Damascus steel

“ It may be rendered self-evident that the figure or pattern (of Damascus steel) so long sought after exists in the cakes of Wootz, and only requires to be produced by the action of diluted acids ... it is therefore highly probable that the ancient blades (of Damascus) were made of this steel."—Wilkinson, Engines of War, pp. 203-206.
1864.—"Damascus was long celebrated for the manufacture of its sword blades, which it has been conjectured were made from the wootz of India."—Percy's Metallurgy, Iron and Steel, 860. ”

“ If there is any truth in all the fine things that are said about Damascus steel, you surely must be ashamed of having to splinter fir chips, and square stakes, and of being turned, at last, into a plaything for children. ”

“ As an example of what may be attained in this direction, imitation Damascus steel may be cited; it consists of twisted and plaited wire, which is then hammered into a dense mass. (Real damascened wootz steel may be made by melting a mixture of the best iron with graphite (1⁄12) and iron rust; the article is then corroded with acid, and the carbon remains in the form of a pattern.)
Steel and wrought iron are manufactured from cast iron by puddling. ”

“ A great emergency acts upon different men as chemical processes act upon different metals. Some it melts like lead, so that their resolution softens and runs away from them; and some it hardens to tempered steel. There was the old major now. Always before this he had seemed to me to be but pot metal and putty, and here, poised, alert, ready—a wire-drawn, hard-hammered Damascus blade of a man—all changed and transformed and glorified, he was coming down on Dave Dancy, finger on trigger, thumb on hammer, eye on target, dominating the whole scene. ”

“ Steel barrels are more plentiful: they care not so much for the price of the metal; it is the after repeated manipulations that are evaded: the labour and loss of material is too much, and is necessarily “shirked,” and argument is always met with the answer, “We see nothing in it.” Yet the words “laminated steel” are to be found engraved upon barrels of the lowest quality of iron of which double barrels are made. Iron twist is subjected to a similar process to that already described as employed in producing Damascus iron, and which may be termed common iron Damascus. ”

“ The sun of New Damascus was then at its zenith and the days of Enoch were few to run. He lived them out consistently. No man saw him but in his strength. His weakness was invisible like his nakedness. His end was as that of the oak that once more flings back the storm, then suddenly falls of its own weight. Never had his power seemed so immeasurable as at its breaking point.
For all that John could or could not do, the American Steel Company came itself to the brink. It could not forever go on making steel rails at a loss. ”

“ When serving in the Punjâb about thirty years ago, I was well acquainted with an old man in Lahore who had been chief armourer to Runjeet Sing, and he has often told me that the real Damascus blades contained a large percentage of arsenic amalgamated with the steel while the blades were being forged, which greatly added to their hardness, toughness, and strength, preserved the steel from rust, and enabled the blades to be sharpened to a very fine edge. ”

“ The discovery of a single weapon of the quality and temper of the Damascus blade amid the ruins of a buried city, would prove as fully as would the discovery of a thousand that the people of that age of the world understood the methods of working steel. ”

“ Nature [2] has had time to heal her burns. No ore has been mined or smelted at New Damascus for many years. Yet the place is still famous for its fine wrought iron. The ore now comes from the top of the Great Lakes, stops at Pittsburgh to be smelted, and arrives at New Damascus in the form of pigs to be melted again, puddled and rolled into malleable bars. That may be done anywhere. It is done at many places. But it is so much better done at New Damascus than anywhere else that the product will bear the cost of all that transportation. ”

“ There are some magnificent scimitars, made of the finest Damascus steel, and some of the hilts and scabbards are of gold, thickly encrusted with precious stones, but beyond these valuable decorations the collection of arms did not appear to be of much value. ”

“ A man with a record for sanity would suddenly lose his balance and cast away the substance of certainty to pursue a vision. The effort to adapt the Bessemer steel process to American conditions was an irresistible road to ruin. That process was producing amazing results in Europe but in this country it was bewitched with perversity and it looked as if the English and German manufacturers would walk away with the steel age. Fortunes were still being swallowed up in snail shaped vessels called converters, not unlike the one Aaron had built at New Damascus twenty-five years before. ”

