Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c25.33

c25.33

I enclose in one of the boxes a specimen of a kind of steel which is called wootz and is in high esteem among the Indians. It appears to admit of a harder temper than any thing we are acquainted with. I should be happy to have your opinion of its quality and composition. It is employed here for covering that part of gun-locks which the flint strikes, for cutting iron on a lathe, for chisels for cutting stones, for files and saws and for every purpose where excessive hardness is necessary. You must carefully observe that it can not bear any thing, beyond a very slight red heat, which makes its working very tedious to the blacksmiths. It has a still greater inconvenience. It can not be welded with iron or steel. It is only joined to them by screws and other contrivances. The blacksmiths who work in wootz generally consider it as a separate art and do not work in iron. When the heat is a little raised above a slight red heat part of the mass seems to run and the hole is lost; as if the substance consisted of metals of different degrees of fusibility...