the.com/arc welder
A machine that turns electricity into a tiny controlled lightning bolt for melting metal.
means A device that uses an electric current to create an intense arc of heat between an electrode and metal, melting and fusing the metal together as it cools.
from From 'arc' — the sustained luminous discharge of electricity jumping a gap, a term from 19th-century physics describing the curved, glowing path current traces through air (think carbon-arc lamps, the showy street lighting that preceded the lightbulb's takeover) — plus 'welder,' from 'weld,' itself a variant of 'well' in the old sense of boiling or surging up, describing metal heated until it fuses. Arc welding as a practical technique emerged in the late 1800s and early 1900s as inventors figured out how to harness that arc's ferocious, localized heat — thousands of degrees in a point no bigger than a pencil tip — to join metal instead of just making it glow.
- temperature
- arc hits roughly 6500 degrees fahrenheit, hotter than the sun's surface
- eye hazard
- flash burn blinds you hours later without warning
- invented
- commercialized in the 1880s, predates the modern power grid
- the irony
- joins metal permanently by briefly melting it apart