“ Among the scraps usually thought to be best are old chains that have been used for many years, the [24] wear and rust of time having left only the best elements of the iron. The Damascus steel, which has attained to so high a reputation, got it by being manufactured out of old coach springs. ”

“ Cotton damasks, which are made in Paisley, Glasgow, and several places in Lancashire, are used for toilet covers, table-cloths, and similar purposes. They are often ornamented with colours and sent to the Indian and West Indian markets. Silk damasks for curtains and upholstery decoration are made in the silk-weaving centres.
DAMASK STEEL, or Damascus Steel, a steel with a peculiar watered or streaked appearance, as seen in the blades of fine swords and other weapons of Oriental manufacture. ”

“ THE CINDER BUGGY
I A generation has fled since a stranger was seen in the streets of New Damascus on an errand of business.
The town has nothing to sell except the finest wrought iron in the world. As the quality of this iron is historic and the form of it a standard muck bar for use in further manufacture you order it from afar at a price based on what is current in Pittsburgh.
Sellers of merchandise miss New Damascus on purpose. It is a catalogue town. It buys nothing because it is new, nothing it does not need, has no natural pride in waste whatever. ”

“ Each nation has its vanity and its own peculiar glory, as it has its especial produce. O cotton mills of Manchester! envy not nor emulate the velvet looms of Genoa or Lyons; you are ten times as useful, and a hundredfold more remunerating. What matters it if Damascus guard jealously the secret of her fragrant clouded steel, when Sheffield can turn out efficient sword-blades at the rate of a thousand per hour? Suum cuique tribuito. Let others aspire to be popular: be it ours to remain irreproachably and unapproachably respectable. ”

“ Barrels of plain steel, or decarbonized steel, so called, should never be used for choke-bore guns, as they are unsafe for guns with light muzzles. Decarbonized steel is most suitable for rifles, where great strength of metal is employed. The finest pattern in Damascus is not always desirable, as the excessive twisting necessary to make the fine pattern often weakens the fibre of the metal.
Freeing Gun Barrels.—It is often desired to free a barrel at the muzzle, or at both breech and muzzle ”

“ A silence fell over the room; a tense, almost vibrant silence.
“Johnny,” he put his hand on the boy’s arm, “we’ve a great discovery within the walls of our factory, a discovery to which the formula, for the time being, is lost. It is a new type of steel. It has the hardness and the flexibility of the Damascus sword blade and, like that wonderful weapon, its owner cannot tell how it was made.”
“Then what good will—”
Mr. McFarland again held up his hand for silence. ”

“ The Bessemer method made possible at once an increase of one hundred fold in metallic production. That was miraculous.
The iron age took three thousand years.
The steel age developed in thirty.
Enoch Gib stood with his face to it. He fought it with his eyes closed. His strength crystallized against it. When it passed him by with a rush and uproar it passed New Damascus. Never was a pound of steel fabricated at New Damascus. It was an iron town. Steel towns grew up around it. ”

“ The real Damascus blade that we have all read about, but so few have seen, is as rigid as cast-iron, without any spring whatever,—as rigid as the blade of a razor. The sword-blade which bends is neither good for cut nor thrust, even in the hands of the most expert and powerful swordsman. A blade of spring steel will not cut through the bone ”

“ And New Damascus unawares was delivered to its fate.
[288]
XXXIV Now the steel age was come with its deluge of things.
Man’s environment was made over twice in one generation. Nothing was built but to be built again on a greater scale. It seemed impossible to make anything big enough. Wonders were of a day’s duration.
In twenty-five years the country’s population doubled. In the same time the production of things unto the use, happiness and discontent of people increased five, ten, twenty fold. Man had now in his hand the universal power of steel. ”

