I came across this excellent, very powerful and well-researched article by karigar: Karnataki Karbon Nanotube Swords- forget S Indian Wootz!

Please read in full and circulate widely. It is a shame that widespread ignorance still persists about our achievements in Sciences, Mathematics and various disciplines of technology.

While on the subject, please also have a look at one of my earlier articles: “Does no one remember the Hindu contribution to Mathematics?”

Some excerpts:

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Just got done reading the NY times article attached below. Apparently, “Cutting edge Technology” of Carbon Nanotubes & nanoscale wires of cementite, can be found in “Damascene swords” made out of “Wootz” steel, whose technology was perfected in ancient
India.

Oh the great Western (& Westernized Indian) media, & us, its uninformed, unsuspecting, & uncritical consumers!
Not many of us have been taught the solid base Ancient India had in the metallurgical Sciences/Arts (until the Western world swooped in to “civilize” us).

The Mehrauli pillar in Delhi, made in the Magadhan times, & rustless till today, is just dismissed as a “wonder” by us Western Educated Indians, in line with the rest of the world that doesn’t have time for Indian thought. Research , if any, is done by Westerners, who will of course, package it into their own systems (as seen in article below). And given time, the Indian element will be forgotten, as it has so often happened in the past & present.

Thus “Our” modern Metallurgy books can boast in typical fashion-“As a science, metallurgy has yet to celebrate its centenary, yet in its brief history it has amassed a tremendous store of knowledge. The ceremonial swords of the Sumarai (sic), the warrior aristocrats of
Japan, were the works of beauty & art a thousand years ago. The sword makers of Toledo & Damascus made their cities famous by their craftsmanship & the quality of their steel. These men knew nothing of the science of metallurgy though well practised in its art.”

[Ref: Preface for “Heat Treatment Fundamentals” By S Collard Churchill, first Pub. 1958 in UK by The Machinery Publishing Co Ltd.]

Now if “Wootz” steel is known to be the origin of the excellence of the “Damascus” & “Toledo” blades, and seemingly, an early example of that “cutting edge western innovation” of “NANOTECHNOLOGY”, wouldn’t the credit go to this steel & people who perfected it, rather than the swordmakers who after all were just using an “imported technology” ? But no.

The author, in typical fashion, “Hail”s the “user” as the Nano technologist (“All hail the great 17th-century nanotechnologist Assad Ullah!“) , and only mentions in passing the “Technology” of “Wootz” steel he’s using. Guess one should be thankful for “Wootz” even being mentioned!
For more details on Wootz and Indian Metallurgy, etc, in general, refer to the following.

Karigar has painstakingly compiled the evidence and references here He deserves our gratitude for the work.REF 1.

LINGUISTIC AVATARS OF WOOTZ: THE ANCINET INDIAN STEEL (summarized by respected Historian DP Agrawal, Original By J. Le Coze ) Excerpt-This steel making process was practiced in peninsular India since great antiquity. The ancient Indian steel was known as Damascene steel in
Persia and was in great demand in the Persian courts of the First Millennium BC. Even Alexander was presented a sword made of such steel. Coze studied the etymology of the terms denoting steel. Taking into account the fact that the names given to steel in different languages have always a technical content (hardness, resistance, etc.), Le Coze traced the transformation of the term Wootz, denoting the Indian crucible steel, through the Arab texts of the 9-12th centuries AD describing the preparation of the crucible steel named fulad. He discovered that fulad had an Indian origin of the word as transformed by Arab travellers.

Wootzis the name given to a crucible steel prepared in India. Coze informs that it first occurred in printed form in the 1795 Pearson’s report. This steel was abundantly studied in Western Europe during the 19th century AD because of its special characteristics: high hardness, difficulty in forging, unknown procedures, etc. However, the origin of the name itself is unclear even if it has been proposed by Yule and Burnell in the Hobson-Jobson Dictionary that the word Wootz could come from ukku in the Kannada language.

