From the link I posted: "Based on our studies, it is clear that to produce the damascene patterns of a museum-quality wootz Damascus blade the smith would hav

From the link I posted: "Based on our studies, it is clear that to produce the damascene patterns of a museum-quality wootz Damascus blade the smith would have to fulfill at least three requirements. 1) the wootz ingot would have to have come from an ore deposit that provided significant levels of certain trace elements, notably, Cr, Mo, Nb, Mn, or V. ...believe the blades with good patterns were only produced from wootz ingots made in southern India, apparently around Hyderabad. 2) ...wootz Damascus blades with good patterns are characterized by a high phosphorus level. This means that the ingots of these blades would be severely hot short, which explains why Breant's9 19th century smiths in Paris could not forge wootz ingots. 3) a smith who developed a heat-treatment technique that allowed the hot-short ingots to be forged might still not have learned how to produce the surface patterns, because they do not appear until the surface decarb region is ground off the blades; this grinding process is not a simple matter. " A combination of the right technology along with the right materials set the stage to allow trial and error to make incremental discoveries. Besides, back then, there was a commercial need for swords, so people worked on it day and night for hundreds of years. You can get pretty good at something when you work on it long enough. Nowadays, our effort is put into semiconductors, among other things. Maybe one day, when a new technology surpasses semiconductors is being used, and the 'art of semiconductors is lost', people of the future might wonder how we built things that were so damn small and hot with [yet unnamed or not understood physics effect].