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Comment by usrusr | Hacker News Reader

Seems surprising at first sight that they still bothered to do the fancy process thing, if a regular blade made from that ore would have been about just as good. But us who live in the 21st century should not have any difficulty at all understanding the power of brand.

I imagine it going like this: first, blades from a certain region start making a name for themselves for superior quality (thanks to the ore). Then a few things happen side by side, augmenting each other:

- higher prices allow smiths to spend more time per blade

- blades from that region become a status product, giving them almost exclusive access to the market segment that is willing to spend extra on fancy craftsmanship, resulting in even more time per blade

- export markets get flooded with fakes that only claim to be from the high reputation region, some of the fancy craftsmanship ends up serving as a sign of authenticity

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> Seems surprising at first sight that they still bothered to do the fancy process thing, if a regular blade made from that ore would have been about just as good.

That's because it's not that simple. Ore plays a part, but the main "secret" to "True Damascus" steel is the Crucible Steel process that was almost unique to South/Central Asia. Most steel producers in the Medieval era were not able to properly melt steel, since they were not able to create a sufficiently high temperature. But a few, primarily in India and Central Asia (and probably at least one place in Europe, associated with the Ulfberth brand) knew how to melt pig iron (that has a lower melting point) together with iron or steel to create Crucible/Damascus/Wootz steel.

Most Europeans and East Asians did not have access to such steel, meaning that European (except a few 'True Ulfberht'), Chinese, Korean and Japanese were made from inferior steel compared to swords made from Wootz/Damascus steel.

That doesn't mean that all such blades were bad. But that is where the intricate process came in, and without access to Wootz steel, creating high quality blades required a lot more labour and skill.

Thanks for the corrections, I guess I might have accidentally explained, in the fake camp, that "other kind" the reddit post was referring to. I wonder if there are examples of both variants combined, perhaps to get an even stronger visual effect?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulfberht_swords#Description

Durong the Viking era people forged Ulfhardt swords, branding is as old people can draw stuff it seems.

This sort of crucible steel was one of the only known ways to make steel before the modern processes were invented. It wasn't a "fancy process", it was the only process.

This isn't true. First the terminology is a bit weird. Steel is an alloy of iron and carbon. This fact was not known until the 19th century! Classial "wrought iron" (whih has a carbon content under 2%) has a similiar composition to what is now called mild steel (it has somewhat different physical properties because wrought iron has inclusions of slag because of how its made). Classical steel has a somewhat higher carbon content. Pig iron (or cast iron) has an even higher carbon content, and is the product of a blast furnace. Steel could be made in a number of ways. The process of creating wrought iron naturally produces some higher carbon steel, which could be removed. This is how japanese swordmaking works (they take higher carbon steel, and low carbon steel, and pound the together). The finery process, invented in china, but heavilly used in europe, involved taking pig iron, and slowly oxidizing it to remove carbon. For armor, case hardening involves baking wrought iron in carbon to cause the surface to become steel. The cementation process from early modern europe involved doing this, and then folding the steel to produce uniform metal. Indian steelmaking didn't involve pig iron, since india didn't use blast furnaces.

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