It must be noticed that, according to Hammer- Purgstall, there was no Arab word for steel, which explain the use of Persian words.
Fuladh prepared by melting in small crucibles can be considered as a steel in our modem classification, due to its properties (hardness, quench hardened ability, etc.). The word fuladh means “the purified” as explained by Al-Kindi. This word can be found as puladh, for instance in Chardin (1711 AD) who called this product; poulad jauherder, acier onde, which means “watering steel”, a characteristic of what was called Damascene steel in
Europe. In Russian the corresponding word is bulat and in Mongol bolot. In the 19th century AD, it was accepted as evident by European metallurgists that the ancient word bulat / fuladh and the newly introduced one Wootz represented the same kind of high carbon crucible steel (1-2wt % C) which should have been used by Muslim blacksmiths to forge the so called Damascene blades, the secret of which had been lost as was said by Russian and European metallurgists of that time.

REF 2.
Textures of ‘Wootz’: Techno-cultural insights on steel, cast iron & ferrous metals in South Indian antiquity
by Dr.(Ms.) Sharada Srinivasan. (B.Tech, IIT, Mumbai, MA, SOAS, Ph.D., Archaeometallurgy,
Institute of Archaeology, London) National Institute of Advanced Studies, Indian Institute of Science Campus, Bangalore, 560012Excerpt- .the intriguing high-carbon ‘wootz’ steel for which India has been famed in antiquity and which forms an important part of its scientific heritage, from the point of view of exploring its antiquity and properties (with special emphasis on investigations on material from previously undocumented old production sites that were uncovered by the author in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu in southern India.) European travellers and geologists such as Buchanan, Percy and Voysey from the seventeenth century onwards have described the production of ‘wootz’ steel ingots by crucible processes over large parts of southern India including Golconda in Andhra Pradesh, the former Mysore state (in Karnataka) and Salem district in Tamil Nadu. Cyril Stanley Smith (1980) has given an account of the European fascination with ‘wootz’ steel ingots from southern India and attempts to replicate it for industrial production which spurred the development of metallurgy and metallography in the 18 ^th-19^th centuries, inviting the attention of scientists of the repute of Michael Faraday, inventor of electricity. Studies on some late medieval ‘wootz’ ingots have shown them to be of high-carbon steel (1–1.5% C), which was a novelty in Europe where only low-carbon steels (less than 0.8% C) had been in vogue.
Wootz ingots were also reputed to have been used to make the artistically patterned ‘ Damascus’ swords.

Indeed, ancient India deserves a special niche in the annals of western science not only for pioneering the semi-industrial production of metallic zinc and high-carbon steel, but also for indirectly spurring their modern metallurgical advances and metallurgical study in Europe leading to the Industrial Revolution , as pointed out in overviews by the author with S. Ranganathan on metallurgical heritage of mankind and on wootz steel (Srinivasan and Ranganathan 1997, 1998, 2003 in press).

As such, more studies have been made on iron in Indian antiquity than on steel. D. P. Agrawal, Bhanu Prakash, V. Tripathi and D. K. Chakrabarti have written on the development of iron metallurgy in ancient India while studies on the famed iron pillar have been made by T.R. Anantharaman, A. K. Lahiri and R. Balasubramanium.

As far as wootz steel is concerned, Thelma Lowe has extensively surveyed and technically studied crucible steel production sites in Konasamudram, while Martha Goodway, Paul Craddock and K.N.P Rao have made studies on the late medieval site of Gatihosahalli recorded by the European travellers. J. D. Verhoeven has simulated the production of Damascus sword blades of high-carbon steel and studied the formation of patterns, while O. Sherby has written on properties observed in ultra-high carbon steels produced under laboratory conditions such as superplasticity. REF 3.NYT Article Below- (this caused my above piece)

Damascus sabers contain carbon nanotubes, as well as nanoscale wires of cementite, giving them a moir pattern. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/28/science/28observ.html
By HENRY FOUNTAIN Published: November 28, 2006All hail the great 17th-century nanotechnologist Assad Ullah!
Web Links: Carbon Nanotubes in an Ancient Damascus Sabre (Nature) Actually, he was a swordmaker, one in a long line of smiths who forged the legendary weapons known as
Damascus sabers. They were strong yet flexible and supremely sharp, which European warriors first discovered, much to their misfortune, at the hands of Muslims during the Crusades. The recipe for making Damascus steel was lost at the end of the 18th century, so no one knew the reasons for its remarkable qualities. But an analysis by 21st-century researchers in Germany provides a clue:Damascus sabers, they report in Nature, contain carbon nanotubes. Using a transmission electron microscope, Peter Paufler of the Technical University of Dresden and colleagues looked at a very thin sample of steel from a saber made by Assad Ullah, who worked in what is now
Iran. What they saw seemed for all the world like carbon nanotubes, cylindrical arrangements of carbon atoms first discovered in 1991 and now made in laboratories all over the world. Further analysis confirmed that that was what they were.

