Who Invented Welding? The Real History of Welding’s Inventors

In 1887, a Russian engineer and a Polish engineer walked into a US patent office with drawings for a machine that fused metal with lightning — and they named it after a Greek god. The tool they patented helped turn a shipyard welder in 1943 into one of the most important workers of the 20th century. But the honest answer to “who invented welding” starts roughly 4,000 years earlier than that, in a blacksmith’s forge with no electricity in sight.

Who Invented Welding? The Short Answer (and Why It’s Complicated)

In 1887, a Russian engineer and a Polish engineer walked into a US patent office with drawings for a machine that fused metal with lightning. They named it after a Greek god of fire and blacksmithing. The tool they patented helped turn a shipyard welder in 1943 into one of the most important workers of the 20th century.

But the honest answer to “who invented welding” starts roughly 4,000 years earlier than that, in a blacksmith’s forge with no electricity in sight.

The Plain-Language Answer

Nobody invented welding. Not one person, not on one day. Welding is a family of techniques for joining metal using heat, pressure, or both, and that family grew in distinct eras, each with its own pioneers. Forge welding was already an established craft around 2000 BC. Chemical heat arrived in the 1800s. Electrical heat arrived later still, and then split into a dozen competing methods.

So if a teacher, client, or quiz app demands a single name, the defensible answer depends entirely on which welding process they mean. TWI’s history of welding timeline makes the same point: welding’s story is a sequence of breakthroughs, not a eureka moment.

Cheat Sheet: Name to Process

Keep this table handy. It’s the fastest way to turn a vague “who invented welding” question into a precise, citable answer.

Read down that list and the pattern is obvious: each name fixed a specific limitation left by the person before. That chain reaction is what the rest of this article follows.

Why This Matters When You’re Researching

If you’re hunting a homework answer, a blog citation, or a talking point for a presentation, the worst move is to grab the first confident-sounding name you find. Search results happily mix up the arc’s inventors with welding’s inventors, and they routinely credit World War II with starting welding, when welding actually helped win it. Today the industry draws on roughly 40 distinct processes, from stick welding to laser welding, and more than 700,000 workers in the United States are involved in welding or allied processes, according to NIOSH census data. That scale doesn’t come from one inventor’s bench. It comes from a 4,000-year relay.

It matters outside the classroom too. Choosing a process without understanding its origin often means choosing the wrong tool: whether you’re picking up a stinger for the first time or reading our guide to stick welding as a beginner, knowing why that process exists tells you where it excels and where it fails.

How This Article Is Built

We move in four acts, in the order the technology actually developed:

1. The ancient craft: forge welding in the Bronze Age and medieval Europe, and why it hit a hard ceiling.
2. The sparks: Humphry Davy and Vasily Petrov’s electric arc, acetylene and the oxy-fuel torch, and Elihu Thomson’s uncredited resistance welding.
3. The invention of arc welding: Benardos, Olszewski, Slavyanov, Coffin and Kjellberg, then the world wars that turned welding into infrastructure.
4. The modern era: TIG, MIG, plasma, laser and friction stir welding, plus the safety standards and career realities that come with them.

One useful reference point to hold onto: the electric arc was first demonstrated in 1800, but the first practical arc welding method didn’t arrive until 1881 — an 81-year gap between discovery and application. Welding’s history is full of ideas waiting on the rest of the world to catch up. The American Welding Society wasn’t formed until 1919, largely through the wartime shipbuilding effort in the United States, which tells you how long it took the industry to organise itself around what inventors had already built.

By the end of this article, you’ll be able to name the inventor of any major welding process, date it within a few years, and explain what problem that invention solved.

The First Welders: Forge Welding in the Bronze Age and the Ancient World

Picture a welder and you almost certainly picture an arc, a dark helmet, and a spray of sparks. That image is so dominant that most people are genuinely surprised to learn that welding is far older than electricity. Long before a battery existed, metalworkers were joining copper, bronze, gold and iron into single solid objects — and doing it with nothing but fire, a hammer and an eye for color.

This earliest joining method is called forge welding, and it is widely recognized as the oldest form of welding. Evidence of the practice reaches back into the Bronze Age, when artisans in the ancient Near East and the Mediterranean were already heating and hammering gold and copper into joined pieces. Sumerian and Egyptian metalwork shows the same principle at work: vessels, ornaments and tools built up from heated sections beaten together. When the Iron Age arrived, roughly around 1200 BC, the technique transferred almost unchanged to the new, harder metal. Indian metallurgy pushed it further, producing iron and early steels on a scale that would later feed the legendary patterned blades of the Middle East.

How Forge Welding Actually Works

The mechanics are refreshingly simple. The smith heats both pieces of metal in a charcoal fire until they reach a glowing yellow-white heat, close to the temperature where the surface would begin to burn. A flux — historically sand, or a borax-like compound — is sprinkled on the joint to melt into a glassy skin that keeps oxygen off the hot surface, because oxide scale is exactly what prevents two pieces from bonding. Then comes the hammer. The blows force the two clean, softened surfaces into such intimate contact that the atoms on one side begin to share with the other, and the pieces become one.

Notice what is absent: no filler rod, no shielding gas, no electrical energy. Heat and pressure do all the work, which makes the mechanism fundamentally different from arc welding, where metal is actually melted and fused in a pool.

The craft was not limited to simple butt joints. From roughly 300 BC onward, smiths discovered that forge welding multiple layers of iron and steel produced a material stronger and tougher than any single bar. Those Damascus-style pattern-welded blades were, in effect, the first composite materials — proof that controlled, repeated forge welding could engineer metal properties, not just connect shapes.

A Trade Europeans Documented for Centuries

By the Middle Ages, forge welding sat at the center of the European economy. Every town needed a smith to make horseshoes, nails, hinges, ploughshares, cart tyres and tools, and the skill was passed from master to apprentice over generations. When the Italian metallurgist Vanoccio Biringuccio published De la Pirotechnia in 1540, he described forge welding as an established, teachable metallurgical craft — centuries before any electric process existed. That book matters because it shows the technique was already standardized enough to write down and instruct.

Why Forge Welding Could Not Build the Modern World

For all its longevity, the method had hard ceilings:

• Hand-powered heat. Charcoal fires and bellows could not reliably reach or hold the temperatures an electric arc produces, and before 1800 no one had a way around that.
• Small, simple parts. Joints had to be hammered while hot, so only pieces a person could lift and beat on an anvil were practical.
• Skill-dependent quality. Too cold and the weld won’t take; too hot and the metal burns. There was no gauge, only experience.
• No filler, no versatility. Dissimilar metals, thin sheet and out-of-position joints were essentially out of reach.

