Iron that comes from meteorites has a higher nickel content than iron dug up from the ground and smelted by humans.

What archaeologists didn’t know at the time was that the blade came from space. When British archaeologist Howard Carter found Tutankhamun’s tomb nearly a century ago and laid eyes on this object, it was clear the dagger was special. King Tut had a dagger made of iron-a treasured object in the ancient world worthy of few more than a pharaoh. We’d fight over it, create and destroy nations with it, grow global economies by it, and use it to build some of the greatest inventions and structures the world has ever known. Over the millennia, our ancestors would work the material, discovering better ways to draw iron from the Earth itself and eventually to smelt it into steel. Thus began an obsession that gripped the species. On a day lost to history, some fortuitous humans found a glistening meteorite, mostly iron and nickel, that had barreled through the atmosphere and crashed into the ground. Eventually, some of that rock and metal formed the Earth, where it would shape the destiny of one particular species of walking ape. Over countless cosmic explosions and rebirths, these materials found their way into asteroids and other planetary bodies, which slammed into one another as the cosmic pot stirred. It begins in the stars.īillions of years before humans walked the Earth-before the Earth even existed-blazing stars fused atoms into iron and carbon. The story of steel begins long before bridges, I-beams, and skyscrapers.

Inventor steel