“If you look at the spacing of the atomic layers in these nanotubes,” Dr. Paufler said, “the spacing is the same as reported by others studying mass-produced nanotubes.”The steel also contains nanoscale wires of cementite, an extremely hard carbon-iron compound, that were probably formed inside the nanotubes, like the filling in a cannoli. These nanowires give Damascus sabers another distinctive characteristic: a moir pattern of banding on the steel.

Swordmakers used special high-carbon steel cakes, called wootz, which were made in India from iron ore that contained vanadium and other impurities. Wootz also had a high percentage of carbon, which was introduced by incorporating wood and other organic matter during fabrication. Dr. Paufler said the vanadium and other impurities could have acted as catalysts to turn some of the carbon atoms in the steel into nanotubes during the heating and reheating of forging.

Of course, Assad Ullah and other swordsmiths would have had no idea that they were creating carbon nanotubes. “They just did tremendous empirical work,” Dr. Paufler said. “They optimized the procedure over centuries in order to get the most strength.”

—————- Paper cited in the article above-

At http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v444/n7117/abs/444286a.htmlNature 444, 286 (16 November 2006) | doi:10.1038/444286a; Received 24 July 2006; Accepted 25 October 2006; Published online 15 November 2006 Materials: Carbon nanotubes in an ancient Damascus sabre M. Reibold1, 2, P. Paufler1, A. A. Levin 1, W. Kochmann1, N. Ptzke 1 and D. C. Meyer1

The steel of Damascus blades, which were first encountered by the Crusaders when fighting against Muslims, had features not found in European steels – a characteristic wavy banding pattern known as damask, extraordinary mechanical properties, and an exceptionally sharp cutting edge.

Here we use high-resolution transmission electron microscopy to examine a sample of Damascus sabre steel from the seventeenth century and find that it contains carbon nanotubes as well as cementite nanowires. This microstructure may offer insight into the beautiful banding pattern of the ultrahigh-carbon steel created from an ancient recipe that was lost long ago.

1. Institut fur Strukturphysik, Technische Universit’t Dresden, 01062 Dresden, Germany
2. Triebenberg Laboratory, Technische Universit’t Dresden, 01062 Dresden, Germany
3. Kr’llsstrasse 4b, 06766 Wolfen, Germany

Correspondence to: P. Paufler (Email): paufler@physik.tu-dresden.de

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Some more interesting stuff (in the comments portion of karigar’s post): More interesting stuff from the article mentioned below
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Following the “Beacon”
When viewed from a nonscientific standpoint, the Delhi Iron Pillar’s ability to resist corrosion has often been called a “mystery.” Balasubramaniam is quick to dismiss this response. ” There is nothing mysterious about the iron pillar,” he says. “The resistance to atmospheric corrosion is due to the presence of a relatively high amount of phosphorus in the pillar. The remarkable corrosion resistance can be understood by applying the basic principles of corrosion research .” He adds that the direct reduction technique used to produce the iron is no mystery, either. “The ancient Indian ironmaking technology is well-known,” he says. The established scientific facts notwithstanding, Balasubramaniam concedes that one feature of the pillar is difficult to explain. ” There is one aspect that is not well-understood and this may be called a mystery, in one sense,” he says. “This is the method by which the iron lumps were forge-welded to produce the massive six-tonne structure .”

Mystery or not, the Delhi Iron Pillar serves as a guidepost for metallurgists in the 21st century and beyond, asserts Balasubramaniam. In fact, just as a seminar at RPI inspired him to study the pillar, he hopes that his research will motivate others to explore the potential uses of phosphorus-containing iron. “There are so many wonderful options available with phosphoric irons,” he concludes, adding that the Iron-Phosphorus phase diagram deserves as much attention as the more popular Iron-Carbon phase diagram. “There is an exciting future in developing phosphoric irons, particularly for corrosion scientists and engineers. ⁷ The beacon of light showing the way to the future is the Delhi Iron Pillar, with its tested proof of corrosion resistance.” From http://www.iupac.org/publications/ci/2005/2706/3_veazey.html
(A Scientific Article, not connected to any “hindu” agenda )