The need was obvious to any growing industry: ships, railways and machines demanded joints that were faster to make, stronger on average, and possible in any position. For roughly 3,000 years the hammer and the forge were all anyone had, and the craft stayed essentially unchanged — until chemistry and electricity showed up.

The Spark: Humphry Davy, Vasily Petrov, and the Electric Arc (1800–1810)

Forge welding ran the world for three millennia, but it had a ceiling: metal heated only as fast as a charcoal fire allowed, shaped only as fast as a hammer swing. In the first decade of the 1800s, two men working independently in London and St. Petersburg stumbled onto something that burned hotter than any forge ever could. Neither of them welded anything. Nothing in modern welding would exist without what they found.

Humphry Davy’s Blinding Blue Light

In 1800, a young Cornish chemist named Sir Humphry Davy was playing with the newest toy in science: the voltaic pile, Alessandro Volta’s stack of alternating zinc and copper discs that produced the world’s first steady electric current. He had already used one of these batteries to isolate potassium and sodium, making him a star of the Royal Institution in London. Now he wanted to see what else electricity could do.

He connected a battery of about 250 pairs of discs to two rods of charcoal, touched the tips together, and drew them slightly apart. A blindingly brilliant bow of light leapt between the two carbon points, the negative one glowing white-hot and the positive tip burning away into vapor. The discharge curved upward in a smooth crescent, and that shape gave the phenomenon the name it still carries today: the electric arc. Davy published his results in 1801.

The shape is not mysterious. The gas between the electrodes has been ripped into a plasma state, hot gas rises, and the current path bows upward like a flame bending in still air. Once you see it, the name sticks.

Enter Vasily Petrov, the Man History Forgot

Two years later, on the other side of Europe, a Russian scientist named Vasily Vladimirovich Petrov was running parallel experiments with a massive 420-pair battery at the St. Petersburg Medical-Surgical Academy. In 1802, Petrov produced a continuous electric arc, not a brief flicker but a stable discharge he could sustain, and in 1803 he published a full account of his work. Petrov went further than Davy in one crucial way: he explicitly noted that the intense heat of the arc could be used to melt metals.

That single sentence, buried in an 1803 Russian volume that few Western scientists read, is arguably the first written proposal for arc welding. Petrov even experimented with arc light as an illumination source, anticipating the carbon-arc lamp by decades.

Around 1808 to 1810, Davy, completely unaware of Petrov’s published work, rediscovered and improved the continuous arc while experimenting with horizontally mounted carbon pencils. By then the scientific world was paying attention, and the arc was demonstrated publicly. For a while it was treated mainly as a curiosity and a potential light source. It would be the better part of a century before anyone seriously asked whether that bow of light could hold a ship together.

What an Arc Actually Is

Plainly: an arc is gas that has been electrified until it conducts. Separate two conductors carrying current and the gas in the gap ionizes, losing electrons to become plasma. That plasma conducts heat and electricity better than metal, and the arc between carbon or metal electrodes routinely runs in the range of several thousand degrees, hot enough to vaporize steel on contact.

If you have ever watched a stick or MIG welder strike an arc and thought “that looks like Davy’s bow, but sideways,” you were right. Every arc process in use today, stick, MIG, TIG, flux-cored, plasma arc, carbon arc gouging, is a direct descendant of that 1800 experiment. Our guide to electrodes in welding breaks down how the arc forms and sustains itself without the textbook fog.

Why Did It Take 80 Years?

This is the question that trips people up, and the answer is refreshingly unglamorous: the arc arrived ahead of the infrastructure.

• Batteries were expensive and weak. Voltaic piles cost a fortune, degraded fast, and produced modest current. Running an arc continuously was a laboratory luxury.
• Generators barely existed. Practical dynamos did not arrive until the 1860s and 1870s, with Werner von Siemens’ self-exciting dynamo of 1866 the landmark. Only then could you buy reliable, sustained current at industrial scale.
• There was no business case yet. Steam power and iron construction were booming, but nobody had articulated a commercial need to melt metal with electricity. The market had to mature before the invention could find a job.

For roughly eight decades the arc remained a physics demonstration and a novelty light source. As the detailed TWI history of welding documents, the transition from laboratory spark to shop-floor tool required one more generation of inventors, plus dynamos, plus a patent fight or two. You can trace the decade-by-decade progression in the American Welding Society’s Welding History records for the 1800s.

Remember the difference when someone claims welding was “invented” in a single year. The arc is the essential enabling discovery, dated cleanly to 1800–1802. Practical arc welding is a different story, and it belongs to entirely different names.

Acetylene, the Blowpipe, and the Birth of Gas Welding (1836–1900s)

While electrical pioneers were chasing the electric arc, a completely different branch of welding was growing out of chemistry. Instead of electricity, this path used fire itself: a gas burning hot enough to melt steel. It took roughly 65 years to get from a laboratory curiosity to a torch a worker could actually hold, and the route runs through a British chemist’s notebook, an accidental discovery in a North Carolina mill town, and one very stubborn problem — nobody could safely store the stuff.

Edmund Davy and a Gas Nobody Could Use

In 1836, Edmund Davy — cousin of Humphry Davy, the man who had produced the first brilliant electric arc — identified a new hydrocarbon gas while experimenting with potassium and carbon compounds. He had found acetylene. It was spectacularly flammable, but Edmund could not pin down its correct formula, and the formula was honestly the least of the practical problems. There was no safe container, no reliable delivery method, and no torch designed for it. A gas that burns brilliantly is just a hazard in a jar. For decades, acetylene remained a laboratory footnote.

Carbide, North Carolina, and an Accident Worth Millions

The unlock was calcium carbide, the solid raw material that produces acetylene on demand when it meets water. Commercial carbide production began in the early 1890s, and the American chapter belongs to Thomas “Carbide” Willson and James Turner Morehead, who were chasing cheap aluminum with an arc furnace in Spray, North Carolina. What they actually walked away with was a gray lump of carbide — and the yield numbers explain why anyone cared: about 2,000 pounds of carbide produced roughly 10,500 cubic feet of acetylene gas. Suddenly the hottest industrial flame known at the time could be generated from a sack of rock and a pail of water. The American Welding Society’s historical records place carbide commercialization and the maturing of gas equipment in the same window.

