Essay About Welding

When most people think about welding they think of it as a blue-collar, low-intelligence job, but they could not be more wrong. Welding is, admittedly, much more dirty than working in a cubicle for eight hours, but involves a huge amount of science that many don’t think about past college. The link between science and welding may sometimes be hidden by a thick layer of metal dust and spatter, but it can easily be seen if one knows where to look. Without advancements in science, there is no way that welding could be what it is today, have had the same improvements, or even be a very survivable process.

Welding itself is a fairly simple concept. In the end, two pieces of metal are bonded together. The method of getting there however, is a bit more complex. “There are tons of different welding methods, and more are being invented all the time. Some methods use heat to essentially melt two pieces of metal together… Other methods rely on pressure to bind metal together, and still others use a combination of both heat and pressure”(Atteberry 1). All these different

According to “How Welding Works”, from HowStuffWorks.com, “Early examples of welding have been found…with some dating back to the Bronze Age. The process they used is known as forge welding”(Atteberry 2). Using the tools available at the time, blacksmiths would heat the metal redhot and then pound them together. This process only works with softer metals, and the bond is hardly the strongest. Later, once electricity was discovered, welders took advantages of this snazzy new invention and began to create rudimentary electrodes and arc welding. Those methods seem infantile to today’s more efficient and stronger welds, but they show how the welding process has advanced in time with major scientific discoveries, which provides hard evidence for the intrinsic relationship between science and