A Major Artifact
Originally fabricated and erected 1 600 years ago at Udayagiri near the present-day city of Bhopal in central India, the pillar was relocated to the Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque in Delhi’s Qutub Minar Complex approximately seven centuries ago. Constructed of rubble from earlier Hindu temples and now designated a World Heritage Site by the United Nations, the Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque is the first mosque built on the Indian subcontinent. The approximately six-tonne pillar was constructed during the Gupta Period (from A.D. 320 to 600), which is considered the golden age of Indian history. karigar comments: on Dec 13 2006 4:38PMJemmar,Thanks for the comments. (& making me work to dig up the info on Mehrauli pillar…!)

Iron pillar

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The iron pillar of Delhi, the capital city of India, is one of the world’s foremost metallurgical curiosities, standing in the famous Qutb complex. The pillar almost seven metres high and weighing more than six tonnes was erected by Chandragupta II Vikramaditya ^[1]. It is the only piece of the Hindu temple remaining, which stood there before being destroyed by Qutb-ud-din Aybak to build the Qutub Minar and Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque. Qutub built around it when he constructed the mosque. The pillar is made up of 98% wrought iron of pure quality, and is a testament to the high level of skill achieved by ancient Indian iron smiths in the extraction and processing of iron. It has attracted the attention of archaeologists and metallurgists as it has withstood corrosion for the last 1600 years, despite harsh weather.…

The pillar, almost seven metres high and weighing more than six tonnes, was erected by Chandragupta II Vikramaditya (375 AD 414 AD), …..The pillar with the idol of Chakra at the top was originally located at a place called Vishnupadagiri (meaning “hill with footprint of Vishnu”) ^[3] . …..It must be worth noting that Vishnupadagiri is located on the Tropic of Cancer and, therefore, was a centre of astronomical studies during the Gupta period. The Iron Pillar served an important astronomical function, when it was originally at Vishnupadagiri. The early morning shadow of the Iron Pillar fell in the direction of the foot of Anantasayain Vishnu (in one of the panels at Udayagiri) only in the time around summer solstice (June 21).

The creation and development of the Udayagiri site appears to have been clearly guided by a highly developed astronomical knowledge. Therefore, the Udayagiri site, in general, and the Iron Pillar location in particular, provide firm evidence for the astronomical knowledge that existed in ancient
India around 400 AD. Translation of the inscription in English.

The pillar bears an inscription which states that it was erected as a standard in honour of the Hindu god, Vishnu. It also praises the valor and qualities of a king referred to simply as Chandra, who has been identified with the Gupta King Chandragupta II Vikramaditya (375-413). Made up of 98% wrought iron of pure quality, it is 23 feet 8 inches ( 7.21 m) high and has a diameter of 16 inches (0.41 m) at the bottom which tapers down on going up. The pillar was manufactured by forge welding and the temperatures required to form such of pillar by forge welding can be achieved by combustion of coal. The pillar is a testament to the high level of skill achieved by ancient Indian iron smiths in the extraction and processing of iron.

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Thumbnail Image courtesy: Wikipedia 

*** Added Sept ’18:

Research Paper: A New Type of Inscribed Copper Plate from Indus Valley (Harappan) Civilisation
Authors: Vasant Shinde, Rick J Willis
Abstract

A group of nine Indus Valley copper plates (c. 2600–2000 BC), discovered from private collections in Pakistan, appear to be of an important type not previously described. The plates are significantly larger and more robust than those comprising the corpus of known copper plates or tablets, and most significantly differ in being inscribed with mirrored characters. One of the plates bears 34 characters, which is the longest known single Indus script inscription. Examination of the plates with x-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectrophotometry indicates metal compositions, including arsenical copper, consistent with Indus Valley technology. Microscopy of the metal surface and internal structure reveals detail such as pitting, microcrystalline structure, and corrosion, consistent with ancient cast copper artifacts. Given the relative fineness of the engraving, it is hypothesised that the copper plates were not used as seals, but have characteristics consistent with use in copper plate printing. As such, it is possible that these copper plates are by far the earliest known printing devices, being at least 4000 years old.

Source: Shinde, V. & Willis, R.J., (2014). A New Type of Inscribed Copper Plate from Indus Valley (Harappan) Civilisation. Ancient Asia. 5, p.Art. 1. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/aa.12317