Why Two Gases Beat One

Burning acetylene in open air gives a dirty, oxygen-starved flame that heats slowly and contaminates the puddle. The fix arrived around 1900 with a proper torch that mixed oxygen with the fuel gas. With pure oxygen, acetylene burns at roughly 6,300°F (about 3,500°C) — hot enough to melt steel locally in a tight, controllable pool while leaving the surrounding plate untouched. That combination of temperature, direction and control is why TWI’s history of welding treats the oxyacetylene torch as the moment gas welding became an industrial process rather than a demonstration. Only at that point did gas welding and cutting become practical on a production scale.

What Gas Welding Did for Industry

The torch gave fabricators something electricity could not yet deliver: heat you could carry anywhere. That meant pipeline joins in open fields, broken castings repaired on a farm, thin sheet that arc heat would blow straight through, brazing and hardfacing work, and — perhaps most importantly — cutting. Oxy-fuel remains the standard for slicing thick steel today and is still the default wherever there is no wall outlet. Field crews running gas line welding jobs still lean on it for exactly that reason.

That last column is the whole story of the 20th century. Gas welding never disappeared — it simply ceded structural work to arc processes that deposited metal faster, deeper and with better atmospheric protection.

One practical carryover from this era: everything about oxy-fuel work is about handling stored energy and hot gas under pressure, so protective equipment and correct cylinder handling come first, long before the arc question ever arises.

Elihu Thomson and the 1877 Breakthrough Nobody Credits: Resistance Welding

Ask ten people who invented welding and you’ll hear Benardos, or Slavyanov, or maybe Humphry Davy. Almost nobody says Elihu Thomson. That’s a genuine oversight, because Thomson’s 1877 process was the first electrically powered welding method to work reliably in a factory — four years before practical arc welding appeared at all.

The Man Who Patented Welding Before Anyone Else

Elihu Thomson (1853–1937) was born in Manchester, England, and moved to the United States as a child. Trained as an electrical engineer, he became one of the era’s most prolific inventors, holding hundreds of patents across lighting, metering, transformers and metallurgy. Crucially, he wasn’t a lone tinkerer: his electrical company eventually merged into the enterprise that became General Electric, giving him a commercial platform most early welding pioneers never had.

One of those ideas was a way to join metal using electricity that didn’t involve an arc at all.

How Resistance Welding Actually Works

The physics is refreshingly simple. Squeeze two pieces of metal together and pass a heavy electrical current through them. The contact point between the pieces offers resistance to that current, and resistance generates heat — the same principle that makes a toaster element glow. Within a fraction of a second, the interface reaches forging temperature, and the machine’s pressure squeezes the softened metals into one piece. Then the current stops, and the part cools under pressure.

That’s the whole trick: current, time and electrode force. No filler metal, no shielding gas, no flux, no visible arc. Quality depends entirely on getting those three variables right, which is precisely why modern resistance welders are controlled by computers rather than by feel.

One Idea, Four Descendants

Thomson’s principle branched into a family of processes that still dominate manufacturing:

• Spot welding — two pointed electrodes clamp overlapping sheets and make one weld nugget at a time. The workhorse of sheet metal assembly.
• Seam welding — rotating wheel electrodes roll along a joint, producing an overlapping series of spots that forms a leak-tight seam, ideal for tanks and tubing.
• Projection welding — small raised bumps concentrate current at predetermined points, allowing several welds to fire at once.
• Flash-butt welding — parts are brought together with current until they flash and upset, used for rails, chains and large cross-sections.

If you want the underlying mechanics in more detail, our guide on how does a spot welder work walks through the physics and setup step by step.

The modern payoff is enormous. A typical vehicle body contains thousands of resistance spot welds, stitched together by automated robot arms in a matter of seconds per weld. Appliance shells, electronics enclosures and fuel tanks are built the same way. Resistance welding quietly became the most-produced weld type on Earth while arc welding got all the headlines.

Resistance Welding vs. Arc Welding: Where Each One Wins

That last row is the honest answer to why resistance welding never replaced arc welding. Because it fuses overlapping sheets under pressure, it simply cannot fill a butt joint in 20 mm plate or run a weld overhead on a bridge. Ship hulls, pipelines, pressure vessels and skyscraper beams all belong to the arc processes. The two technologies didn’t compete so much as divide the industrial world between them.

So when someone asks “who invented welding,” the most defensible full answer includes Thomson alongside the arc pioneers. He got there first, industrialised it first, and his process still runs in robotic cells worldwide. For a broader chronology of how these methods developed, see the American Welding Society’s welding history records on the 1800s.

Nikolay Benardos and Stanisław Olszewski: The Men Who Actually Invented Arc Welding (1881–1887)

Ask three people who invented welding and you will get three answers: Edison, Siemens, some unnamed medieval blacksmith. The paperwork tells a cleaner story. The first practical arc welding process was invented by Nikolay Benardos, a Russian engineer, together with Stanisław Olszewski, a Polish inventor, working together in the 1880s. Their story begins with someone else’s experiment.

Auguste de Meritens and the First Deliberate Arc Weld

In 1881, at the Cabot Laboratory in France, the engineer Auguste de Meritens was trying to join the lead plates of storage batteries. Hand-soldering them was slow and uneven, so he clamped a small carbon arc near the joint and let the heat fuse the plates. It worked. He filed French patent No. 146010 that same year.

Meritens had no grand plan for metal fabrication; he was solving a battery problem. But the experiment proved the point that mattered: an electric arc could be aimed at metal deliberately and used to fuse it, instead of just burning an electrode to pieces. Benardos, who worked as Meritens’s associate, saw the wider application immediately.

Elektrogefest: “Electric Hephaestus”

Benardos teamed up with Stanisław Olszewski, and between them the experiment became a system: a carbon electrode held in a clamping device, a workpiece completed into the circuit, and a controlled arc drawn along the joint. They named the process Elektrogefest — roughly “Electric Hephaestus,” after the Greek god of fire and the forge — which tells you exactly how the inventors saw it. They believed they had mechanised the blacksmith’s craft.

The Patent Trail, 1885–1887

Protection came in stages, because the partners filed country by country:

• Britain, No. 12984 (1885) — their first major filing outside France.
• France, No. 171596 (1885) — covering the process at home.
• Germany, Belgium and Sweden — additional patents securing the process across industrial Europe.
• United States, No. 363,320 (May 17, 1887) — the patent that fixed their priority in the American record, and the one you can still read today at Google Patents, US363320A.

