A dull edged butter knife to add some milk fat condensate to your bagel or bread. Perhaps an EDC folding knife that you can flick out lightning quick. From Kyocera high technology ceramic knives that stays sharp 10X longer as long as you do not chip the edge, to special steel alloys of iron, molybdenum, and vanadium superalloy tougher stronger blades. A disposable utility blade (relatively brittle) one of the sharpest knife blades you can buy; cheap too!
All throughout human history, sharp edges utilized to render animals into food, starting with chip sharpened flint or obsidian edges made by pounding rocks, during the Stone Age, against other rocks that chip fragmented into razor sharp edges. No human body part exists as an analogy to a cat claw or razor-sharp shark tooth, to cut through flesh or prey, be that for hunting for food or in combat to hurt or kill the enemy, but manmade artificial blade technology gave those who wielded it, the edge, pun intended.
Slicing & cutting things a big business today, not just for making pocketknives, cutlery or Swiss Army knives with multiple function & features that flip out of a knife handle, but cutting a major important processing in manufacturing, to trim composites like carbon fiber after the parts come out of the form or mold with rough edges that require trimming.
From clothing fabrics to leather goods, food processing, to plastic film & paper printing of books & magazines, slicing, cutting, dicing, trimming & sharp edge tools are extensively utilized during cooking, industrial production, and in commercial applications.
The edge sharpness, edge holding durability, resilience of the blade, corrosion resistance & profile of blade, along with the cost of making it, all determine the application specific knife that works best for rendering a fish or cutting sheet metal - tin snips or machine scissors. Precision hair cutting scissors used in salons to give haircuts, it's the edge & how those edge meet up with the material that makes the difference. Inside food processors & some blenders, even a dull blade spun at great velocity can chew up coffee beans or ice in seconds.
Swords, like those handmade & forged one at time in Japan that cost thousands of dollars, to cheap 8in chefs' knives made in China by the billion, there are knives for shaving, cutting materials in a shop, for self-protection, for hunting & combat, for EDC, for dicing meat & veggies & fruit in your homes kitchen, to those that cut open tape & boxes shipped from E-commerce retailers to people's homes, or to break down cardboard boxes for recycling. There are blades of all different shapes & sizes, made of different alloys & materials, for every different application & every person.
The old wisdom about knives is that a dull knife is dangerous. This is why I got a Whetstone & Lansky 5-stone precision sharpening system. Wicked sharp knives so sharp they can cut your fingernail easily with just a glance, cut to a super low 12–15-degree blade angles, they can be dangerous too as one false move can slice your flesh or skin easily.
Some of the most precise blades made are used in surgery, heated or ultrasonically vibrated, these blades are designed to cut through skin & muscle while causing the least amount of damage to nearby flesh, the flesh next to the cutting edge of the scalpel. One of the main goals of surgery, to correct the problem while causing the least amount of unintentional tissue damage. Watch "Dr. Pimple Popper" on TLC where Dr. Sandra Lee in Upton California uses special blades to remove cysts & lipomas from under people's skin, sometimes to release puss or blood or other fluids, sometimes to remove cysts of different kinds. Some people cannot stomach watching this kind of graphic content, I love it! I love knives, & always have a knife near me.
I use my EDC knife as an improvised tool to cut off hang nails & to open packages, to help open devices for device repair, to cut & trim & to unscrew, modify, dent, indent, profile, measure, pry or otherwise adjust, to make or build things, for survival & for daily living. My pocketknife not fancy or expensive, its an everyday tool with lots of utility value that seems nearly indispensable, or super useful all the time.
Before firearms became popular in warfare, knives were the preferred weapon of combat. At home, the fork was invented in Italy by 1100, so before that, it was sharp pointed knives at dinner parties. Sometimes if the dinner social interaction went sour, those food handling knives were used as weapons during a chaotic social decay moment when the party goers turned on each other, because of tense words exchanges about political topics, that "Set people off" by causing a social disturbance.
In the Middle Ages, sometimes these disturbances at dinner parties turned ugly as people turned on each other, using their sharp pointed eating knives as weapons to hurt & kill each other. Sometimes it was so bad, that everyone sustained mortal knife wounds, in what is known as a "blood bath", where everyone at the function together ends up dying from injuries caused by violence induced knife wounds at that dysfunction event. Stabbing with improved shanks a way that people in prison harm & hurt each other for various reasons.
