CAW could not have been created if not for the discovery of the electric arc by Sir Humphry Davy in 1800, later repeated independently by a Russian physicist Vasily Vladimirovich Petrov in 1802. Petrov studied the electric arc and proposed its possible uses, includingwelding.
The inventors of carbon-arc welding were Nikolay Benardos and Stanisław Olszewski, who developed this method in 1881 and patented it later under the name Elektrogefest ("Electric Hephaestus")
