© Owen Pietrokowsky and Materials Means: Science and Technology Blog, 2014.
Email Owen at opietro@ yahoo dot com
(Inspired by an LBL thesis on soldering)
To resourceful experimentalists, engineers, and hobbyists it’s a familiar ritual: clear space in a cramped laboratory, move a stool up to a makeshift workbench — appropriate any available dining room space for hardware assembly.
Next, arrange your tools. Unroll a schematic. Plug in a soldering iron, and clip wire from a spool of solder.
For most electronic mavens these steps are second nature. Holding a piece of solder in your left hand and your iron in your right, dab and whet the iron. In short order, a wisp of evaporated resin rises when cold solder contacts a hot iron.
Now you’re ready. Position a circuit board just right, and place your iron on a chip lead for a few seconds while feeding wire to that spot. Metallurgical alchemy transforms a dull malleable solid into silvery liquidus bead. Capillary action quickly pulls liquid solder simultaneously up a device lead and down into its board pad. Done. A chip lead is now mechanically and electrically joined to its board. The average electronics/computer hardware project consists of scores and even hundreds of these ritual binding acts. Under every piece of circuitry is the deft hand of metallurgical magic.
Materials Means: Science and Technology Blog 
The wonder of the first soldering experience deftly captured