The methods of making a Japanese katana are not “lost” at all. People make them today using a variety of methods both ancient and modern. As far as how these would stack up against modern blades, they do quite well. Traditional katanas are tested by cutting steel wire and other hard items.
The European swords were (IMHO) well made but not as good as the katanas unless you are talking about pattern-welded blades made with wootz steel. There were some swords made with wootz that were excellent and that particular technique was lost for many years. Recently, a metallurgist and a blacksmith have discovered how to make this steel. It turns out that certain steels had impurities that formed carbides on the blade edge if the steel was heat-cycled many times. How the ancient types discovered this is unknown. The carbides form an extremely hard edge, this is a material that can be used to cut steel. At the same time, the spine of the blade is relatively soft so the thing doesn’t shatter when stressed.
I spent a year studying pattern-welded Saxon blades as part of my Metallurgy degree. Some of the blades were very sophisticated, with high-carbon steel inserts for the cutting edge that had been quenched to martensite and tempered. The spine of the blades by contrast were tougher, ferrite-pearlite steel. The highest edge hardness I measured was 824 Vickers, which I’d put up against a katana or wootz damascus blade any day. This was a knife rather than a sword though - it may have been the equivalent of a craft knife or scalpel.
I attempted to duplicate this during the same study. I was trying see whether the purpose of the clay was to act as a carbon diffusion barrier to carburise the cutting edge exclusively, or to allow the cutting edge to quench faster than the rest. I never managed to answer that question. I also never managed to quench the blade without cracking it, which shows the swordsmiths knew and still know a thing or two.
That is an interesting question. I had always assumed that it was simply done to vary the quenching speed but couldn’t swear to it. As an OBTW, the modern smiths in the US/Europe no longer use the traditional clay slurry. It probably makes purists revolve in their graves but the modern guys use cat litter.
matt, I am a mechanical engineering student with an interest in mideval weapons. You seem like a peron I would like to talk to. I know this isn’t the place but if you could e-mail me I would like to talk to you about material sciences and the such.
etgaw1
Having said that, I was playing with 0.8 wt% carbon steel strips a few inches long, a couple of inches wide and a quarter inch thick. I couldn’t get any form of differential quenching with the clay envelope - the strips always completely through-hardened. Slacker quenching with oil or boiling water gave the same result. I missed a trick somewhere!
As for a diffusion barrier, I was trying to carburise by packing the strips in fired clay boxes full of powdered charcoal and heating them in an electric tube furnace. I got a nice blue CO flame at the top of the furnace, but the carbon potential was never high enough for carburisation. Instead the strips always had a decarburised “skin” at the surface. The decarburised layer was the same thickness whether the surface had been bare or coated with clay, which I guess demonstrates that it wasn’t an effective carbon diffusion barrier. I did wonder if mixing sand into the clay would help - silica and iron oxide form a glassy slag called fayalite which might have made a decent diffusion barrier. Ran out of time before I could check that out though.
Incidentally, my samples were cracking because I had a sharpened edge on them. Blacksmiths can feel free to laugh at my expensive university education. They teach you all kind of crap about phase transformations and time-temperature relationships, and forget to mention anything about not putting sharp edges and corners on things until after you harden them.
…portraits of VIPs from as late as the 1780’s show people wearing breastplates, shoulder and forearm plate armor. Was this just for looks? I assume that by 1500 or so, musket balls could readily penetrate any practical plate armor, or was its still useful?
It is amazing to look at Late-Medieval full-boy plate armor…it is so skillfully made, and fitted so well! Even the armored guantlest fitted very well. Of course, probablyn by 1400 or so it was mostly useless…the English had those nasty LONGBOWS!
It is surprising that body armor stayed around so long…the crossbows used at the Battle of Crecy were quite capable of pebnetrating plate armor.
Now, I may be wrong and you do seem to know what you’re talking about, But IMHO, particular line of thought is quite erroneous. European swords were made to be harder and tougher. This sounds an awful lot like a different = better fallacy. If I understand the problem correctly, a European military sword was far, far better for practical battlefield use. They certainly didn’t hold an edge like a Katana, but that wasn’t really relevant. You also don’t see Katana surviving 400 years in a muddy field: Euro-swords sometimes did. Performance wise, I’d have to say the European cruciform blades were a lot more practical, as were Chinese blades.
