Selects: Blacksmiths? You got that right!

Josh Clark (0:00)

Hi, guys, it's Josh. And for this week's Select, I'm going with our 2020 episode on blacksmiths.

Growing up, there wasn't a lot of smithing going on around me. Pretty much zero smithing, actually. So I wasn't very familiar with this topic. But I found very quickly that I really enjoyed researching it and talking about it too. And I came to admire all the blacksmiths on the videos that I watched. It's just kind of mesmerizing.

And if you think about it, there aren't many things that people do today that are essentially unchanged over the last few thousand years, which is pretty cool. So I hope you like listening to this one as much as I liked researching it.

SPEAKER_2 (0:50)

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

Josh Clark (1:00)

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryan over there, and Jerry's out there somewhere, and this is Stuff You Should Know.

Chuck Bryant (1:09)

Did I tell you about my new hobby that started yesterday?

Josh Clark (1:13)

I bet I can guess.

Chuck Bryant (1:15)

Watching blacksmithing videos.

Josh Clark (1:17)

Yeah, I was going to say the same thing, man. Like, I don't have any desire to blacksmith myself.

Chuck Bryant (1:22)

Nope.

Josh Clark (1:23)

I just like watching these videos. There's something really amazing about them.

Chuck Bryant (1:27)

Yeah, there's one, I don't know if you watched, it's on YouTube. It's called Blacksmithing Forging a Bearded Axe.

Josh Clark (1:34)

No, I didn't see that one. Oh, God.

Wow.

Chuck Bryant (1:38)

It just reminds me of the sort of the lulling of that show, How It's Made. But I watched this video, and most of them have some sped up stuff too, because blacksmithing takes so long that a 30-minute video, I mean, half of it is in fast motion, so it just goes to show you, and it's edited.

Josh Clark (1:56)

And they always do, they always put it to Yakety Sax.

Chuck Bryant (2:00)

But it's just crazy, though, when you see how long it takes to make this one ax, and then you think about outfitting armies.

Josh Clark (2:10)

Yeah.

Chuck Bryant (2:11)

It just feels like it was every other person a blacksmith, and did they just do that 24-7?

Josh Clark (2:17)

Yeah, I get the impression there was a Walt Whitman poem about blacksmiths, and he was basically like, they were the most important people in any community. Everybody loved them. They owed no one anything, because they never had any debts, because they were so vital that anything they did probably was worth 10 times what anybody else could do for them.

And they seem to have been pretty amazing people on the whole.

Chuck Bryant (2:43)

Yeah, I mean, and we'll talk about this more, but when you think about just nails, and how many nails built this country and the world, those nails had to be forged.

Josh Clark (2:53)

Yeah, when you watch some of these blacksmith videos, and like you're saying, when you do see how long it takes to just make an average thing that you would like buy in a second these days, it really gives you an appreciation for just what a sea change the Industrial Revolution was.

Chuck Bryant (3:08)

Yeah, amazing.

Josh Clark (3:09)

To where this was automated and made, like converted to mass production. It just could have never happened before. And it didn't happen before, but it was up to the lone blacksmith to equip their entire communities with all this stuff. It's pretty cool.

Chuck Bryant (3:25)

So are we going to do blacksmith history first or the metal history first?

Josh Clark (3:33)

We'll do blacksmith history first, I think.

Chuck Bryant (3:36)

Okay. I guess we got to look at the name, because if you look at other smiths, they were all a little more specific. They were called bronze smiths.

Blacksmiths are not called iron smiths.

Josh Clark (3:48)

No.

Chuck Bryant (3:49)

Even though they work with iron, and most of the other smiths were named for the metal that they work with.

Josh Clark (3:53)

Silver smith, that's a good one.

Chuck Bryant (3:55)

Yeah. Good silver smith.

Josh Clark (3:56)

Sure.

Chuck Bryant (3:57)

It's worth their weight and it's gold.

Josh Clark (3:58)

Silver. Don't bring up gold to those guys.

Chuck Bryant (4:01)

Oh, no, no.

But black comes from, well, we're not positive, but one explanation is black smith comes from the hammer scale, or these scales. If you're watching these videos, you'll see when they're hammering this stuff, these little tiny chunky, thin, not chunky actually, just little chunks of thin scales are falling off every time they hammer it. That's the hammer scale. And it is black and your hands get all black and your face gets black.