Reading the US patent is worth ten summaries. The drawings show the electrode holder, the adjustable clamp and the arc geometry, and the claims describe working metals by the direct application of the electric current. This was not a lab curiosity; it was a buildable machine.

Why the Welds Were Brittle

The process had a serious defect. The arc ran open to the atmosphere, so the molten pool absorbed oxygen and nitrogen from the air. The resulting metal was porous and brittle, with cracked, unreliable joints, and Benardos knew it. He had no shielding gas and no coated electrode to fix the problem.

The power situation made things worse. There were no electrical grids in 1887. Pioneers had to run generators off steam engines, drag batteries to the work, or stay within a few feet of a power source. Arc welding was possible, but only where a steam-driven generator was already turning. In other words, the invention arrived about forty years before the infrastructure needed to use it comfortably.

Russian, Polish, or French?

This is why the credit gets tangled. Meritens was French and published first, so some histories name him. Benardos was Russian and held the core patents, so Russian sources name him. Olszewski was Polish, and Polish sources insist on his share of the partnership. All three have a claim, and none of them invented welding in general.

The clean, accurate answer: Meritens demonstrated the arc weld, and Nikolay Benardos with Stanisław Olszewski turned it into the first practical, patented arc welding process between 1881 and 1887. Carbon arc welding was the first commercially viable arc process, and its descendants are still in service under names like carbon arc gouging.

One problem remained open. A carbon rod joins metal but adds nothing to the joint. The next inventors had to ask a different question: what if the electrode itself were made of metal — metal that melts into the seam and fills it? That idea was still waiting in the wings, and it would change welding a second time.

From Carbon to Consumable Metal: Slavyanov, Coffin, and Kjellberg’s Coated Electrode (1888–1920)

Nikolay Benardos and Stanisław Olszewski proved an arc could fuse metal. What they could not do was produce a weld you would trust in a boiler, a bridge, or a pressure vessel. Early arc welds were brittle, full of pores, and inconsistently strong. Fixing that took three inventors working in three countries, and each one solved a single piece of the puzzle.

Slavyanov and the Birth of Filler Metal (around 1890)

The first breakthrough came from Russia. In the late 1880s and around 1890, engineer Nikolay Slavyanov patented a method that replaced Benardos’s non-consumable carbon rod with a consumable metal electrode whose composition matched the workpiece being welded. The rod did double duty: it carried the current, sustained the arc, and melted away into the joint as filler metal. That single decision created the concept welders still work with today — that you add metal to make a seam, rather than simply melting two edges together and hoping they bond.

Slavyanov protected the idea aggressively, patenting in Russia and then filing in England, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Belgium. The reach of those filings tells you how quickly European engineers recognized that the consumable electrode was the missing link. For a deeper look at how these early processes developed, see our overview of welding history timelines.

Charles L. Coffin Takes It to America (1892)

Across the Atlantic, American engineer C. L. Coffin received a US patent in 1892 for a bare metal electrode arc welding process. Coffin’s importance is commercial as much as technical: he pushed arc welding toward practical industrial equipment and commercially produced electrodes in the United States, giving American shops something they could actually buy and run. Bare electrodes worked, and they welded fast, but they left the molten pool fully exposed to the air — which is exactly why welds still came out porous and unpredictable.

Oscar Kjellberg’s Coated Electrode (1904)

The fix came from Sweden in 1904, when Oscar Kjellberg dipped bare iron wire into mixtures of carbonates and silicates and let the coating dry. That humble layer of material changed everything. In the same era, Kjellberg founded the company that became ESAB, one of the names still printed on welding consumables today.

Why shielding matters, physically: above roughly 2,500°C, molten steel behaves like a liquid sponge. It actively absorbs oxygen and nitrogen from the surrounding air, and when it solidifies, those gases either form bubbles (porosity) or react with the metal to form hard, brittle compounds. The result is a weld that looks fine and snaps under load. Kjellberg’s coating solves this by burning in the arc zone to produce a shielding gas blanket over the puddle, while simultaneously forming a layer of slag that protects the cooling metal and adds cleaning action. The coating also stiffens the arc and improves its stability, so a beginner can strike and hold it far more easily.

Bare electrode vs. coated electrode vs. flux-cored wire: A bare electrode is cheap and simple but offers no shielding, so it works only on clean metal with generous margins and produces porous welds. A coated (stick) electrode carries its own shielding and slag inside the flux covering, which is why SMAW remains the most portable, all-position process on earth. Modern flux-cored wire takes the same chemistry and wraps it inside a hollow metal tube, feeding continuously through a gun — combining Kjellberg’s shielding idea with the speed of mechanized welding. If you’re choosing between them, our guide to what electrodes are in welding — types, numbers, polarity, and how to choose walks through the classifications.

By the end of the 1920s, the American Welding Society had standardized welding symbols, a clear sign that arc welding had matured from an experimental technique into a formal engineering discipline. The chain reaction was complete: Slavyanov supplied the filler metal, Coffin industrialized it, and Kjellberg made it trustworthy. Everything from stick rods on today’s truck racks to the electrode development of the 1900s traces back to those three decisions.

The user wants me to rewrite the fragment to fit 560-840 words, keeping same heading, same facts, all links. Let me count current links:

1. https://www.twi-global.com/technical-knowledge/faqs/the-history-of-welding – TWI’s documented history of welding
2. https://weldgallery.com/pipe-welding-procedures-the-complete-guide-to-wps-positions-passes-inspection/ – pipe welding procedures
3. https://www.weldinghistory.org/whfolder/folder/wh1900.html – AWS historical records on the 1900s

Facts to keep:
– Early 1900s arc welding worked but not trusted, shop curiosity, patching castings
– WWI: US entered 1917, Emergency Fleet Corporation, Woodrow Wilson, United States Wartime Welding Committee of the Emergency Fleet Corporation, Dr. Comfort Avery Adams, Harvard electrical engineer
– Jan 1919 meeting founded AWS, constitution approved March 27, 1919
– First all-welded ship launched 1918, first all-welded building 1920
– WWII: 1941-1945, thousands of Liberty ships, welded hulls, eliminated hundreds of thousands of rivets, riveter team (heater, bucker-up, driver, rivet gun) vs single welder, record keel to launching under five days
– Women entered welding, “Wendy the Welder”
– John C. Lincoln, Samuel Wylie Miller Medal, variable-voltage welding machines, weld ductility, carbon arc automation
– Brittle fracture, Liberty ships cracked in two, riveted hulls as crack-stoppers, bad weld metal, notch-sensitive steel, square hull corners, cold water
– ANSI/AWS D1.1 Structural Welding Code
– Riveting survived in bridges, pressure vessels, aircraft

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Draft:

World Wars, Liberty Ships, and Skyscrapers: How Welding Replaced Rivets (1914–1950)

By the early 1900s, arc welding worked. That was not the same as trusting it. Shops treated welds as a curiosity, good for patching broken castings and little else. Then two world wars arrived and settled the argument almost overnight, because both were, at bottom, shipbuilding and logistics contests — and riveting a hull was slow, heavy, and brutally labor-hungry.

