Weekly EZine Newsletter: January 28, 2008
Wrought Iron Forging: A History
The forge or smithy is the workplace of a smith or a blacksmith. "Forging" is the term for shaping metal, mainly iron by use of heat and hammer, and the end product will become “forged iron.”
A basic smithy contains a forge, sometimes called a hearth for heating the metals (commonly iron or steel) to a temperature where work hardening ceases to accumulate, an anvil (to lay the metal pieces on while hammering), and a slack tub (to rapidly cool, and thus harden, forged metal pieces in). Tools include tongs to hold the hot metal, and hammers to strike the hot metal.
Once the final shape has been forged, iron and steel in particular often get some type of heat treatment. This can result in various degrees of hardening or softening depending on the details of the treatment.
Forging is the working of metal by plastic deformation. It is distinguished from machining, the shaping of metal by removing material (drilling, sawing, milling, turning, grinding, etc.), and from casting, wherein metal in its molten state is poured into a mould, whose form it retains on solidifying. The processes of raising, rolling, swaging, and drawing are essentially forging operations although they are not commonly so called because of the special techniques and tooling they require. Some of these techniques are shown in this animation of the forging of simple flat fire tongs.
Many metals are typically forged cold but iron and its alloys are almost always forged hot. This is for two reasons: firstly, if work hardening were allowed to progress, hard materials such as iron and steel would become extremely difficult to work with; secondly, most steel alloys can be hardened by heat treatments (i.e. by the formation of Martensite) rather than cold forging. Alloys that are amenable to precipitation hardening (such as most structural alloys of aluminum and titanium) can also be forged hot, then made strong once they achieve their final shape. Other materials must be strengthened by the forging process itself.
Forging was done historically by a smith using hammer and anvil, and though the use of water power in the production and working of iron dates to the twelfth century CE the hammer and anvil are by no means obsolete.
In industry forging is commonly done either with machine presses or with hammers powered by steam or compressed air. These hammers are very large, having reciprocating weights in the thousands of pounds. Smaller power hammers (500 pounds or less reciprocating weight) and hydraulic presses are common in art smithies as well.
In industry a distinction is made between open- and closed-die forging. In open-die work the metal is free to move except where contacted by the hammer, anvil, or other (often hand-held) tooling. In closed-die work the material is placed in a die resembling a mould, which it is forced to fill by the application of pressure. A great many common objects (wrenches, crankshafts...) are produced by closed-die forging, which is well suited to mass production. Open-die forging lends itself to very short runs and is appropriate for art smithing and custom work.
Closed-die forging is more expensive for mass production than is casting, but produces a much stronger part, and is thus used for tools, critical machine parts, and the like. One particular variant, drop forging, is often used to mass produce flat wrenches and other household tools.
Hephaestus
Hephaestus (also Hêphaistos or Hephaestos) is the Greek god of fire and the forge. There is more material about his approximate Roman equivalent at the entry for Vulcan. Hephaestus is the god of blacksmiths, craftsmen, artisans, sculptors, metals and metallurgy and fire. He was worshipped in all the manufacturing and industrial centers of Greece, especially Athens. Though his forge lay in the volcanic heart of Lemnos, Hephaestus became associated with Mount Etna by Greek colonists in Sicily.
Hephaestus and his brother Ares are sons Hera, with or without the cooperation of Zeus. In classic and late interpretations, Hera bore him alone, in jealousy for Zeus's solo birth of Athena, but as Hera is older than Zeus in terms of human history, the myth may be an inversion. Indeed, in some versions of Athena's birth, she only enters the world after Zeus' head is split open by a hammer-wielding Hephaestus. Either way, in Greek thought, the fates of the goddess of wisdom and war (Athena) and the god of the forge that makes the weapons of war (or at least their births) were linked. Hephaestus and Athena Ergane (patroness of craftsman and artisans), were honored at a festival called Chalceia on the thirtieth day of Pyanopsion. Hephaestus crafted many of Athena's battlements, along with those of the rest of the gods and the mortals who received their favor.
Hephaestus also crafted many of the other magnificent equipage of the gods, and almost any finely-wrought metalwork imbued with powers that appears in Greek myth is said to have been forged by Hephaestus: Hermes's winged helmet and sandals, the Aegis breastplate, Aphrodite's famed girdle, Achilles’ armor, Hercules’s bronze clappers, Helios's chariot, the shoulder of Pelops, Eros's bow and arrows and Hades’ helmet of invisibility. Hephaestus worked with the help of the chthonic Cyclopes, his assistants in the forge. He also built automatons of metal to work for him. He gave to blinded Orion his apprentice Cedalion as a guide.
Prometheus stole the fire that he gave to man from Hephaestus' forge. Hephaestus also created the gift that the gods gave man, the woman Pandora and her famous box.
In Iliad i.590, Zeus threw Hephaestus from Olympus because he released his mother Hera who was suspended by a golden chain between earth and sky, after an argument she had with Zeus. Hephaestus fell for nine days and nights before landing on the island of Lemnos where he grew to be a master craftsman and was allowed back into Olympus when his ability and usefulness became known to the gods.
Hephaestus was quite ugly; he was crippled and misshapen at birth: in the vase-paintings, his feet are sometimes back-to-front. In art, Hephaestus was shown lame and bent over his anvil. He walked with the aid of a stick. Hera, mortified to have brought forth such grotesque offspring, promptly threw him from Mount Olympus. He fell, as he tells it himself in the Iliad (xviii.395) many days and nights and landed in the Ocean where he was brought up by the Oceanid Thetis (mother of Achilles) and Eurynome.
Hephaestus gained revenge against Hera for rejecting him by making her a magical golden throne which, when she sat on it, didn't allow her to leave it. The other gods begged Hephaestus to return to Olympus to let her go but he repeatedly refused. Dionysus got him drunk and took him back to Olympus on the back of a mule. Hephaestus released Hera after being given Aphrodite, the goddess of love, as his wife.
Hephaestus and Aphrodite
In the Olympian order, Hephaestus was often paired with Aphrodite. Although married to Hephaestus, Aphrodite gave herself in secret to Ares, according to a tale in the Odyssey. When Hephaestus found out about it from Helios, the Sun, who sees all, he surprised them during one of their trysts ensnared in his invisibly fine and unbreakable net and left them exposed for all of Olympus to see. The Thebans told that the union with Ares produced Harmonia, as lovely as a second Aphrodite. But of her union with Hephaestus, there was no issue, unless Virgil was serious when he said that Eros was their child Aeneid i.664). But in Homer's Iliad the consort of Hephaestus is a lesser Aphrodite, Aglaia "the glorious," the youngest of the Graces and Hesiod agrees Theogony 945). Hephaestus fathered several children with mortals and immortals alike.
One of those children was the robber Periphetes. With Thalia, Hephaestus was sometimes considered the father of the Palici.
Hephaestus was somehow connected with the archaic, pre-Greek Phrygian and Thracian mystery cult of the Cabari, who were called the Hephaistoi, "the Hephaestus-men," in Lemnos.
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