Today we xyj kitchen knife want to talk about the history about the knife and steel. Homo habilus revolutionized the world by figuring out how to modify certain rocks into usable tools, around 2.5 million years ago. We believe the first crafted tool was the hand-axe, which doesn’t really look like much upon initial examination. It looks like a rock, but if you look closer, you can see that one edge has been sharpened significantly by chips being knocked off of it, in a process known as ‘knapping’. The hand-axe was the Swiss Army Knife of the prehistoric world, used for everything from skinning, digging,slicing, chopping, to whacking an enemy over the head with it.

It wasn’t long before early human ancestors figured out how to apply this technique to make other tools, such as spear heads. At some point, probably around the time Homo sapiens arrived, someone figured out that spearheads make good cutting tools, but the handle was too long. They shortened both the blade, and the shaft, and thus, the first knife was born. It is hard to imagine us being able to survive as a species without the knife. After fire, it quickly became one of the most important things a person could have. Knives were crafted from specific rocks, that fractured correctly to be able to create a sharp edge, Suitable rocks were chert, flint, and obsidian, which still makes the sharpest edge known to humankind (obsidian is a natural glass formed by volcanic action. Modern glass can be knapped to just as fine an edge…).

Knives and bladed weapons continued to be used even beyond the beginning of civilization. Copper, and gold were the first metals that people learned how to work with, but they were un-suitable for edged tools. They were too soft to take an edge. Around 3000 BC, simultaneously in Egypt and Sumeria, probably by accident, someone found out that mixing tin with copper while smelting it made it much harder, and the Bronze Age was born. Knives and swords were made from bronze up until the Iron Age.

Around 1200 BC, in Anatolia, someone figured out how to smelt iron, and hammer it into usable shapes with hard, sharp, tough edges. Iron weapons, in the hands of Greeks and Romans, easily outclassed the puny Bronze blades of other cultures. Around 500 BC, in Rome and Greece, steel began to be used to make devastating blades. No one knows exactly when it happened, but somewhere, while someone was smelting iron, some carbon contaminated the metal, making it stronger, tougher and it held a better edge. By varying the amount of carbon, and other metals in the steel, they found they could bring out the desired qualities in steel for different purposes, such as resistance to rust, tensile strength, and edge retention. This brings us into the modern world of cutlery.