African Steel Making Tribe

This is not really a conspiracy, but I thought it was cool. It's about an African tribe that figure out how to make steel, and had been doing it for centuries.

www.uh.edu...
But carbon steel had been made long before either Kelly or Bessemer. One of the oldest and most sophisticated methods was that of the Haya people. They're an African tribe in what is Tanzania today. The Hayas produced high-grade carbon steel for about 2000 years.

(mod edit to add a link to source)


[edit on 14-4-2006 by pantha]

Right....and they were building 747's for about 300 years

do you have a link for this and why hasnt this been in the news as this would surely change the way we view history.

[edit on 14-4-2006 by XphilesPhan]

XphilesPhan, Your lack of open mindedness disgusts me...
Of course it was never done on a mass scle as it is today, but it was done.
You REALLY wan some links?
www.raceandhistory.com...
www.pbs.org...
www.cwo.com...

BTW: You do know that Vikings discovered America before Colombus, dont you?

Ok, I apologise, you are correct....but how are thse africans if they are in tanzania, isnt that near australia? so they would be aborginal which is kind of interesting.

[edit on 14-4-2006 by XphilesPhan]

Tanzania= East coast Africa.
Tazmania= Southern (island of?) Australia

ok, lol well you can see how I made that mistake.

Originally posted by XphilesPhan
Right....and they were building 747's for about 300 years

do you have a link for this and why hasnt this been in the news as this would surely change the way we view history.

[edit on 14-4-2006 by XphilesPhan]

Actually, it might change the way YOU view history... but steelmaking (low grade) has been around for a very long time. I had some reason to look up metalsmithing last year (I think it was for an article I was writing) and found that iron smelting and low grade steelmaking has been around for milennia.

Details were given on the forges on the sites where I looked -- and I did check various scholarly sources on it.

So, yes, it hopefully will change your view of what the ancients were able to do! But no, it won't change the academics' views... turns out we've known about ancient iron forging and steel making for quite some time.

As I understand it, the main trick to making steel is to mix the iron directly in with the charcoal when you build the fire. Then you need to have powerful bellows that will force oxygen into the heart of the fire, and drive carbon into the iron.

Byrd, as always is right and first. This was being done on a very limited scale, by most ancient cultures.

The African cultures that did this found a way to make it economically.

You can do it with charcoal in your back yard, but you will need to burn bushels and bushels of charcoal to get a few ounces of steel output.

The English monarchs (especially Elizabeth I) actually forbade the making of steel without a special patent, because merchants were chopping down all of England's bests forests in order to make charcoal. And the crown wanted to save the largest trees for making battleships.

What the cultures of Zimbabwe and Tanzania discovered, was to use the blast of bellows-air to drive the carbon upward through liquid iron. The bubbles' surface area reached more of the iron, and made a lot more steel, than the old process of blowing across the top of the fire.

Basically, this blast of air from below is how a Bessemer furnace works today.

They didn't need help from aliens, just some creativity and reasoning skills.

A short page abot the history of iron and steel:

www.topforge.co.uk...

.

[edit on 14-4-2006 by dr_strangecraft]

ok, lol well you can see how I made that mistake.

Yeah, it's a bit confusing, especially when Australia is a country in Europe.

But yeah, the 1st nation to make steel (very crude though) was infact India around 200 BC.

Australia? Surely you are getting yourself confused. It is Austria that is in Europe, right there next to Swaziland.

Interesting post. Cheers.

LoL so many errors here regarding australia. We're just pretty much sitting in the ocean all alone, we're an independant country, NZ is next to us, and tazmania is just off the tip of a southern part, still considered a part of australia. We have ties with the UK since we originally came from there and killed off alot of aboriginies here. But i'd say we're more American than anything else now : )

Originally posted by T0by
We have ties with the UK since we originally came from there and killed off alot of aboriginies here. But i'd say we're more American than anything else now : )

You mean like the queen on the money?

Or the way Texans always greet each other with a heartyk "G'day, Mate!"

Or in the fact that you only have 2 political parties . . . . .

No, I bet you were thinking of your nation's unreasoning fear of the metric system . . .

someone here mentioned they were doing it more economically (compared to other ancient and medieval societies), interesting.

The other amazing part is that they reached temperatures of 1800 degrees centigrade, it says Europeans didn't reach that until the 1800s.

openlearn.open.ac.uk...

A bit off topic, really off topic really, but on the opposite side of the continent Benin had some of the most accomplished artists that worked with metal in Africa

www.hevasof.com...

www.youtube.com...