[masraum]

This is a pretty cool video by Veritasium on the Samurai sword thing (Japanese, not Chinese for Bill D). They usually do a pretty good job of getting the technical details worked into their videos in a way that most folks will understand. I haven't watched this in many months. I don't remember how deep they went into the technical aspects.



I think that most damascus makers these days are focused on the appearance of the steel more than the particular qualities of the steel (durable, sharp/edge retaining, flexible/not brittle), but I'm sure there are some.

Ancients, of course, didn't know that they were creating carbon nanotubes. They just figured out the right recipe and over many, many years figured out tweaks to the recipe to make their steel better and better.