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from the answer-"cloudy"-try-again-later dept.
Why 536 was 'the worst year to be alive'
Ask medieval historian Michael McCormick what year was the worst to be alive, and he's got an answer: "536." Not 1349, when the Black Death wiped out half of Europe. Not 1918, when the flu killed 50 million to 100 million people, mostly young adults. But 536. In Europe, "It was the beginning of one of the worst periods to be alive, if not the worst year," says McCormick, a historian and archaeologist who chairs the Harvard University Initiative for the Science of the Human Past.
A mysterious fog plunged Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia into darkness, day and night—for 18 months. "For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year," wrote Byzantine historian Procopius. Temperatures in the summer of 536 fell 1.5°C to 2.5°C, initiating the coldest decade in the past 2300 years. Snow fell that summer in China; crops failed; people starved. The Irish chronicles record "a failure of bread from the years 536–539." Then, in 541, bubonic plague struck the Roman port of Pelusium, in Egypt. What came to be called the Plague of Justinian spread rapidly, wiping out one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire and hastening its collapse, McCormick says.
[...] At a workshop at Harvard this week, [a team led by McCormick and glaciologist Paul Mayewski at the Climate Change Institute of The University of Maine (UM) in Orono] reported that a cataclysmic volcanic eruption in Iceland spewed ash across the Northern Hemisphere early in 536. Two other massive eruptions followed, in 540 and 547. The repeated blows, followed by plague, plunged Europe into economic stagnation that lasted until 640, when another signal in the ice—a spike in airborne lead—marks a resurgence of silver mining, as the team reports in Antiquity this week.
Alpine ice-core evidence for the transformation of the European monetary system, AD 640–670 (open, DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2018.110) (DX)
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday December 06 2018, @12:23AM (4 children)
Arik, mild steel completely melts well before clay gets hot enough to make ceramics. The technology not only existed, it had been around longer than iron had been anything but an interesting rock.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday December 06 2018, @12:44AM (3 children)
The melting point of *iron is about 2700 degrees, realistically to get good consistent results without taking a very long time you're looking at roughly 3k degrees. You need what's called a blast furnace, they were developed in the lowlands in the late 15th century.
The temperature at which clay is fired to produce fine ceramics is about 1k degrees.
That's nowhere near enough to melt iron, which is what you have to do if you want to produce a pure material.
It IS high enough to make iron 'blooms' however - and that's exactly how people before the 15th century produced raw materials for ironworking. In a bloomery, the ore is brought to just over 1k degrees. Not enough to melt the iron itself, at most it becomes a little spongy at that temperature - but it's hot enough to melt (or even sublimate) many of the contaminants, and it can be purified further by hammering it while at temperature, forcing slag out of the mix, although this is an extremely expensive process in terms of man hours, fuel etc. The result is not pure iron, it's not steel either, but with some luck it can be close enough to make a good sword out of.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday December 06 2018, @04:18AM (2 children)
Blah, you are correct. Mental units conversion error, or rather lack of conversion. Either way, a blast furnace isn't remotely high tech. Rather labor intensive to make back then (constant airflow of the necessary amount would have to be water or manually powered, for instance) but not exactly something that's going to stump anyone.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday December 06 2018, @07:12AM (1 child)
Yes.
"Rather labor intensive to make back then (constant airflow of the necessary amount would have to be water or manually powered, for instance) but not exactly something that's going to stump anyone."
The simple fact that people worked iron for thousands of years, and made bloomery iron since at least ca 3500 years ago, but the blast furnace didn't show up until the 15th century, suggests that you are underestimating the difficulty.
In historical fact, it was done with waterwheels. "Manual" ventilation was used from the very beginning - it is not sufficient.
*oh yeah, there are a few minor exceptions - the Chinese apparently managed to melt a little iron much earlier, but not much, and we don't know exactly how they did it. We just have a few bits of cast iron to prove they somehow pulled it off. The Indians produced 'crucible steel' for several centuries as well, it wasn't true steel, it wasn't homogeneous, and they weren't melting iron, but it was extra close on all counts and traded widely. It also seems to have relied on ore as much as technique, and gone away when the ore deposit was exhausted (after being worked for ~2k years continuously.)
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday December 06 2018, @02:01PM
Nah. It's just that genius isn't common or predictable. By that I mean thinking outside what is necessary for your survival/comfort has never been humanity's strong suit. Already knowing most everything they would have to have a lightblub moment and figure out would mean you'd likely see the industrial revolution happening in the 600s instead of over a thousand years later.
I wasn't talking ventilation though, I was talking compression. Pretty damned ghetto and hacky compression by today's standards but enough to make a system that would last long enough to make a better system. That's the key here. It's not like you have to build a modern furnace with only the tools at hand; you only have to build the tools you need to make better tools and keep doing so until you're satisfied.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.