The History of Welding

History of welding timeline

Ancient beginnings: The bronze and iron ages

Welding’s historic development can be traced back to ancient times. During the Bronze Age (around 3000 BC), small gold circular boxes were made by pressure welding lap joints together. It is estimated that these boxes were made more than 2,000 years ago. During the Iron Age (about 1400 BC), the Egyptians and people in the eastern Mediterranean area learned to weld pieces of iron together – and many tools that have been found date back to approximately 1000 BC.

The Middle Ages: The rise of blacksmithing

During the Middle Ages, the art of blacksmithing came to be, and many iron items that were produced were welded by hammering. It was not until the 19th century that welding as we know it today was invented. 

The 19th century: The birth of modern welding

Early welding innovations

Historians credit Edmund Davy of England with the discovery of acetylene in 1836. Edmund’s cousin, Sir Humphry Davy, had previously produced an arc between two carbon electrodes using a battery in 1809. In the mid 1800s, the electric generator was invented, and arc lighting became popular. Gas welding and cutting was developed during the late 1800s. Arc welding with the carbon arc and metal arc was developed, and resistance welding became a practical joining process. 

Carbon arc welding and early patents

Auguste De Meritens, working in the Cabot Laboratory in France, used the heat of an arc for joining lead plates for storage batteries in the year 1881. One of the students in his laboratory, a Russian, Nikolai N. Benardos, received a patent for welding. Bernardos, along with a fellow Russian, Stanislaus Olszewski, secured a British patent in 1885 and an American patent in 1887 that showcased an early electrode holder. This marked the beginning of carbon arc welding. Benardos restricted his efforts to carbon arc welding, although he was able to weld iron as well as lead. Carbon arc welding became popular during the late 1890s and early 1900s. 

Metal electrode arc welding

In 1890, C.L. Coffin of Detroit was awarded the first U.S. patent for an arc welding process using a metal electrode. This was the first record of the metal melted from the electrode carried across the arc to deposit filler metal in the joint to make a weld. About the same time, N.G. Slavianoff, a Russian, presented the same idea of transferring metal across an arc, but to cast metal in a mold.

The early 20th century: Innovations and World War I

Early developments in coated electrodes

Approximately 1900, Strohmenger introduced a coated metal electrode in Great Britain – it had a thin coating of clay or lime, and it provided a more stable arc. Then, between 1907 and 1914, Oscar Kjellberg of Sweden invented a covered or coated electrode. He produced his stick electrodes by dipping short lengths of bare iron wire in thick mixtures of carbonates and silicates and allowing the coating to dry. 

Advances in resistance and thermite welding

Meanwhile, resistance welding processes were being developed, including spot welding, seam welding, projection welding and flash butt welding. Elihu Thompson is credited with inventing resistance welding, with patents dating 1885-1900. In 1903, a German named Goldschmidt invented thermite welding that was first used to weld railroad rails. 

Gas welding and cutting

Gas welding and cutting were also perfected during this same time period. The production of oxygen and later the liquefying of air, along with the introduction of a blow pipe or torch in 1887, helped the development of both welding and cutting. Before 1900, hydrogen and coal gas were used with oxygen. However, around the turn of the century, a torch suitable for use with low-pressure acetylene was developed. 

Wartime impact on welding

World War I brought a tremendous demand for armament production, growing the need for welding. Many companies sprang up in America and in Europe to manufacture welding machines and electrodes to meet the requirements. Immediately after the war, 20 members of the Wartime Welding Committee of the Emergency Fleet Corporation, under the leadership of Comfort Avery Adams, founded the American Welding Society in 1919. The nonprofit organization would be dedicated to the advancement of welding and allied processes. That same year, C.J. Holslag invented alternating current; however, it did not become popular until the 1930s when heavy-coated electrodes found widespread use. 

