Video: The History of Steel & the Roots of Progress

by Jason Crawford · October 10, 2019 · 1 min read

The progress studies group (join the Slack if interested!) held their first San Francisco meetup recently, and I gave a talk on the history of iron and steel:

Metallic iron was once the stuff of myth, known only in the form of meteorites. Today, in the hardened form of steel, iron is everywhere. What is this metal that is so indispensable to the modern world? Why is it so hard to make? And how did it go from mythical to mundane? This talk explores the challenges of ironmaking and the solutions humanity has found over the centuries, including the famous Bessemer process that was a watershed of the Industrial Revolution.

I’ll have a blog post on this soon as well.

At the end, I also commented a bit on why it’s important to study and promote human progress.