Welding Looking Back

Honestly, I don't think most people give much thought to welding today.  We go to work in our offices located in major metropolitan areas mostly.  Fewer and fewer people are involved in agriculture or ranching where they make a living off the land or directly involved with it in some way.  So things like a shop and welding are out of sight.  And out of sight is out of mind.

You ask a typical city dweller about welding today and they will likely tell you that it conjures up a man with a protective mask holding a torch connected to some tanks by rubber lines.  I had one person tell me that they had seen this set-up repairing a big rig on the side of the road one time.  And true, that is one part of welding that we know of from the last 100 years.  But welding has actually been around for several thousand years.

The earliest forms or welding generally involved the community blacksmith.  He didn't just shoe horses!  A town wasn't much of a town until and unless it had a blacksmith that had developed his welding skills.  His use of the fire to heat the metal (mostly iron and steel) and a hammer to beat it with brute force is what the earliest forms of welding was all about.  In simple terms all welding is is joining two metals together.  This form of welding is pretty much all that was used to accomplish this task until some discoveries were made a little over a hundred years ago.

Welding Now

With the discovery of the electric arc, its application for welding followed.  And throughout the last century a whole bunch of advancements and discoveries have impacted welding in huge ways.  Besides arc welding, there is gas welding using oxy-fuel.  Also, one of the more recent forms of welding is that using and energy beam.  Most people will readily think of the laser beam and that is a form of welding.  But there is also electron beam welding and even x-ray welding.  Clearly, I'm not attempting to be the welding historian with this post.  However, I do want to emphasize that welding is something that has evolved quickly and rapidly over the last century.

And hardly anything we do or touch is not seriously impacted by welding!  For sure we think of the cars we use to drive over the bridges we travel to work in the buildings that have metal frames as all having been put together in part through welding.  But the smart phone or computer that you're reading this post on is likely to have welding on some level.  Amazingly, welding is all around us just about everywhere in our modern society.

Welding Tomorrow

Probably the biggest changes in welding is in the area of automation.  The use of robotics for welding is making big advances in the manufacturing sector.  Welding has always been a dangerous trade.  The opportunities for burn injuries abound.  So do eye injuries.  That's why there is so much emphasis on safety equipment and protection.  I also think it's one of the reasons for the increase in automation.

There is no way to completely automate every possible facet of welding.  There will always be a critical need for specialized and good welders.  I just think a lot of the very routine repetitive tasks will be able to be done by robots.

TIG Welding Technique - Kevin Caron

Wikipedia has a great article about this if you want to learn more.  Simply go to their site and search for the word welding.