IIRC, Samurai actually were nt really known for fighting within their swords on the fron lines, given a choice of spear or bow weapons. The Japanese cult of the sword is as much flash and myth as anything. The Japanese had to work out extreme measures for getting the best steel possible because they couldn’t use anything but their own corrupted iron deposits. And even after treatment, the result was fairly brittle, right? And had to be kept extremely carefully or it would quite handily rust away.
I’d agree with you about the legendary Damascus steel being right up there, though.
Nope. The ultimate evolution of armor was actually able to ward off muskets. The proved plate was tested by firing a pistol at it from close range. We still have many suit with the slight scar from it. A bullet might be able to penetrate the joints, but your chest was well protected.
IIRC, Plate armor was not really widely used until the 15th century. Crossbows were around a log time before plate. The soldiers at CRecy mostly wore chainmail.
Guns and plate were actually introduced about the same date. Plus, body armor didn’t have to completely stop the bullet to be effective. People often get their ribs broken while wearing Kevlar, but it doesn’t mean armor is useless.
Another point to remember in the guns vs. armor thing is that once the combat closed, it was back to swords again - right up through the Napoleonic Wars, and possibly later (that’s the end of my knowledge base, though - I haven’t studied the Crimean or U.S. Civil wars). Muskets take a while to reload and aren’t really all that accurate and the more accurate rifles are too long to bother reloading in close combat, so you’d whip out your sword once the enemy got close enough. While they were still advancing you could get out a few volleys a minute (I forget exactly how many was standard - 3 or 5?), which isn’t THAT bad but isn’t good enough to take out an entire army before they got close enough for hand-to-hand combat, either.
My point is, anyway, that even IF armor was useless against bullets, it still would have been worth wearing some, in case you survived the firefight in the beginning of the battle; it would still work against the swords in hand-to-hand combat.
A sword can be used for both offense and defense. If one of the current super fast firing, armor piercing gun-type weapons jams or otherwise fails, it is virtually worthless. Unless, do they still affix bayonettes in today’s armies?
And even today, there’s a certain visual poetry to the art of swordplay.
You certainly have a point about the lack of corrosion resistance. I’ve seen quite a few katanas with perfect fingerprints etched into them from skin acids. A katana would be lucky to last more than a few years buried in the mud.
As far as the European swords being “harder and tougher”, this would be difficult to do. I’ll defer to the knowledge of someone like mat but AFAIK, those two attributes are extremely difficult to maximize in a single blade. Hardness, or edge-holding ability, generally results in a more brittle steel that will crack or chip when struck. Toughness requires a softer steel that would tend to bend. The Japanese answer to this was to make a super hard edge and a soft spine. This gives you an edge that will take and hold an edge under severe use and a spine that is flexible enough to keep the sword from snapping. While there was nothing keeping them from doing it, I have never heard of European swords being differentially quenched.
I probably shouldn’t have declared that katanas were superior to European blades as that always begs the question of: Superior for what purpose? I tend to think of katanas being used more for duels and the like rather than as a primary battlefield weapon. Pikes of various sorts as well as bows were probably a lot more popular, with the sword being a backup weapon.
The issue of Chinese blades being superior I’ll have to take your word for as I know very little about them. I believe the Japanese actually learned to make their swords from the Koreans who in turn got the techniques from the Chinese so I would think there would be very little difference. I could be wrong on that chain of events but I believe this was the way it went. I’ll take a look in some of my books tomorrow and see if I can’t find a better reference for that.
When talking about materials, “toughness” and “hardness” have very specific meanings. “Toughness” for example refers to the level of resistance to cracking. Probably better to say European swords were sturdier, which can’t be quibbled with.
A material can be tough without being hard, e.g. rubber. Testy has it right for steel - you cannot maximise toughness and hardness together, generally you trade off one against the other to some degree. However, you can get variable toughness for a particular hardness level, depending on the steel composition and heat treatment - some approaches give better results than others.
Scalpel bades and craft knives are generally very hard so as to hold a sharp edge. But they are not tough - abuse them and they snap quite easily. (I don’t recommend cutting thick carpet or opening paint tins with them, for example. At least, not without safety glasses.) A sword blade hardened to this level all the way through would be an ornament, not quite as bad as a glass sword but getting close.
The very mild steel sheet used for automobile bodies is by contrast very tough, bend it and won’t snap. But it stays bent, which again isn’t great for swords. The Romans recorded that their Celtic opponents straightening their wrought iron swords out under their feet in mid battle - not too good.