World War I: The Government Discovers Welding

When the United States entered World War I in 1917, the Emergency Fleet Corporation needed ships faster than riveted construction could deliver them. Torpedoed tonnage had to be replaced faster than it sank. Facing that math, President Woodrow Wilson established the United States Wartime Welding Committee of the Emergency Fleet Corporation, led by Dr. Comfort Avery Adams, a Harvard electrical engineer and one of the most respected technical educators of his day.

Adams understood something deeper than “welding is faster.” A welded hull has to be consistent, inspectable, and repeatable across hundreds of yards and thousands of workers. That meant standards: agreed procedures, agreed tests, agreed qualifications. In January 1919, Adams convened the meeting that founded the American Welding Society, and the AWS constitution was approved on March 27, 1919. It still writes the welding codes the modern industry runs on — a turning point TWI’s documented history of welding recognizes as decisive for the profession.

Two landmarks followed quickly. The first all-welded ship launched in 1918, and the first all-welded building went up in 1920. Neither was glamorous. Both proved welded joints could be structural, not just cosmetic.

World War II: The Liberty Ship Boom

If WWI made welding respectable, World War II made it indispensable. Between 1941 and 1945, the United States produced thousands of Liberty ships, standard-design cargo vessels with welded rather than riveted hulls. The results were dramatic:

• Welded hulls eliminated hundreds of thousands of rivets per ship, cutting weight.
• Welding replaced an entire riveting crew — heater, bucker-up, driver, and rivet gun — with one welder and a stinger.
• Shipyards assembled Liberty ships in days rather than weeks; the record from keel to launching was under five days.

There was a social revolution inside the booth too. With experienced tradesmen shipped overseas, huge numbers of women entered welding. The “Wendy the Welder” figure — real, heavily publicized, and drawn from actual Women’s War Work welding programs — became a symbol of wartime industry.

The trade also produced its own industrial statesmen. John C. Lincoln — no relation to the president — received the American Welding Society’s Samuel Wylie Miller Medal for his variable-voltage welding machines, his work on weld ductility, carbon arc automation, and his relentless push to expand welding’s industrial use. Companies built on his machines helped turn welding from a shipyard technique into a universal fabrication method.

The Hidden Price: Brittle Fracture and the Birth of Modern Codes

Welding did not win on speed alone, and the victory was not painless. Some Liberty ships developed cracked hulls, and a few famously broke completely in two in cold North Atlantic water. The cause was brittle fracture: welded hulls formed continuous structures that could propagate a crack over great distances, where riveted hulls acted as mechanical crack-stoppers. Bad weld metal, notch-sensitive steel plates, square hull corners, and cold water all contributed.

The industry’s response is why modern welders carry codebooks. Testing and standards work — much of it later codified in documents like ANSI/AWS D1.1, the Structural Welding Code — evolved directly from these failures. If you have ever read a welding procedure specification, passed a visual inspection, or looked up acceptance criteria for undercut, you are using tools created because wartime welds broke and people needed to know why.

For a deeper dive into how those code requirements translate to real joints and inspections, see our guide to pipe welding procedures, WPS requirements, positions, passes, and inspection.

From Wartime Necessity to Today’s Job Market

The consequences run straight to the present. Wartime welding created the certification infrastructure, the inspection culture, and the training pipelines that define the modern trade, along with a demand curve that never came back down. After 1945, welding carried into skyscraper construction, pipeline networks, automotive body lines, power plants, and every heavy fabrication shop on earth. Today’s welders are the professional grandchildren of the Liberty ship yards, owing their codebooks, their qualifications, and much of their career stability to the frantic, imperfect, history-making production of 1918 to 1945.

For more on the arc from the first arcs to modern practice, the American Welding Society’s historical records on the 1900s are an excellent primary source.

Let me count words. I’ll estimate.

Paragraph 1: “By the early 1900s, arc welding worked. That was not the same as trusting it. Shops treated welds as a curiosity, good for patching broken castings and little else. Then two world wars arrived and settled the argument almost overnight, because both were, at bottom, shipbuilding and logistics contests — and riveting a hull was slow, heavy, and brutally labor-hungry.” ~62 words.

H3 heading: ~8 words.

P: “When the United States entered World War I in 1917, the Emergency Fleet Corporation needed ships faster than riveted construction could deliver them. Torpedoed tonnage had to be replaced faster than it sank. Facing that math, President Woodrow Wilson established the United States Wartime Welding Committee of the Emergency Fleet Corporation, led by Dr. Comfort Avery Adams, a Harvard electrical engineer and one of the most respected technical educators of his day.” ~74 words.

P: “Adams understood something deeper than “welding is faster.” A welded hull has to be consistent, inspectable, and repeatable across hundreds of yards and thousands of workers. That meant standards: agreed procedures, agreed tests, agreed qualifications. In January 1919, Adams convened the meeting that founded the American Welding Society, and the AWS constitution was approved on March 27, 1919. It still writes the welding codes the modern industry runs on — a turning point TWI’s documented history of welding recognizes as decisive for the profession.” ~85 words.

P: “Two landmarks followed quickly. The first all-welded ship launched in 1918, and the first all-welded building went up in 1920. Neither was glamorous. Both proved welded joints could be structural, not just cosmetic.” ~37 words.

H3: ~7 words.

P: “If WWI made welding respectable, World War II made it indispensable. Between 1941 and 1945, the United States produced thousands of Liberty ships, standard-design cargo vessels with welded rather than riveted hulls. The results were dramatic:” ~36 words.

List: ~55 words.

P: “There was a social revolution inside the booth too. With experienced tradesmen shipped overseas, huge numbers of women entered welding. The “Wendy the Welder” figure — real, heavily publicized, and drawn from actual Women’s War Work welding programs — became a symbol of wartime industry.” ~44 words.

