How we Invented Metal, Not what you think!

How we Invented Metal, Not what you think!

Almost every version of this story says the same thing. Somebody dropped a green rock into a campfire, and in the morning found metal.

It is a wonderful story. It is also almost certainly wrong, and the reason why is chemistry. An open fire is drowning in air, and air is the one thing that stops copper letting go of the oxygen holding it inside the rock.

So if not the campfire, then what? The real answer is a piece of technology humans had already mastered for generations, for something else entirely.