The strange sound of your welding machine sparks into life as you send searing hot arcs of electricity beaming out from your fingertips like some super villain constructing his doomsday machine. The thought had occurred to you, building a thing of destruction and chaos instead of art and beauty, but you figured it would take too much time to try and blow up the world, better stick to destroying your garage. Gas metal arc welding (GMAW), sometimes referred to by its subtypes metal inert gas (MIG) welding or metal active gas (MAG) welding, is a welding process in which an electric arc is formed between a consumable wire electrode and the workpiece metal, which heats it, causing them to melt, and join. Originally developed for welding aluminum and other non-ferrous materials in the 1940s, it was soon applied to steels because it allowed for lower welding time compared to other welding processes. The cost of inert gas limited its use in steels until several years later, when the use of semi-inert gases such as carbon dioxide became common. The principles of gas metal arc welding began to be understood in the early 19th century, after Humphry Davy discovered the short pulsed electric arcs in 1800. Vasily Petrov independently produced the continuous electric arc in 1802. It was not until the 1880s that the technology became developed with the aim of industrial usage.
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