We can learn a lot about human history through archeological digs that find rock & early metal blades. This tells us about where people were operating. It also tells us about the kinds of people & about their technologies. Not just the final knife or edge, but what processes were used to make it. It tells us a lot more. We can learn about their ancient society by closer examination of their knives, even if corroded or damaged from weathering or aging in nature for millennia or longer. Humans have been modifying the biosphere of Earth with fire for many thousands of years, then with blades & finally guns & then nuclear weapons.
Early knifes were made by knapping a flake forming rock like volcanic glass obsidian, with a harder rock, to make razor sharp flakes. These flakes were often added to the end of a wood stick to make spear & later arrows for bows & crossbows. A small sharp obsidian flake can be utilized in hand to butcher an entire large animal for example.
These sharp cutting instruments gave early people a major advantage over other animals in nature. Early people moved from simply watching each other & learning by observation of first-person examples. As their toolkit of knife instruments became more standardized, so did local languages, enabling the people to talk. Sharp cutting tools initiated human communication such that peoples could collaborate to butcher an animal faster as a team. This helped to propel early people into organized societies, by liberating food calories from nature faster, enabling people free mental time to invent & imagine & predict & plan & significantly, gave their brains extra fuel to give rise to language & speech & thus increasingly faster exchanges of ideas between people. Blades & cutting tools used to cut paper, enables mass produced books to exist, at much lower prices than the handwritten books released before the printing press was commercialized.
Today the internet serves this role of connecting people's minds in way that would be impossible without global information technology & telecom copper wire & fiber optic infrared laser diode pumped high bandwidth cloud compute enabling networks, servers & websites from the mundane entertainment of Steam Games like Portal 2 downloaded digitally in minutes over comcast Xfinity though a coaxial cable modem with wicked fast bandwidth & thus amazing fast data throughput or download performance.
In jungles & forests, blades helped people cut paths, footpaths & then roads. Even landscapes crews today utilized chain saws with sharp blades in the chain, to rip through trees & branches, to protect powerlines from branches that would impact the lines during winter storms, from high wind modulation or snow loading that would cause the branches to sag onto the power lines. Crews are paid hundreds of millions per year nearby, to cut such branches down above power lines owned by the local utility company PSE.
Sword like blades allow people to slash their ways through the rainforest & heavy thick jungles. Back then nature was wild & much healthier & full of hazards of all kinds. A cut down foot path enables people to move between locations faster, for hunting or logistics, transporting of the animal hunted or other goods, like lumber or timbers, wood product cut down with axes & other strong sharp-edged instruments. Up until mechanization, early agriculture was fueled by humans wielding scythes, a curved sword like blade used to arm-swing cut down grain. The scythe helped people to liberate grain for bread, and bread went on to liberate more glucose for even more thinking. Over time this gave rise to the high renaissance or intellectual enlightenment of liberated easy cheap food calories. Today easy cheap carbs in the form of sugars causing metabolic syndrome disorders characteristic of the SAD or standard American diet, e.g. diseases of civilization.
Today industrial mining uses special tungsten carbide blade tipped blade bucket wheels to cut through rock & earth to the point of making large scale water & air pollution that have major effects on nature & on degrading ecosystems & air & water quality, mostly because of the scale of production required to provide minerals, materials, water, goods & energy to 8-9 billion people alive at the same time (human overpopulation) with no historical parallel to draw on. We are literally cutting our way through history as we go forward, moment by moment as Human people on Earth. People are also all, making it up as they go, since no one has all the answers & no one is perfect. We are the product of our philosophies & understandings applied to the reality around us, via our brain & muscles & bones interacting with the environments of Earth.
What are you cutting with sharp edges? Ironically, words can cut deeper than blades, affecting a person's mind in ways that lasts a lifetime. Thats the entire goal of my blog & why I write it. I want to inspire other people to think about things, inspired by the ways that I understand the world emergently, concurrently, reflectively, at a time that's relevant for future readers, write & share about tops they can still relate too, like cutting instruments, knives, blades or swords, even if just hung on their walls as functional decorations.
Undoubtably blades will continue to have significant impacts on human civilization & society well into the distant future. I am sure future people will have better metal alloys & better ceramics, blades that are shaper that hold their edge longer, that are tougher & more resilient, with noble corrosion proof alloys, metalloids & ceramic construction that lasts as long as the device is intact; high technology cutting instruments that people much further in the future will study the same way archeologist's today study flint & obsidian blade flakes & tools from antiquity, that they dig up and analyze!
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