Selects: Blacksmiths? You got that right!

Stuff You Should Know

This episode of Stuff You Should Know explores the history, significance, and craft of blacksmithing, highlighting its crucial role in ancie

Key takeaways

• Blacksmiths were vital community figures, often considered more important than other trades due to their indispensable role in producing essential goods.
• The term 'blacksmith' likely comes from the black scale that forms during hammering or the dark color of wrought iron.

Main topics

• History of blacksmithing
• Origin of the term 'blacksmith'

Notable quotes

'They were the most important people in any community. Everybody loved them. They owed no one anything.'

Conclusion

While blacksmithing has largely faded due to industrialization, its legacy endures in

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. 30 years ago, an island off Manhattan almost brought down New York City. Who will you trust? Your friends and neighbors? Or will you trust the people five miles overseas? This is a story about neighbors turning on each other and what happens when a forgotten place decides it's had enough. But we're not stopping, are we? Listen to Revisionist History, The Staten Island Problem on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. New school year, same beautiful mess. Good Mom's Bad Choices is back to talk back-to-school realness. The guilt, the giggles, and the choices no other show is brave enough to admit. Mom life is calling, and I have my last motherfucking volleyball tournament of Irie's Club Team Volleyball, and I cannot wait for this to be over, because I don't like... Speaker 1 (1:00) participating and having to drive far distances. Shout out to the moms and my mom who made it happen. Listen to Good Moms, Bad Choices from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi guys, it's Josh, and for this week's Select, I'm going with our 2020 episode on blacksmiths. Growing up, there wasn't a lot of smithing going on around me. Pretty much zero smithing, actually. So I wasn't very familiar with this topic. But I found very quickly that I really enjoyed researching it and talking about it, too. And I came to admire all the blacksmiths on the videos that I watched. It's just kind of mesmerizing. Speaker 1 (1:44) And if you think about it, there aren't many things that people do today that are essentially unchanged over the last few thousand years, which is pretty cool. So I hope you like listening to this one as much as I liked researching it. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Speaker 1 (2:14) Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryan over there, and Jerry's out there somewhere, and this is Stuff You Should Know. Did I tell you about my new hobby that started yesterday? I'll bet I can guess. Watching blacksmithing videos. Yeah, I was going to say the same thing, man. Like, I don't have any desire to blacksmith myself. Nope. I just like watching these videos. There's something really amazing about them. Yeah, there's one. I don't know if you watched. It's on YouTube. It's called Blacksmithing Forging a Bearded Axe. No, I didn't see that one. Oh, God. It just reminds me of the... Speaker 1 (2:54) The sort of the lulling of that show, how it's made. But I watched this video, and most of them have some sped up stuff too because blacksmithing takes so long that a 30-minute video, I mean, half of it is in fast motion, so it just goes to show you, and it's edited. And they always do, they always put it to yakety sacks. But it's just crazy, though, when you see how long it takes. to make this one axe. And then you think about outfitting armies. Yeah. It just feels like, was every other person a blacksmith? And did they just do that 24-7? Yeah, I get the impression there was a Walt Whitman poem about blacksmiths, and he was basically like, they were the most important people in any community. Everybody loved them. They owed no one anything. Speaker 1 (3:44) because they never had any debts because they were so vital that anything they did probably was worth 10 times what anybody else could do for them. They seem to have been pretty amazing people on the whole. Yeah, I mean, and we'll talk about this more, but when you think about just nails and how many nails built this country and the world, those nails had to be forged. Yeah, when you watch some of these blacksmith videos, and like you're saying, when you do see... Speaker 1 (4:11) how long it takes to just make an average thing that you would like buy in a second these days, it really gives you an appreciation for just what a sea change the industrial revolution was. Yeah, amazing. To where this was automated and made, converted to mass production. It just could have never happened before. And it didn't happen before, but it was up to the lone blacksmith to equip their entire communities with all this stuff. It's pretty cool. So are we going to do, Speaker 1 (4:42) blacksmith history first or the metal history first? We'll do blacksmith history first, I think. Okay. I guess we got to look at the name because if you look at other smiths, they were all a little more specific. They