The mid-20th century: Advancements and World War II

Early advances in automatic welding

In 1920, P.O. Nobel of the General Electric Company invented automatic welding, which used bare electrode wire operated on direct current and arc voltage as the basis of regulating the feed rate. General Electric used automatic welding to build up worn motor shafts and crane wheels, while the automobile industry also used it to produce rear axle housings. 

Development of welding electrodes

During the 1920s, various types of welding electrodes were developed, and a considerable controversy arose about the advantage of the heavy-coated rods versus light-coated rods. In 1927, Langstroth and Wunder of the A.O. Smith Company developed heavy-coated electrodes. Then in 1929, Lincoln Electric Company produced extruded electrode rods and sold them to the public. By 1930, covered electrodes were widely used. Welding codes appeared that required higher-quality weld metal, which increased the use of covered electrodes.

Innovations in gas shielding techniques

During the 1920s there was considerable research in shielding the arc and weld area using externally applied gases. The atmosphere of oxygen and nitrogen in contact with the molten weld metal caused brittle and sometimes porous welds. Researchers tested welds using gas shielding techniques, and Alexander and Langmuir did work in chambers using hydrogen as a welding atmosphere. They utilized two electrodes in their research, starting with carbon electrodes but later changing to tungsten electrodes. The hydrogen was changed to atomic hydrogen in the arc. It was then blown out of the arc forming an intensely hot flame of atomic hydrogen turning to the molecular form and liberating heat. This arc produced half again as much heat as an oxyacetylene flame. This became known as the atomic hydrogen welding process. Atomic hydrogen never became popular, but was used during the 1930s and 1940s for special applications of welding and later for welding tool steels. 

H.M. Hobart and P.K. Devers were doing similar work with argon and helium. According to their 1926 patent applications, arc welding using gas supplied around the arc was a forerunner of the gas tungsten arc welding process (GTAW). They also showed welding with a concentric nozzle and with the electrode being fed as a wire through the nozzle. This was the forerunner of the gas metal arc welding process (GMAW).

Stud welding and submerged arc welding

Welders at the New York Navy Yard developed stud welding in 1930, specifically for attaching wood decking over a metal surface. Stud welding became popular in the shipbuilding and construction industries. 

The automatic process that became popular was the submerged arc welding process. The National Tube Company developed this under powder, or smothered arc, welding process for a pipe mill at McKeesport, Pennsylvania. The company designed the process to make the longitudinal seams in the pipe. Robinoff patented the process in 1930 and later sold it to Linde Air Products Company. Linde renamed it to Unionmelt welding. Shipyards and ordnance factories used submerged arc welding during the defense buildup in 1938. Today, it remains one of the most productive and most popular welding processes. 

Gas Tungsten Arc Welding (GTAW)

Gas tungsten arc welding (GTAW) had its beginnings in welding history from an idea by C.L. Coffin to weld in a nonoxidizing gas atmosphere, which he patented in 1890. H.M. Hobart and P.K. Devers further refined the concept in the late 1920s using helium and argon for shielding, respectively. This process was ideal for welding magnesium as well as stainless steel and aluminum. It was perfected in 1941, patented by Meredith, and named Heliarc welding. It was later licensed to Linde Air Products, where the water-cooled torch was developed. The gas tungsten arc welding process has become one of the most important.

Gas Metal Arc Welding (GMAW)

A turning point in welding history came when the Battelle Memorial Institute — under the sponsorship of the Air Reduction Company — successfully developed the gas metal arc welding (GMAW) process in 1948. This development used the gas shielded arc similar to the gas tungsten arc, but it replaced the tungsten electrode with a continuously fed electrode wire. One of the basic changes that made the process more usable was the small-diameter electrode wires and the constant-voltage power source. (H.E. Kennedy had patented this principle earlier.) The initial introduction of GMAW was for welding nonferrous metals. The high deposition rate led users to try the process on steel. The cost of inert gas was relatively high, and the cost savings were not immediately available.

