Iron and Steel - Excerpt from letters sent by Scott (1790-1801)

Excerpts from Dharampalji's book Indian Science and Technology in the 18th Century (1971)

I enclose in one of the boxes a specimen of a kind of steel which is called wootz and is in high esteem among Indians. It appears to admit of a harder temper than anything 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 cannot bear anything, beyond a very slight heat, which makes its working very tedious to the blacksmiths. It has a still greater inconvenience. It cannot 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 is a separate art and so 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 whole is lost as if the substance consisted to metals of different degrees of fusibility.

By K. Kesava Rao
Department of Chemical Engineering
Indian Institute of Science
Bengaluru 560012, India
kesava@iisc.ac.in

...To be continued ...

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