Page 51 - Апрель

HISTORY

Russian metallurgists
Continuation

Damask steel turned out to be a complex body consisting of pure iron and embedded iron
carbide plates, a chemical compound of iron with carbon, serving as a blade base.
If you look for a comparison in the technique of our days, you can find a rather suitable one:
damask steel is similar to reinforced concrete. In reinforced concrete, two bodies meet in a
single community: metal, which resists stretching well and poorly resists bending that occurs
during compression, and concrete, which is not afraid of strong compression, but is not resistant
to tension.
Likewise, in damask steel - viscous, but soft iron gives the material flexibility, and
exceptionally hard, but fragile, like glass, iron
carbide plates give it strength, the ability to take
sharpening well.
Anosov did not rest on his laurels. By
1837, he had prepared a number of excellent
mechanical qualities and the design of blades
from damask steel of various grades.
He crumbles with them the best chisels of
English work, easily cuts through the thinnest
gas kerchiefs thrown into the air, bends the
blades in an arc; With fair pride, Anosov reported
about his blades: "This is undoubtedly the limit
of perfection in elasticity, which is not found in
steel."
What is no less amazing than the damask
itself, the secret of Anosov's victory, who managed
to recreate the art that had been accumulating
for centuries in a relatively short time? The
secret is that the Russian metallurgist acted like
a scientist.
He did not indiscriminately, blindly try all
kinds of means, as Edison did half a century later,
who set up several thousand experiments to pick
up a carbon hair for a light bulb. If Anosov had
chosen this path, he would not have had enough
life.
The Russian metallurgist went to unraveling
the mystery of the damask steel not by groping,
Micro slice of soft iron, on which individual grains of metal but armed with the means of scientific research,
are distinguishable. created by him.

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