The late 20th century: New techniques and technologies

CO₂ welding process and variations

In 1953, Lyubavskii and Novoshilov announced the use of welding with consumable electrodes in an atmosphere of carbon dioxide gas. The CO₂ welding process immediately gained favor since it utilized equipment developed for inert gas metal arc welding and could be used for welding steels economically. The CO₂ arc is a hot arc and the larger electrode wires required fairly high currents. The process became widely used with the introduction of smaller-diameter electrode wires and refined power supplies. This short-circuit arc variation was known as micro-wire, short-arc and dip transfer welding, all of which appeared late in 1958 and early in 1959. This variation allowed all-position welding on thin materials and soon became the most popular of the gas metal arc welding process variations. 

Another variation was the use of inert gas with small amounts of oxygen that provided the spray-type arc transfer. It became popular in the early 1960s. A recent variation is the use of pulsed current. The current switches from a high to a low value at a rate of once or twice the line frequency.

Dualshield and Innershield® processes

Soon after the introduction of CO₂ welding, a variation with a special electrode wire was developed. This wire, described as an inside-outside electrode, was tubular in cross section with the fluxing agents on the inside. The process was called Dualshield, which indicated that external shielding gas was utilized as well as the gas produced by the flux in the core of the wire for arc shielding. This process, invented by Bernard, debuted in 1954 and then patented in 1957, when the National Cylinder Gas Company reintroduced it. 

In 1959, an inside-outside electrode was produced that did not require external gas shielding. The absence of shielding gas gave the process popularity for noncritical work. This process was named Innershield®.

Electroslag and Electrogas welding

The Soviets announced the electroslag welding process at the 1958 World Fair in Brussels, Belgium. It had been used in the Soviet Union since 1951, but was based on work done in the United States by R.K. Hopkins, who was granted patents in 1940. The Hopkins process was never used to a very great degree for joining. The Paton Institute Laboratory in Kiev, Ukraine, and the Welding Research Laboratory in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, perfected the process and developed the equipment. The Electromotive Division of General Motors Corporation in Chicago used the process in production for the first time in the United States. They called it the electro-molding process and used it to fabricate welded diesel engine blocks. Manufacturers use the process and its variation, using a consumable guide tube, for welding thicker materials. 

The Arcos Corporation introduced another vertical welding method, called electrogas, in 1961. Using equipment developed for electroslag welding , electrogas employed a flux-cored electrode wire and an externally supplied gas shield. It is an open arc process since a slag bath is not involved. A newer version of this process uses self-shielding electrode wires, and another variation uses solid wire but with gas shielding. These methods allow the welding of thinner materials than allowed with the electroslag process. 

Plasma arc and electron beam welding

Gage invented plasma arc welding in 1957. This process uses a constricted arc or an arc through an orifice, which creates an arc plasma with a higher temperature than the tungsten arc. It is also used for metal spraying, gouging and cutting. 

The electron beam welding process, which was developed around the same time in France, uses a focused beam of electrons as a heat source in a vacuum chamber. J.A. Stohr of the French Atomic Energy Commission made the first public disclosure of the process on Nov. 23, 1957. In the United States, the automotive and aircraft engine industries are the major users of electron beam welding.

Modern welding techniques

Inertia welding

Developed in the Soviet Union, inertia welding is a type of friction welding that uses a flywheel to generate kinetic energy instead of relying on a drive motor. One of the parts is spun to a high speed and brought into contact with that stationary part, using stored kinetic energy to create the weld. It is a specialized process and has applications only where there is a sufficient volume of similar parts to be welded due to the initial expense for equipment and tooling.

Laser welding

Laser welding is one of the newest welding processes, using a laser originally developed by the Bell Telephone Laboratories as a communications device in 1960. Because of the tremendous concentration of energy in a small space, it proved to be a powerful heat source – making it efficient for cutting metals and nonmetals alike, with continuous pulse equipment available. The laser is finding welding applications in automotive metalworking operations.

Welding history information courtesy of Hobart Institute of Welding Technology. This article was excerpted from Modern Welding Technology, 4th edition, 1998, by Howard B. Cary. Published by Prentice-Hall.