The Man Who Welded Iron

Herodotus, describing the treasures he saw at Delphi, singles out one object above all the others. It was not gold. It was an iron stand for a mixing-bowl, dedicated by Alyattes, king of Lydia — the father of Croesus, and the richest monarch of the western world in his generation.

Herodotus says that of all the offerings at Delphi, this one was most worth seeing. And he attributes it to a Chian: Glaucus of Chios, "who alone of all men discovered how to weld iron."

Pausanias saw the thing some six hundred years later and describes it more fully. It was an iron stand, he says, worked with figures of small animals and with plants and flowers, and the parts were joined not with rivets or nails or clamps but by fusion, iron flowing into iron. The Greeks found this remarkable enough to become proverbial; "the art of Glaucus" entered the language as a phrase for exceptionally fine craftsmanship.

Whether Glaucus literally invented the welding of iron is doubtful; the technique has a longer and more diffuse history than any single-inventor story allows. But the tradition is informative regardless. It tells us that in the seventh century BC, Chios was associated with metalwork at the outer edge of what was technically possible, that its craftsmen were commissioned by the wealthiest king in the neighbouring world, and that their work stood at the most prestigious address in Greece for the better part of a millennium, with the island's name attached.

It is worth pausing on the economics. Alyattes did not commission an iron stand from Chios because iron was scarce in Lydia. He commissioned it because the Chian could do something nobody else could do, and because dedicating an object of impossible workmanship at Delphi was a form of international communication understood by every Greek who saw it. Chios, in other words, was already in the business of selling things whose value came from their being unobtainable elsewhere. It would be in that business, one way or another, for the next twenty-six centuries.