Callout: ~55 words.

P Lincoln: “The trade also produced its own industrial statesmen. John C. Lincoln — no relation to the president — received the American Welding Society’s Samuel Wylie Miller Medal for his variable-voltage welding machines, his work on weld ductility, carbon arc automation, and his relentless push to expand welding’s industrial use. Companies built on his machines helped turn welding from a shipyard technique into a universal fabrication method.” ~64 words.

H3: ~12 words.

P brittle: “Welding did not win on speed alone, and the victory was not painless. Some Liberty ships developed cracked hulls, and a few famously broke completely in two in cold North Atlantic water. The cause was brittle fracture: welded hulls formed continuous structures that could propagate a crack over great distances, where riveted hulls acted as mechanical crack-stoppers. Bad weld metal, notch-sensitive steel plates, square hull corners, and cold water all contributed.” ~70 words.

P codes: “The industry’s response is why modern welders carry codebooks. Testing and standards work — much of it later codified in documents like ANSI/AWS D1.1, the Structural Welding Code — evolved directly from these failures. If you have ever read a welding procedure specification, passed a visual inspection, or looked up acceptance criteria for undercut, you are using tools created because wartime welds broke and people needed to know why.” ~70 words.

P link: “For a deeper dive into how those code requirements translate to real joints and inspections, see our guide to pipe welding procedures, WPS requirements, positions, passes, and inspection.” ~29 words.

Callout: ~55 words.

H3: ~9 words.

P: “The consequences run straight to the present. Wartime welding created the certification infrastructure, the inspection culture, and the training pipelines that define the modern trade, along with a demand curve that never came back down. After 1945, welding carried into skyscraper construction, pipeline networks, automotive body lines, power plants, and every heavy fabrication shop on earth. Today’s welders are the professional grandchildren of the Liberty ship yards, owing their codebooks, their qualifications, and much of their career stability to the frantic, imperfect, history-making production of 1918 to 1945.” ~90 words.

P: “For more on the arc from the first arcs to modern practice, the American Welding Society’s historical records on the 1900s are an excellent primary source.” ~25 words.

Total estimate: 62+8+74+85+37+7+36+55+44+55+64+12+70+70+29+55+9+90+25 = let’s sum.

62+8=70
70+74=144
144+85=229
229+37=266
266+7=273
273+36=309
309+55=364
364+44=408
408+55=463
463+64=527
527+12=539
539+70=609
609+70=679
679+29=708
708+55=763
763+9=772
772+90=862
862+25=887

Hmm, that’s 887 words, over 840. Need to trim ~50-80 words. Note headings count as words? Typically yes-ish. Let me cut some.

Trim areas: the Lincoln paragraph (64), the final paragraph (90). Also could trim the callouts.

Let me reduce final paragraph and others.

Actually let me cut maybe 60 words.

Edit final paragraph: “The consequences run straight to the present. Wartime welding created the certification infrastructure, the inspection culture, and the training pipelines that define the modern trade — plus a demand curve that never came back down. After 1945, welding carried into skyscraper construction, pipeline networks, automotive body lines, and power plants. Today’s welders are the professional grandchildren of the Liberty ship yards.” ~58 words. Saves ~32.

Trim brittle paragraph slightly. “Welding did not win on speed alone. Some Liberty ships developed cracked hulls, and a few famously broke completely in two in cold North Atlantic water. The cause was brittle fracture: welded hulls formed continuous structures that could propagate a crack over great distances, while riveted hulls acted as mechanical crack-stoppers. Bad weld metal, notch-sensitive steel plates, square hull corners, and cold water all contributed.” ~62 words. Saves 8.

Trim Lincoln: “The trade also produced industrial statesmen. John C. Lincoln — no relation to the president — received the American Welding Society’s Samuel Wylie Miller Medal for his variable-voltage welding machines, his work on weld ductility, carbon arc automation, and his push to expand welding’s industrial use. Machines like his helped turn welding from a shipyard technique into a universal fabrication method.” ~58 words. Saves 6.

That’s about 46 saved, bringing to ~841. Need a bit more. Let me trim the first code paragraph or callout.

Trim callout 2: “Riveting did not vanish overnight. It survived for decades in bridges, pressure vessels, and aircraft, and riveted joints remain common today. But for large steel structures built after 1945, welding was the default — and the reason traces back to wartime production pressure.” ~43 words. Saves 12. Total ~829.

Good, ~829 words, within range. Let me also double-check the count is safely above 560, yes.

Actually let me be a bit more careful; my estimates could be off. The range is 560-840, and I’m around 820-830, which is fine but close to max. Let me trim a bit more to be safe, target ~790.

Trim first paragraph: “By the early 1900s, arc welding worked. That was not the same as trusting it. Shops treated welds as a curiosity, good for patching broken castings. Then two world wars arrived and settled the argument almost overnight, because both were shipbuilding and logistics contests — and riveting a hull was slow, heavy, and brutally labor-hungry.” ~55 words. Saves 7.

Trim the “two landmarks” paragraph merge? Keep.

Trim WWI second para: “Adams understood something deeper than “welding is faster.” A welded hull has to be consistent, inspectable, and repeatable across hundreds of yards and thousands of workers. That meant standards: agreed procedures, tests, and qualifications. In January 1919, Adams convened the meeting that founded the American Welding Society, whose constitution was approved on March 27, 1919. It still writes the welding codes the modern industry runs on — a turning point TWI’s documented history of welding recognizes as decisive.” ~75 words. Saves ~10.

Total saved ~29 more, landing ~795.

Let me finalize. Also fix heading to correct one (remove the joke and duplicate).

Let me write the final version and count once more mentally… I’ll trust ~790-810.

One more check: keep “Harvard electrical engineer” fact. Yes. Keep “one of the most respected technical educators of his day” — I could keep or trim. Keep for accuracy of facts? It’s a descriptive fact. I’ll keep it to be safe but it costs words. Actually I’m within range, keep it.

Let me settle final.

Final draft below.

World Wars, Liberty Ships, and Skyscrapers: How Welding Replaced Rivets (1914–1950)

By the early 1900s, arc welding worked. That was not the same as trusting it. Shops treated welds as a curiosity, good for patching broken castings. Then two world wars arrived and settled the argument almost overnight, because both were shipbuilding and logistics contests — and riveting a hull was slow, heavy, and brutally labor-hungry.

