surprise, Surprise, India. Yeah, the the there's some different scholarship on this. There are two different types of steel that are referred to as Damascus steel. Some of it is patterned steel, which you kind of talked about it a little bit earlier, and then the other type is woots steel. Yeah. So it's supposed to be really really strong. Um, and I say

supposed to be because we don't know how it's made anymore. Yeah. Yeah, they could figure out how to make tiny amounts of carbon with iron to make steel, and we can't figure out how to make the boots steel. Yeah. No, it's the the especially Essentially the recipe for woots steel has been lost to time. So whatever the methodology was, There's been a lot of people who have claimed that they were able to replicate woots steel, but from everything I

have read, no one has successfully done so. And so it's interesting to me that a methodology that was was mastered more than a thousand years ago is totally lost to us. Well. I think that's partially because swordmaking fell out of practice for a while. Beture, we have guns and other things like that, and now with this maker society,

it's coming back into fashion. Yeah. Actually, one of the videos I watched in preparation for this had a guy uh fashion a sword he found um leaf springs from an old uh probably an old trailer like leaf springs, probably the the system on a trailer, uh, and use that as the means of creating a sword, and even then starting from a piece of material that is roughly the size of what you wanted to be. Even then, it was incredible to see what kind of work goes

into making one of these. Yeah, And I mean I watched a video as well, and he was talking a lot about Viking swords and how the Vikings forged and use their swords, and a lot of that knowledge is passed by word of mouth, and if it's written down, if someone doesn't use it, that piece of parchment or paper whatever is gonna degrade. And yeah, yeah, so mostly most time you would look at it from master to apprentice. But as sword making fell out of failure favor, there

was no need to have an apprentice. So you then get to a point where this art is largely lost, and you know, some of it has been written about, especially as people were puzzling out how is it that this one sword is so much more boss than this other sword? Uh so this this has been really an interesting discussion. Now it's just the first part of our talk on swords and sword technology. In our next episode, we're going to go through the process of actually making

a sword. So we wanted to really cover things like the basic parts of a sword and the basic materials that swords are made from in this episode because uh, it's just way too much information to cram into a single episode. That was Swords the real cutting edge technology episode. Hope you enjoyed it. If you have suggestions for topics I should tackle in future episodes of tech stuff, don't hesitate let me know about it. The best way to

do that is to reach out on Twitter. The handle we use for the show is text stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from i Heeart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.