were called bronze smiths. Blacksmiths are not called iron smiths. No. Even though they work with iron and most of the other smiths were named for the metal that they work with. Silversmith, that's a good one. Yeah. Oh, God. Good silversmith. Speaker 1 (5:10) Sure. It's worth their weight, and it's gold. Silver. Don't bring up gold to those guys. Oh, no, no. But black comes from, well, we're not positive, but one explanation is blacksmith comes from the hammer scale, or these scales. If you're watching these videos, you'll see when they're hammering this stuff, these little tiny, chunky, thin, not chunky, actually, just little chunks of thin scales are falling off every time they hammer it. That's the hammer scale. Speaker 1 (5:36) And it is black, and your hands get all black, and your face gets black. Or it might have just been because iron is black. Typically, yeah, it's pretty dark. It's dark enough. Especially wrought iron, it tends to be black. So that's why they think one of those two reasons is where blacksmith came from. And the name Smith itself, we actually talk about this in our book that's coming out, you know, in the episode on Keeping Up with the Joneses. Oh, that's right. We talked about— You mean the chapter. Yeah, yeah, the chapter. In our book, we talk about how keeping up with the Joneses could have very easily been keeping up with the Smiths because the two names are so prevalent. And in fact, Smith is the most prevalent name in the United States. And it's all derived from. Speaker 1 (6:23) and just how many blacksmiths there were because every community needed one. And then if you were in a large enough community, you had multiple blacksmiths all working because one blacksmith had to do all this work to supply this one community with all this stuff, and they could only keep up with a certain size community, you know? Yeah, and if you had an on-site thing that you were doing, you had a blacksmith with you. If you were out at war, in battle, you had blacksmiths there because... Speaker 1 (6:52) Not only do they create these weapons and the armor, but they have to fix stuff. You know, after a big long day of battle, you go in and trade in your sword and say, fix this thing. Yeah. And those smithies got to be working around the clock. Yeah, and they have like apprentices and help and all that kind of stuff. But yeah, I mean, like you get the impression that the community could come to a standstill when the blacksmith was sick for a week or something. Yeah, and there were... Speaker 1 (7:19) And blacksmiths doing all kinds of work all over the place, so many that they eventually, and this makes sense, would become a little more specialized. And horses were a big deal back then. We still love horses today, but back then they did a lot more for humanity. They just look pretty and run around in fields now. So they had to make horseshoes, and it was a very specialized set of equipment for making horseshoes as opposed to just regular blacksmithing. So that was a very busy job. They were called farriers. Speaker 1 (7:47) And even when blacksmithing as a whole kind of went away, there were still farriers working because it's not like a shoe store where one size fits all. Well, shoe stores aren't one size fits all, but it's very specific to your foot size or your hoof size as a horse. So you can't just throw any old shoe that's close enough on there. You've got to make them a la carte, basically, made to order, I think, in the fashion world. What's it called? Pret-a-porter? Bespoke. Oh, yeah, that's the opposite of prediport. And so farriers continue to work for years and years and years. And I think there are people that still do farrier work today, aren't they? Sure, sure. Just to show off. Right. Sure. But I guess you kind of spoiled the ending. Blacksmiths aren't really around much today because of industrialization. Speaker 1 (8:36) But they were around, though. They're in Brooklyn, New York. I guarantee it. Yeah, they are. For about 2,000 years, they were extraordinarily important to society. But, you know, society was around for a very long time before blacksmiths came around. So there's this really important window in the historical development of... of human society that blacksmiths, you know, existed in. Prior to that, you know, we had tools, but they were mostly made of stone. And then at some point, somebody said, hey, if you put tin and copper together, you can come up with this stuff called bronze. And it's pretty great. You can make some pretty neat things with it. And one of the things about bronze is that it has a fairly low melting point. Something like... Speaker 1 (9:23) 1742 degrees Fahrenheit, 950 degrees Celsius, which you could get a hot campfire to that temperature to melt, melt into molten liquid bronze, which means that you can create casts and molds and you can pour that molten bronze into it. And as it cools, you've got a handy sword that you can make over and over and over again. So bronze fulfilled this. purpose for tools for many thousands of years. So much so that, and these metals were so important that we go back and call these historical ages by the name