Welding is a fabrication process that joins materials, usually metals or thermoplastics. It is distinct from lower temperature metal-joining techniques such as brazing and soldering. Many different energy sources can be used for welding, including a gas flame, an electric arc, a laser, an electron beam, friction, and ultrasound.
About Welding in brief
Welding is a fabrication process that joins materials, usually metals or thermoplastics. It is distinct from lower temperature metal-joining techniques such as brazing and soldering, which do not melt the base metal. Many different energy sources can be used for welding, including a gas flame, an electric arc, a laser, an electron beam, friction, and ultrasound. Until the end of the 19th century, the only welding process was forge welding, which blacksmiths had used for millennia to join iron and steel by heating and hammering. Welding technology advanced quickly during the early 20th century as world wars drove the demand for reliable and inexpensive joining methods. Today, as the science continues to advance, robot welding is commonplace in industrial settings, and researchers continue to develop new welding methods and gain greater understanding of weld quality. Welding was used in the construction of the Iron pillar of Delhi, India, about 310 AD and weighing 4metric tons. The earliest examples of this come from the Bronze and Iron Ages in Europe and Middle East. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus wrote that Glaucus of Chios invented the single-handedly invented welding in the 5th century BC. The word is derived from the Old Swedish word valla, meaning ‘to boil’.
It was first recorded in English in 1590, from a version of the Christian Bible that was originally translated into English by John Wycliffe in the fourteenth century. The Old English word for welding iron was samod or samodwellung. The term ‘weld’ is from the Middle English verb ‘well’, meaning: “to heat’ or ‘bring to a boil”. The modern word was likely derived from a past-tense participle, “welled”, with the addition of ‘d’ for this purpose being common in the Germanic languages of the Angles and Saxons. In Swedish, however, the word only referred to joining metals when combined as in valla järn. The word possibly entered English from Swedish settlements that arrived before and during the Viking Age, as more than half of the most common English words in everyday use are ‘wool’ and ‘värn’ The word may have been used to refer to the iron trade with the thousands of Scandinavian settlements that were in existence at the time, such as the Illyrian variti, Turkish kaynamak, Grison bulgir, or the Lettish sawdrit. In the Middle Ages, many other European languages used different words but with the same meaning to referring to welding iron, like ‘sawdrit,’ ‘sawdrit’ or “sawdred’ “Weld” is a common term for joining metals in today’s everyday use.
You want to know more about Welding?
This page is based on the article Welding published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 03, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
