4 ms·

Getting access to tin is hard. And making wrought iron isn't really harder to do than making cast bronze. The issue is that if you don't know how to turn it int

• dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  >wrought iron is highly inferior to bronze. What? Wrought iron is immensely more useful than bronze in many applications demanding strength (per weight or per volume, take your pick) and/or toughness. There's a reason things like metal bridges, railways, etc. all became common only after wrought iron became readily available. Likewise for cast iron, other than malleability it is mechanically superior to bronze. There's a reason the only time you see bronze these days is bushing material and applications demanding corrosion resistance for which aluminum/zinc alloys would be unsuitable.
  • ummonk 7y ago
    To clarify, I meant superior for contemporary needs. People weren’t building large scale structures out of metal, but they were crafting tools, weaponry, and armor, for which wrought iron’s softness is a dealbreaker.
• bluGill 7y ago
  The earliest refining of iron also produced a little steel as a byproduct. There is reason to believe that iron refining is as old as, or even older than bronze, and steel would have been made with that iron. However bronze was easier to work with (I think this refers to readily available ore though I haven't looked into this and could be wrong as to reasons). In general a craftsman would use bronze where possible, iron where bronze didn't work (which wasn't often, bronze is better than most people think), and steel only where required. For files and other metal working tools not much steel is required and the advantages would be worth it (though these might be case hardened iron - we suspect they knew how to do this long ago but there is no historic record to be sure) The are plenty of stories passed down about magic swords that could cut others in half. If someone collected enough steel from the little that would made it would be magic compared to other swords, but the effort to collect that much steel would be enough that few such swords would be made.
• logfromblammo 7y ago
  Dwarf Fortress taught me to always import bismuthinite and cassiterite stones on embark, along with willow logs. Real history shows that tin mines were a major strategic asset for pre-steel civilization, and Devon and Cornwall on Britain had the oldest and deepest mines in the world, and continued working after other European sources were exhausted. Even if you know how to make steel, making types suitable for non-specialty work in significant quantities was difficult until smelting technology upgraded to the Bessemer process, and the types of available steels meant that a lot of cannons were still cast bronze. On a historical scale, it is only very recently that newer steel alloys and mass-produced aluminum has obsoleted bronze for just about everything but cymbals, certain corrosion-resistant fittings, and yellowish coinage cladding.