of the metal tools that were being produced. So you get the Bronze Age, and then that was eventually followed by the Iron Age. And one thing that stuck out to me, Chuck, I hadn't realized before, is that you think of history as progressing, you know, constantly. But the Bronze Age, Speaker 1 (10:16) even though it was followed by the Iron Age, the Iron Age marked a period of cultural decline where the Bronze Age, which had come previously, was a period of cultural blossoming. But for the first several centuries of the Iron Age, it was a step backwards. A lot of the classical or antiquity societies kind of crumbled at about the same time. They think possibly because of climate change or mass droughts and starvation, kind of like the Maya. Speaker 1 (10:44) Yeah, so it's not like the iron caused that, but iron, like really good bronze, is probably superior to iron in a lot of ways. I think iron is a little softer. It might rust a little quicker. It depends on what kind of iron you have for sure. Right, but the iron that they were using, basically they started using, and, you know, there's not like a demarcation line. There is some overlap, and no one knows exactly when the big switch happened, but it was cheaper, and it was more readily available. than bronze was, so they just started using iron, basically, and it surpassed bronze. Yeah, the Greeks pin a semi-mythical group called the Chalabes, who supposedly were absorbed by the Hittites in Anatolia and Turkey, and that they were the ones who figured out how to mine. Speaker 1 (11:31) iron because originally there was iron stuff like king tut was found with a dagger made of iron and it would have been even more highly prized than anything made of gold in his entire tomb because iron was so rare at that time yeah because the only source of iron on earth as far as humans knew came in the form of meteorites. So you had to find a meteorite above ground to find your deposit of iron. So making a dagger out of that would have been a very special dagger. And then eventually they say the Calabese figured out, no, there's actually iron like in rock in the earth. And people started figuring out that you could take that rock and heat it to some pretty high temperatures considering and then hammer it. And you can hammer. Speaker 1 (12:18) the other stuff out, the ore out, or hammer the iron from the ore, and you have something approaching what you would consider iron, something called bloom. Yeah, so they just couldn't get the fire hot enough basically at first to get to the iron point. Right. But they could make it hot enough to get to the bloom, and they would put it in an oven known as a bloomery, and it would kind of just roast out those impurities. It had iron, it had slag, which is sort of a glass-like byproduct. Speaker 1 (12:44) that you, you know, it's so funny that you can just hammer this stuff out. But Bloom would eventually, when they, I mean, it worked okay. You could heat it up, you could hammer it, and it would get a lot of the slag out. And it was useful enough for tools. But when the blast furnace came around, when you really got larger furnaces and hotter fires that incorporated bellows to really get that oxygen in there and get it super, super hot. That eventually allowed them to get that ore to pig iron. And pig iron was a pretty big advancement because from pig iron, you could hammer that slag out to eventually get to wrought iron. Right. I want to give a shout out to Harold DeSmith, H-A-R-A-L-D. He wrote an intro to iron smelting that talks all about making bloom himself with pictures. It's pretty cool. It's worth checking out for sure. And the Grabster helped us with this one, right? Speaker 1 (13:40) Yeah, big time. Thank you, Grabster. But with pig iron, that was like a, it was like you said, like a pretty big change in that, like you could suddenly make much purer iron because we had a much hotter furnace that we were working with. And the thing about pig iron is in very much the same way as bloom, you've got to hammer out those impurities. And so to make pig iron. into wrought iron, you would take this pig iron, which is pretty impure, heat it up and hammer it with a sledgehammer over and over again. Heat it, hammer it, heat it, hammer it. Very much the same process as bloom, but at higher temperatures and producing a much purer iron. And then eventually you would have wrought iron. And they say that they figured out how to use water hammers, like water-powered hammers. In part because of the plague of the 13th century. Speaker 1 (14:32) It killed so many people that they didn't have the human power any longer that they needed to hammer pig iron. So it made people devise water hammers. Yeah, water hammers, steam hammers. You know, if you look at these videos today, these people in their shops and their sheds that they have behind their house have, it looks like hydraulics, I guess, that are pounding this stuff. And at first when I saw that, I was disappointed. I was like, oh, man. But that's just the big initial work. Like there's still tons of hammer work by hand because there are many, many – there's a lot more to it than that initial