Steel, the alloy of iron and carbon, is even stronger than bronze, with ingredients that are much more plentiful: pretty much every bit of rock has some iron in it, and carbon is present in the fuel of any fire. Our ancestors didn’t realize that steel was an alloy—that carbon, in the form of charcoal, was not just a fuel to be used for heating and reshaping iron but could also get inside the iron crystals in the process. Carbon doesn’t do this to copper during smelting, nor to tin or bronze, but it does to iron. It must have been incredibly mysterious—and only now with a knowledge of quantum
...more
