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from the successive-refinements-add-up dept.
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
It isn’t an uncommon science fiction trope for our hero to be in a situation where there is no technology. Maybe she’s back in the past or on a faraway planet. The Professor from Gilligan’s Island comes to mind, too. I’d bet the average Hacakday reader could do pretty well in that kind of situation, but there’s one thing that’s often overlooked: materials. Sure, you can build a radio. But can you make wire? Or metal plates for a capacitor? Or a speaker? We tend to overlook how many abstractions we use when we build. Even turning trees into lumber isn’t a totally obvious process.
People are by their very nature always looking for ways to use the things around them. Even 300,000 years ago, people would find rocks and use them as tools. It wasn’t long before they found that some rocks could shape other rocks to form useful shapes like axes. But the age of engineered materials is much younger. Whether clay, metal, glass, or more obviously plastics, these materials are significantly more useful than rocks tied to sticks, but making them in the first place is an engineering story all on its own.
The first steps were using wood from trees, including bark and unusual wood like cork, and other plant materials. They used mud, too, and mudworking evolved into ceramics about 26,000 years ago. Pottery was high science in its day. The Corded Ware culture, who spread across Europe around 5,000 years ago, created pottery that they would decorate with rope while it was still wet. When fired, the rope would burn away and leave its imprint in the finished piece. Bone was another early structural element. People today sometimes mimic prehistoric pottery techniques, like the stone-age tech video below. [link]
When the first people stumbled into copper in its elemental form, around 7,500 years ago, people started to shape it into useful implements. About 500 years later, there is evidence people learned to melt copper to help with the shaping process. It would be another 1,000 years before craftsmen started melting copper and casting it. Copper is soft on its own, but by experimentation or accident someone figured out that adding arsenic to copper would make bronze, which was much harder. Even a half percent of arsenic can make a bronze that is 10% harder and stronger than elemental copper. Bump that two percent and the results are even better. Later bronze formulae would employ tin in place of the arsenic, but tin would have to wait for more advanced metallurgy. It took over, though, not because it is much better from a metallurgy standpoint, but smelting and casting arsenic is bad for your health.
[Editor's Note: The full story goes on to explain how and why we made various materials through history and nowadays too.]
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 23 2021, @10:59PM (6 children)
Mesopotamian civilization had two resources that could be obtained locally: mud and grass. No wood, stone, or metal. And they seem to have done alright.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 23 2021, @11:51PM (1 child)
that's why I always pack my ass full of mud and sticks every day.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 24 2021, @12:04AM
don't be such a stick in the mud.
(Score: 5, Informative) by captain normal on Friday December 24 2021, @12:21AM
F-
"Mesopotamian people invented many technologies including metal and copper-working, glass and lamp making, textile weaving, flood control, water storage, and irrigation. They were also one of the first Bronze Age societies in the world. They developed from copper, bronze, and gold on to iron. Palaces were decorated with hundreds of kilograms of these very expensive metals. Also, copper, bronze, and iron were used for armor as well as for different weapons such as swords, daggers, spears, and maces."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesopotamia [wikipedia.org]
"It is easier to fool someone than it is to convince them that they have been fooled" Mark Twain
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 25 2021, @02:08PM
A third resource: other people.
Something that become clear from the likes of "Primitive Technology" Youtuber, is /division of labor/ makes a lot of things possible. The guy there spends an inordinate amount of effort trying to do things from-scratch, which one example being the time his got some Iron Smelting done. By himself, doing things sequentially, it'd take him a year to get enough wrought iron for one axe head. But with a settlement of ~20 people with an organized process, there'd be a pound of (tradable!) iron produced every day just about.
(Score: 3, Funny) by driverless on Saturday December 25 2021, @02:09PM
So did the developers of a number of the Gnu utilities, but look what they created from it!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 25 2021, @06:47PM
asphalt. lots of asphalt.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 23 2021, @11:50PM (3 children)
the monkeys are out of the cage
the knife is out of it's sheath
the wineskins are full of skittles
I am not going to piss in my aquarium forever.
The five signs of insanity are: fuck, you, fuck, you, fucker
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by hendrikboom on Friday December 24 2021, @03:57AM (1 child)
I liked the first three lines of that, especially about the skittle-filled wineskins. Then you had to spoil it with the last two lines. Sounds like your poetical sensitivity is different from mine.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday December 24 2021, @04:07PM
Moral of that story - don't give them sharp tools or an army, or you might get more than bad poetry.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Friday December 24 2021, @06:53AM
And you still don't want to leave until the end of the movie.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 5, Informative) by Snotnose on Friday December 24 2021, @12:15AM
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39026990-how-to-invent-everything [goodreads.com]
Great book, even if you don't intend to rent a time travel pod.
I came. I saw. I forgot why I came.
(Score: 3, Informative) by mcgrew on Friday December 24 2021, @12:38AM (4 children)
Wikipedia: "Bronze is an alloy consisting primarily of copper, commonly with about 12–12.5% tin and often with the addition of other metals (such as aluminum, manganese, nickel or zinc) and sometimes non-metals or metalloids such as arsenic, phosphorus or silicon."
Bronze statues are alloys of copper and brass. I would guess that tin would have come about before the addition of brass or arsenic.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 4, Informative) by coolgopher on Friday December 24 2021, @02:01AM
From TFS:
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 24 2021, @03:43AM
> Bronze statues are alloys of copper and brass.