World War I: The Government Discovers Welding

When the United States entered World War I in 1917, the Emergency Fleet Corporation needed ships faster than riveted construction could deliver them. Torpedoed tonnage had to be replaced faster than it sank. Facing that math, President Woodrow Wilson established the United States Wartime Welding Committee of the Emergency Fleet Corporation, led by Dr. Comfort Avery Adams, a Harvard electrical engineer and one of the most respected technical educators of his day.

Adams understood something deeper than “welding is faster.” A welded hull has to be consistent, inspectable, and repeatable across hundreds of yards and thousands of workers. That meant standards: agreed procedures, tests, and qualifications. In January 1919, Adams convened the meeting that founded the American Welding Society, whose constitution was approved on March 27, 1919. It still writes the welding codes the modern industry runs on — a turning point TWI’s documented history of welding recognizes as decisive for the profession.

Two landmarks followed quickly. The first all-welded ship launched in 1918, and the first all-welded building went up in 1920. Both proved welded joints could be structural, not just cosmetic.

World War II: The Liberty Ship Boom

If WWI made welding respectable, World War II made it indispensable. Between 1941 and 1945, the United States produced thousands of Liberty ships, standard-design cargo vessels with welded rather than riveted hulls. The results were dramatic:

• Welded hulls eliminated hundreds of thousands of rivets per ship, cutting weight.
• Welding replaced an entire riveting crew — heater, bucker-up, driver, and rivet gun — with one welder and a stinger.
• Shipyards assembled Liberty ships in days rather than weeks; the record from keel to launching was under five days.

There was a social revolution inside the booth too. With experienced tradesmen shipped overseas, huge numbers of women entered welding. The “Wendy the Welder” figure — real, heavily publicized, and drawn from actual Women’s War Work welding programs — became a symbol of wartime industry.

The trade also produced industrial statesmen. John C. Lincoln — no relation to the president — received the American Welding Society’s Samuel Wylie Miller Medal for his variable-voltage welding machines, his work on weld ductility, carbon arc automation, and his push to expand welding’s industrial use. Machines like his helped turn welding from a shipyard technique into a universal fabrication method.

The Hidden Price: Brittle Fracture and the Birth of Modern Codes

Welding did not win on speed alone. Some Liberty ships developed cracked hulls, and a few famously broke completely in two in cold North Atlantic water. The cause was brittle fracture: welded hulls formed continuous structures that could propagate a crack over great distances, while riveted hulls acted as mechanical crack-stoppers. Bad weld metal, notch-sensitive steel plates, square hull corners, and cold water all contributed.

The industry’s response is why modern welders carry codebooks. Testing and standards work — much of it later codified in documents like ANSI/AWS D1.1, the Structural Welding Code — evolved directly from these failures. If you have ever read a welding procedure specification, passed a visual inspection, or looked up acceptance criteria for undercut, you are using tools created because wartime welds broke and people needed to know why.

For a deeper dive into how those code requirements translate to real joints and inspections, see our guide to pipe welding procedures, WPS requirements, positions, passes, and inspection.

From Wartime Necessity to Today’s Job Market

The consequences run straight to the present. Wartime welding created the certification infrastructure, the inspection culture, and the training pipelines that define the modern trade — plus a demand curve that never came back down. After 1945, welding carried into skyscraper construction, pipeline networks, automotive body lines, and power plants. Today’s welders are the professional grandchildren of the Liberty ship yards.

For more on the arc from the first arcs to modern practice, the American Welding Society’s historical records on the 1900s are an excellent primary source.

TIG, MIG, Plasma, Laser, and Friction Stir: The Modern Era of Welding (1941–Today)

By the time the Second World War began, welding had a century of history but few processes suited to the materials modern industry demanded. Aircraft builders needed to join aluminum and magnesium skins without ruining them. Shipyards needed speed. Factories wanted a machine that could lay bead all day without stopping to change rods. Between 1941 and today, a wave of invention answered all of it, producing essentially the processes you will find in any shop, yard, or garage now.

Russell Meredith and the Heliarc Revolution

Aluminum and magnesium are light, strong, and miserable to weld with the stick electrodes of the day: the molten pool oxidizes almost instantly, and the result is porous, brittle, and useless in an airframe. At Northrop Aircraft in Los Angeles, engineer Russell Meredith developed gas tungsten arc welding in the early 1940s, patenting the technique that became known as heliarc welding because helium shielded the weld zone from air.

The trick was brilliant in its simplicity: a non-consumable tungsten electrode strikes the arc, wrapped in inert gas. Filler is added by hand, so the welder controls heat input and puddle size with unusual precision. That is why TIG remains the choice for aerospace aluminum, food-grade stainless piping, and anything where the weld must match the base metal. Our complete guide to TIG welding sheet metal covers settings, technique, and the mistakes beginners keep making.

Battelle and the Birth of MIG

The companion breakthrough was continuous wire. At the Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio, researchers developed gas metal arc welding, publicly introduced in 1948. Instead of a stick electrode you stop and replace every few inches, MIG feeds thin consumable wire continuously through the torch under shielding gas. Deposition rates made stick welding look slow, cleanup was minimal, and a relatively inexperienced operator could learn it in days rather than months.

MIG took over high-production steel work almost immediately. It remains the backbone of automotive assembly, fabrication, and structural steel, and is usually the first process a beginner learns. Our step-by-step MIG setup guide covers the practical side.

Plasma, Electron Beam, Laser, and Friction Stir

The invention wave did not stop. Plasma arc welding arrived in the 1950s, constricting the arc through a small nozzle to produce a hotter, more focused jet than a free arc. Later that decade, electron beam welding fired a stream of electrons under vacuum for deep, narrow, low-distortion joints in critical aerospace and nuclear parts. Commercial laser welding followed in the 1960s and is now ubiquitous in vehicle body lines and electronics.

The newest landmark is arguably the strangest: friction stir welding, invented in 1991 at TWI in the United Kingdom. No arc, no melting, no fumes. A rotating tool generates friction heat, softens the metal, and mechanically stirs the two pieces together in the solid state. It now sees heavy use in aluminum shipbuilding and railcar shells, where fusion welding would distort panels.

The Safety Bill Nobody Sent With the Inventions

Every fusion process that melts metal also vaporizes it, and welding fume is a cocktail of metal oxides, silicates, and sometimes carcinogens such as hexavalent chromium from stainless steel. The data is sobering: NIOSH reports welders have roughly a 40% increase in relative risk of lung cancer (CDC/NIOSH), and estimates metal fume fever strikes between 1,500 and 2,500 US workers annually, with some estimates suggesting 30–40% of welders experience it once in a career (NIOSH engineering controls).

