When and where was steel (NOT the Bessemer process, but steel as such) invented and first produced in useful quantities?

riotgrrl

It depends on what you describe as useful quantities: "Wrought iron can be carburized into a mild steel by holding it in a charcoal fire for prolonged periods of time. By the beginning of the Iron Age, smiths had discovered that iron that was repeatedly reforged produced a higher quality of metal. Quench-hardening was also known by this time. The oldest quench-hardened steel artifact is a knife found on Cyprus at a site dated to 1100 BC." During the Han Dynasty (202 BC–AD 220), Chinese ironworking achieved a scale and sophistication not reached in the West until the eighteenth century. In the first century, the Han government established ironworking as a state monopoly and built a series of large blast furnaces in Henan province, each capable of producing several tons of iron per day. By this time, Chinese metallurgists had discovered how to puddle molten pig iron, stirring it in the open air until it lost its carbon and became wrought iron. (In Chinese, the process was called chao, literally, stir-frying.) "During the Han dynasty...Chinese metallurgists had found that wrought iron and cast iron could be melted together to yield an alloy of intermediate carbon content, that is, steel." "Perhaps as early as 300 BC, although certainly by AD 200, high quality steel was being produced in southern India by what Europeans would later call the crucible technique." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steel Nov 19 05, 5:03 PM

bloomsby

Many thanks. By "useful quantities" I simply meant enough to make useful objects, such as one or more knives, for example. Nov 19 05, 6:50 PM