But brass is already an alloy, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brass [wikipedia.org]
> Brass is an alloy of copper and zinc, in proportions which can be varied to achieve varying mechanical, electrical, and chemical properties. It is a substitutional alloy: atoms of the two constituents may replace each other within the same crystal structure.
> Brass is similar to bronze, another alloy containing copper that uses tin instead of zinc.[2] Both bronze and brass also may include small proportions of a range of other elements including arsenic, lead, phosphorus, aluminum, manganese, and silicon. Historically, the distinction between the two alloys has been less consistent and clear, and modern practice in museums and archaeology increasingly avoids both terms for historical objects in favor of the more general "copper alloy".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 24 2021, @11:32AM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 24 2021, @05:32PM
Good point, lead added to make machining easier. But now, less lead in California!!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brass#Lead_content [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 24 2021, @01:38AM (3 children)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Stone [wikipedia.org]
The main character start from nothing and create electricity and radio and light bulbs, mainly with his knowledge of chemistry.
It reminds me of Jules Verne's novel "The Misterious Island" (L'Île mystérieuse), where engineer Smith do something along this:
«With the knowledge of the brilliant engineer Smith, the five are able to sustain themselves on the island, producing fire, pottery, bricks, nitroglycerin, iron, a simple electric telegraph, »
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mysterious_Island [wikipedia.org]
CYA
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday December 24 2021, @04:03AM (1 child)
The Mysterious Island was an enjoyable book.
(Score: 3, Funny) by mhajicek on Friday December 24 2021, @06:55AM
Until Gilligan showed up.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by driverless on Saturday December 25 2021, @02:07PM
There was a BBC TV series called Rough Science that did a lot of this stuff, e.g. take a bunch of scientists, drop them on a desert island, and get them to build a satellite phone to call for help using only seashells and bits of coral.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Friday December 24 2021, @11:05AM (1 child)
I constantly find myself amazed that the modern world works. The huge amount of infrastructure required to e.g. deliver electricity and network access to our homes is staggering, and it all has to play together well. It is an incredible feat by humanity just to be here typing this!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Friday December 24 2021, @09:43PM
Hear, hear. Even when you work in a technical field it is easy to forget about all the support networks you rely upon to do your job. And even when you have a technical understanding of systems it's common to hit upon those that you'd rather hire done instead of messing with it yourself; eg., sure, you may understand the principles of plumbing but do you really want to be the one that digs up and fixes your sewer main?
On the flip side, when you have troubleshot an iffy connection or two you run across somebody else's kludges that leave you scratching your head and give you a real appreciation for how rickety and error prone many aspects of our civilization are. About ten years ago I was helping my sister fix the foundation of her house. We had pulled the siding away at the corner thinking all we had to do was patch cracks on the foundation, but discovered that somebody had raised the house with a jack in the 40's and left it there. The structure had been sitting on that jack for 70 years.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Username on Friday December 24 2021, @03:06PM (1 child)
They had easy access to copper on the surface, once that was used up they mined down where they found it. If we ever have a global reset, like the surface gets wiped out and a few hundred in bunkers come out 1,000 years later when the radiation goes down, where are they going to get the resources? All iron on the surface rusted away, all copper is scattered around randomly, not concentrated in one spot on the surface. Everything buried. I'd assume they would only come out of the bunkers after everything inside stops functioning.
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Friday December 24 2021, @04:11PM
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 24 2021, @05:10PM
didn't even have arms and he did OK
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday December 24 2021, @09:32PM
I have been fascinated with this subject since I was a teenager, mainly because every time I wanted to do some project the cost and difficulty in acquiring prerequisites was prohibitive (in the days before the Internet and my own income streams); I always thought it would be better to start from absolute scratch so that you'd never be blocked from accomplishing your goal.
It's only recently that doing such a thing has seemed achievable. First, the know-how is readily available via the Internet. Second, the software to handle more advanced projects is freely available thanks to FOSS. Third, with additive manufacturing you can often print what you need, or at least a workable stand-in.
We talk about the latter two and more advanced content on the first a lot, but for the primitive leg of the technology ramp I'd recommend the Primitive technology [youtube.com] channel on YouTube. The original guy who started the topic doesn't talk, he just shows you how. The ingenuity using simple tools is infectious.
There are also several programs on cable now like Alone or Dual Survival or Survivorman, but they don't really go into depth on techniques and they don't really build the way the Primitive Technology guy builds later projects on top of earlier ones. For example, first he shows you how to make charcoal and then he shows you how to build a kiln and fire shells that he collects from forest brooks (snail shells and the like), then how to crush those and turn them into concrete. For people who can appreciate problem solving it's quite entertaining.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday December 25 2021, @06:49PM
https://www.haraldthesmith.com/iron-smelting/ [haraldthesmith.com]
Clearly Harald doesn't care about TLS but his site is pretty good WRT iron refining.
Gathering enough wood seems the hardest part although access to the correct type of clay is non-trivial.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 25 2021, @06:57PM
pretty sure all these described technologies also have a "secret sauce" and it's not just experience.
i think anyone who has tried to follow a normal cooking recipe will agree ...
one special one i think is pottery and from there porcelain (jar with lid, oh wonder!)
now this is just a assumption but methinks porcelain is special because the kaolin clay required to make it needs to stay wet thru the whole process until it can be fired.
so if you dig a hole and find kaolin clay, you cannot let it dry out. once it's dry without fireing it, it is ruined?
and ofc, the secret of making "hot" fires ... for above and iron etc. many a forest did bite the dust until enough strong stuff was "fired" for coal mining. and again wood. just generally lots of dead wood. really, human technological evolution is just a genocide of trees ...