Glass on the other hand is ‘amorphous’, so it does not have any natural planes to split, or cleave to, making it much more suitable for making sharp edges.Ī type of naturally occurring glass that has already been in use since the Stone Age as a blade is obsidian. The difficulty is that diamond crystals tend to ‘cleave’ in what’s called an octahedral fashion, which doesn’t allow for a very sharp blade cross-section. The hardest material out there is diamond, so logically a diamond knife should be the sharpest type. So there is an element of practicality as well. The trade off, of course, as we’ve mentioned already in our article about Samurai swords, is that very sharp blades can be very brittle, and it’s no use to anyone if parts of a knife break off while it’s being used. Leaving aside our knives of course, there are many earnest scientific discussions/arguments on the web as to which material makes, or would make the sharpest blade. Which brings us to the oft discussed topic of the sharpest blade in the world. Ancient technology in contemporary surgery.If anyone has earned the right to be a bit nerdy about knives, then it’s us. My guess as to why this might be the case, beyond inertia in surgical equipment trends, is that some of the practical aspects of making obsidian blades might have been underestimated by Buck, especially those concerning standardization in shape and thickness, along with the properties of various grades of obsidian.Įdit (, 10:45AM): Hey! This post was included in this week's ResearchBlogging 'Editor's Selection' for the social sciences! Sweet!īuck BA (1982). Since the results of that brief experimental study were published almost thirty years ago, however, there hasn't been much of a push for obsidian tipped surgical instruments. Remains that no honed metal edge has matched Various tasks cannot be produced today, the fact Though one with faith in modem technologyĬannot imagine that instruments equal to these Surgery, fine plastic work on thin skin (blepharoplasty, Examples that come to mind are theĭebridement of nerve ends for repair, microvascular Scalpel blades and razor blades leave much to beĭesired. With the convenience of the modem disposable Of sharpness suffices, and one feels comfortable In most fields of surgery, of course, a modicum Buck (1982) reports some observations on this episode, as well as on experiments comparing the obsidian to steel scalpel blades, concluding that, at 30 angstrom (i.e., 3 nanometers that's three billionth of a meter) obsidian is much sharper than even the sharpest steel blade, the cuts it produces heal just as well if not better than those made with a steel surgical blade, and contrary to some concerns, it doesn't chip or leave residues when employed to operate on soft tissue. When I've given knapping demos using obsidian and inadvertently nicked myself with little obsidian flakes, they're so sharp that I usually didn't notice I was bleeding until I smeared blood all over myself - this made knapping look pretty bad-ass to at least one group of sixth graders I once gave a demo to.īut don't take my word for it! Lithic specialists often refer to the story of Don Crabtree (one of the people directly responsible for the rebirth of knapping in the 60's and 70's) insisting that he be operated on by surgeons using scalpels tipped with obsidian blades he had expressly knapped for the purpose. Well, that bloody geyser was unleashed by a flake of coarse flint - and obsidian is much, much sharper than that. Just how sharp is obsidian? Extremely damn frikkin' sharp! I often regale students about the first time I knapped stone myself, a sad, sordid story that ends with a fountain of blood gushing from the tip of my index finger (not that I would ever exaggerate for dramatic effect or anything). Whenever it was available, obsidian seems to have been one of the preferred materials to make sharp flakes of, mainly because it is incomparably sharp among lithic raw materials! See, most of my analytical work has been focused on stone tools (aka lithics) and how they were manufactured, used and managed by people in the past. In my recent post on #hipsterscience, the quote that struck closest to home was the one about the obsidian blade.
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