Regulation caught up slowly but meaningfully. OSHA sets the permissible exposure limit for welding fume from iron, mild steel, or aluminum at 5 mg/m³ as an 8-hour time-weighted average in the breathing zone (OSHA welding, cutting, and brazing standards). That limit is met with local exhaust ventilation, fume-extraction torches, powered air-purifying helmets, and the practices set out in ANSI Z49.1. The modern complete guide to welding PPE covers respiratory protection alongside arc-rated clothing.

The modern era in one line: seven decades of process invention, each answering a specific wartime or industrial problem, followed by a slower reckoning with what vaporized metal does to the people breathing it. Next, what it all adds up to when you decide what to weld, how to learn it, and whether to make a career of it.

Common Myths, Costly Mistakes, and What Welding’s History Means for You Today

You now know the real story. Before you close the tab, let’s clear out five myths that refuse to die, name the research and buying mistakes that cost people time and money, and turn this history into decisions you can actually use.

Five Welding Myths That Won’t Retire

• Myth: One person invented welding. As you’ve seen, welding has no single parent. Forge welders, Humphry and Edmund Davy, Elihu Thomson, Benardos and Olszewski, Slavyanov, Kjellberg, Meredith and the Battelle team each owned a chapter. Anyone presenting one name is selling a headline, not history.
• Myth: Welding began in World War II. Welding was already a mature trade by 1918, when the first all-welded ship launched. WWII scaled it enormously; it did not invent it.
• Myth: Humphry Davy invented welding. Davy, with Vasily Petrov, invented the electric arc in the 1800s. Welding was an application that waited 70-plus years for generators, electrodes and a business case.
• Myth: Carbon arc welding is dead. It survives as carbon arc gouging and related metal-removal work, where the arc’s ferocity is a feature rather than a flaw.
• Myth: Newer automatically beats older. Stick welding is older than MIG, yet it remains the field standard for structural work in wind, position and dirt because nothing else is as forgiving or portable.

The Four Mistakes That Cost Time, Money and Good Welds

1. Trusting unsourced timelines. A surprising number of welding infographics recycle errors. If a date has no patent number, archive or institution behind it, treat it as folklore. TWI’s history of welding and the American Welding Society’s historical records are the anchors worth trusting.
2. Confusing brazing and soldering with welding. Brazing and soldering use a filler that melts below the base metal’s melting point, so the base metals never truly fuse. That’s why a brazed joint behaves differently under heat and load. Related confusion: choosing the wrong electrode because the job was never correctly categorized in the first place.
3. Ignoring shielding requirements. Liquid weld metal is a sponge for oxygen and nitrogen. Any process that skips shielding gas or flux trades a visible problem for a hidden one: porosity and brittle welds that fail without warning. Start with MIG shielding and safety basics before you strike an arc.
4. Assuming processes are interchangeable. A welder that’s perfect for one job can be wrong for the next. The Industrial Revolution-era rule still governs: process choice follows material thickness, joint type, position, volume and code requirements, never age or novelty.

Process Selection Cheat Sheet

Is Welding a Good Career? The Real Numbers

Welders, cutters, solderers and brazers number in the hundreds of thousands in the United States, and NIOSH counts over 700,000 workers exposed through welding and allied processes. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics projects steady annual openings as experienced workers retire or move on, and median pay sits in the low $50,000s before overtime, certifications and specialty work push it higher. The catch: modern protection, including proper PPE and fume extraction, is what keeps a long career possible in the first place.

Welding has dozens of parents and no single birth certificate. The next chapter is already being written by robotics and additive manufacturing, where a weld bead and a 3D-printed layer are the same idea wearing different clothes. If you strike an arc this week, you’re not holding a tool. You’re holding four thousand years of accumulated answers to one stubborn question: how do we join metal for keeps?

Frequently Asked Questions

Who invented welding?

There is no single inventor, but the person most often credited with inventing modern arc welding is Nikolay Benardos, who with Stanisław Olszewski developed carbon arc welding in 1881 and patented it as ‘Elektrogefest’. Forge welding, the oldest form of welding, has no known inventor at all — it emerged in the Bronze Age around 2000 BC.

Did Humphry Davy invent welding?

No. Humphry Davy discovered and demonstrated the electric arc in 1800, but he never used it to weld metal commercially. He invented the heat source, not the joining process — the arc was used as a light source for roughly 80 years before anyone welded with it.

Who invented resistance welding?

Resistance welding was invented in 1877 by Elihu Thomson, the British-born American electrical engineer who later co-founded a company that merged into General Electric. It was the first electrically powered industrial joining process and remains the backbone of automotive spot welding.

What is the oldest type of welding?

Forge welding is the oldest type, dating back roughly 4,000 years to about 2000 BC. Blacksmiths joined copper, bronze and iron by heating metal to forging temperature and hammering the surfaces together under pressure — no electricity or filler metal required.

When was the first welding machine invented?

The first practical welding machine is generally tied to the 1881–1887 patents of Benardos and Olszewski for carbon arc welding apparatus, which included an early electrode holder. Their process required a generator driven by a steam engine because reliable electrical grids did not yet exist.

Who invented the welding electrode?

The consumable metal electrode was pioneered by Nikolay Slavyanov in the late 1880s, while the coated electrode — which shields the molten weld with flux — was invented by Oscar Kjellberg of Sweden around 1904. Kjellberg’s flux coating solved the brittleness and porosity problems that plagued the earliest arc welds.

Was welding invented during World War II?

No, though WWII massively accelerated it. The first all-welded ship launched in 1918 and the first all-welded building appeared in 1920, and the American Welding Society was founded in 1919. The war simply industrialized welding by putting it into thousands of shipyards at once.

Who invented TIG and MIG welding?

TIG (gas tungsten arc) welding was developed during WWII for aircraft metals and patented by Russell Meredith in the early 1940s. MIG (gas metal arc) welding was developed in 1948 at the Battelle Memorial Institute, which introduced continuous wire feed and much higher deposition rates.

Why did it take so long between discovering the electric arc and using it to weld?

Davy demonstrated the arc in 1800, but the first practical arc welding arrived in 1881 — an 81-year gap. Powerful, affordable electricity was unavailable, early batteries could not sustain an arc for long, and no industry had a strong commercial reason to fuse metal electrically until the electrical and shipbuilding booms of the late 1800s.