“ Then the steel rail knocked the iron rail out completely. There isn’t an iron rail made anywhere in the world now.”
[5]
“And nails. New Damascus was once the seat of the nail industry. What became of that?”
“Same thing. They made iron nails here,—what we call cut nails. The cheap steel wire nail knocked the iron nail out. Then, of course, you must remember that when the Mesaba ore fields were opened we had to close our mines. We couldn’t compete with that ore. It was too cheap.” ”

“ There were blast furnaces before those of Gib and Breakspeare, in England, Germany and France, but they were few and still in the stage of wonder. They were very costly to build, many failed for unknown reasons, and the conservative old iron masters stuck to the forge. Nowhere had a blast furnace been worked with anthracite or stone coal. All that had so far succeeded used wood, charcoal, bituminous coal and coke. The fuel at New Damascus was anthracite. ”

“ Many had begun to believe that steel might overthrow iron. He was resolved to put that heresy down. He chose the right time. The committee going to and fro saw steel rail plants lying idle; it found the steel people in despair, terrorized by Enoch. It returned to New Damascus and saw with its own eyes on Enoch’s books how the output of iron rails was increasing. Who would go behind such evidence? The committee reported that steel would never supersede iron. Except perhaps in some special uses, iron was forever paramount. ”

“ The very minute Damascus figure they frequently produce, is admirable, if beauty alone were the advantage sought in a gun barrel. They use thirty-two alternate bars of steel and iron, and roll them into a sheet of 3-16ths thick, and then slit them by a machine into square rods ”

“ Barrels for sporting arms are made of four different kinds of material Damascus twist, laminated steel, stub iron, and mild cast-steel; besides these, common material is worked up into cheap barrels for exportation. Damascus twist consists of alternate rods of iron and steel placed one upon another ”

“ In all the histories of iron and steel you read men’s blank amazement at the fact that it took so many years for the steel rail, once perfected, to supersede the iron rail. They cannot account for it.
At about this time a committee of New Damascus [249] business men went forth to investigate the subject of steel. Enoch caused this to be done. ”

“ Pig iron was for some time the sole product. The mill to draw and roll the iron came later.
In five years the population of New Damascus trebled. The mines, the blast furnaces and later the drawing mill,—the first in this country to pass iron through rollers,—employed thousands of workers. Their wants made business. The town was rebuilt. That made more business. Enoch on his own venture built houses for the iron workers and opened a large company store. ”

“ There are swords of Damascus, of a fineness unknown to the best steel of the present day, and which may have flashed in the hands of Saladin or Haroun-al-Raschid. There are knives and lances that are said to have pierced through coats of mail, and whose handles are crusted and covered with 141pearls and precious stones. There are spears, hatchets, lances, sabres, curious old match-locks, with barrels of immense length—all the weapons of the Islam of the past and going back to the time when Mohammed, at Mecca, believed himself commissioned from heaven to reform the world. ”

“ Pottinger names steel among the imports into Kermán from India. Elphinstone the Accurate, in his Caubul, confirms Dupré: “Indian Steel [in Afghanistan] is most prized for the material; but the best swords are made in Persia and in Syria;” and in his History of India, he repeats: “The steel of India was in request with the ancients; it is celebrated in the oldest Persian poem, and is still the material of the scimitars of Khorasan and Damascus.” [4]
Klaproth, in his Asia Polyglotta, gives Andun as the Ossetish and Andan as the Wotiak, for Steel. ”

“ He had twelve girths made of finest silk, not for display and youthful vanity, but for strength and easiness of movement. His stirrups were of engraved steel brought from Damascus, where the good sword blades are marked with strange devices; the buckles were of bronze which moist Mother Earth is not able to rust, and which no amount of hard wear can in [36] the least affect. Such was Cloudfall the shaggy bay steed of Ilya the Old Cossáck. ”

“ The famous Damascus blades, so renowned in the time of the Crusaders, are made here no longer. The art has been lost for three or four centuries. Yet genuine old swords, of the true steel, are occasionally to be found. They are readily distinguished from modern imitations by their clear and silvery ring when struck, and by the finely watered appearance of the blade, produced by its having been first made of woven wire, and then worked over and over again until it attained the requisite temper. ”