Tongs are among the oldest metalworking tools in existence, necessary from the moment humans began working with fire hot enough to be dangerous to bare hands, and they appear constantly in ancient, medieval, and early modern illustrations of forges, furnaces, and alchemical workshops without any single inventor or documented point of origin, much like the mortar and pestle and the sieve. The major sixteenth-century metallurgical treatises take tongs entirely for granted: Vannoccio Biringuccio's De la Pirotechnia of 1540 and Georgius Agricola's De Re Metallica of 1556, both painstaking in documenting furnaces, cupellation, and assaying procedure in careful technical detail, mention and illustrate tongs as ordinary workshop equipment rather than as anything requiring explanation, the clearest sign of just how basic and long-established the tool already was by then. That unremarkable, essential status has never changed. Crucible tongs, built on the identical long-arm, pivoting-jaw design, remain standard equipment today in chemistry laboratories, metal foundries, glassblowing studios, and jewelry workshops, doing precisely the job they have always done: letting a person move something dangerously hot without ever having to touch it.