Spring steel is a compromise of strength and hardness - it’ll bend some way and spring back again, and if you push it too far it’ll deform rather than snap. IMO an “ideal” sword would be like a length of spring steel with the cutting edge hardened up further, perhaps to the level of a scalpel. We can do that today because we have a bunch of fancy techniques to play with such as induction hardening and laser hardening. Without such luxuries, the katana is about as good as you can get. It uses different levels of carbon in the steels used for the cutting edge (high carbon), spine (low carbon), back edge and side cheeks (medium carbon). This is combined with presumably different quench rates for the cutting edge and the rest, achieved by wrapping the blade in a clay envelope with the edge protruding, firing the whole thing and quenching in water. The result is a reasonably springy blade with a hard cutting edge.
You might enjoy going to Thailand someday. The local smiths make all manner of edged weapons and tools out of leaf-springs. I have a pair of sabers made for me where the guy did not use any kind of clay coating but did quench the edges for a couple of seconds before dunking the rest of the blade.
He got enough hardness difference to detect with a new file. Unfortunately, I don’t have access to anything more sophisticated to check this.
I’ve heard that leaf springs are popular with smiths around the world. And as I said, swordsmiths know a trick or two! Just being able to judge the right temperature for quenching from the glow of the steel impresses me.
Were your sabers tempered seperately after quenching, or did he just pull them out the water still hot and let them self-temper?
The sabers were tempered by placing them in a hot area near the forge overnight and turning them a few times. Since then I’ve tested them by cutting green wood and bamboo and they hold up well; no chips, nicks, or bending and they still have an edge. I think most SE Asian knives are made using recycled materials. The smith who made the sabers used old industrial hacksaw blades for kitchen knives, and worn-out files for other tools.
Watching him was like stepping back in time a bit. The guy used charcoal and a boy-powered bellows and grinding wheel along with an anvil spiked to a tree-stump. He generally worked around sundown to allow him to judge color on the steel and it was probably more comfortable as well. As you say, these old guys really have some practical knowledge of working with steel. The smith who made my sabers died a few years ago and I always wonder what he knew but didn’t pass along to his apprentice, the bellows-boy.
If you want to see a real artist take a look at Don Fogg’s web page. I think his swords are more appropriate for a museum than working tools but they are truly beautiful.
Not odd at all, considering how seldom swords were used in combat in the Civil War. Most cavalry was really mobile infantry and those who did some of their fighting from horseback preferred revolvers. [url="http://www.civilwarhome.com/weapons.htm"More details:
Exactly. I tend to think of weapons in terms of their suitability for practical battlefield use, and the Katan was made to be a dueling weapon, which therefore exempts it from a lot of practical concerns. But I still wouldn’t want to try and kill a man in full plate with one.
More that they were practical for battlefield use. of course, the Chinese didn’t really use them much on the battlefield anyway, but the technology and style was there.
In what way were the Chinese swords more practical? The steel used? The blade style? I haven’t heard much, good or bad, about Chinese swords. I have studied some armed SE Asian martial arts (Kali) but haven’t been around the Chinese arts at all.
Ah, that was sort of my point: Chinese swords aren’t known for being particuarly anything. They were perfectly ordinary swords, like Cruciform swords or swords more or less anywhere else. The katana design was not really used anywhere else: specifically because it was not a an effective battlefield design, and therefore culturally constructed. The katana lived and died with katana-culture, and spread nowhere where there was not katana-culture.
That said, the Chinese did produce some nice blades, roughly like a wetsern longsword.
I don’t put much stock in martial arts, myself, for two reasons: first, there are a lot of martial arts past an present that use some truly ridiculous weaponry, including many that are almost as dangerous to the weilder as the target. The other is that most formalized martial arts aren’t very effective in realist combat: the further it got from practical origins the less effective they become.
That said, the Chinese did, IIRC (and I’m a little fizzy here because I’m not extremely knowledgable about martial arts history) adapt several Kung-fu styles to swordwork. Chinese martial arts were not born from actual war, though; the nature of Chinese military history led to military skill (and martial arts) being lost every few generations.
Well, I take your point of MAs not being as useful as they might be but believe that it depends on the which one you are considering. Kali uses short batons or sticks and small knives along with empty-handed techniques. There was a short sword part but that is vanishing as no one carries such a thing regularly. There are also some Japanese MAs such as Jiu-Jutsu that are also fairly effective as combat techniques.
As far as the weapons being dangerous to the user, I think that applies more to the chinese MAs than to those of other countries. Interesting about the skills disapearing every few generations. Why do you think that happened? As I say, I’ve never been interested in MAs from China but had always had the impression they were preserved in rural areas.
