Modern Marvels | The Business of Blacksmith | Forum

Wayne Coe;16634 wrote: I am watching Modern Marvels on the History Channel. They just told that a century there were 23000 blacksmiths in the USA, today only 600 remain.
They need to check their facts, the membership of ABANA at over 4000 and the members of NWBS forum.
Matter of fact I think that there are over 600 full time professional Blacksmiths.

hum... i think they forgot some zeros there ... it was around 1/2 million blacksmiths from what i remember looking up ...not incl farriers and others who used forges for other uses ...like ironworkers heating rivets... i dont know what criteria they are using to define blacksmith ...I have seen many definitions (everything from fabricators that can do a little forging to "if its not all hand forged then its not blacksmith made") and only counting fulltime smiths where for every fulltime smith there are probably 100 partime and hobby smiths...

ok according to statistics from 1900 there were a little over 225,000 people who considered themselves blacksmiths .another 290,000 were iron and steel workers . now that does not mean that they were artists (a lot of blacksmith work was not art) but they were blacksmiths ! now there are still industrial blacksmiths out there forging steel every day they are blacksmiths ! that does not mean they know a lot about working metal ! for instance i saw a program about cornwall tools ... they showed making a socket it was hot forged in a die ... the operator would be considered a blacksmith (he forges hot steel) but not really someone who knows how to make anything but the parts he was trained to make with his press and die setup...still a blacksmith tho...all the dyeing art thing is people who have no clue about how things are made ... the hand made one of a kind forged stuff is rarer because it can now be mass produced in dies! a lot of items that are hot forged nowadays people do not even know how they are made. The image of the old time blacksmith shoeing a horse in a small town is what they think of when you say blacksmith ... its hard to educate people about what a blacksmith really is and how much industry depended on the ability to make a part to fit and fix things on up to modern times ...many factories had blacksmith shops as part of the plant and used them up into the 60 and 70s . and many of your hardware companys started as blacksmiths who made a popular product and expanded from there... a lot of the small town shops ended up becoming auto and tractor mechanics. anyway hope this clears up the how many blacksmith were there thing...