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Building a Telegraph Using Only Stone Age Materials
MMBK writes "It's the ultimate salvagepunk experiment, building a telegraph out of things found in the woods. From the article: 'During the summer of 2009, artist Jamie O’Shea of the organization Substitute Materials set out to test whether or not electronic communication could have been built at any time in history with the proper knowledge, and with only tools and materials found in the wilderness of New Jersey.'"
This video is a big let down: all he's doing is showing that it's possible to smelt iron & copper and construct an organic battery. This is not news...
Furthermore, he uses stone tools and tries (and fails) to start a fire with a friction bow drill.
For building a telegraph (or any electronic communications medium), the challenge lies in the miles of wire that are needed. The scale of manufacturing for this task is huge and is a long project -- not something you'd set out to do in the wilderness with your stone axe.
If civilization collapsed and needed to be rebuilt with only stored knowledge and what can be found outside, don't you think we'd start by finding flint and making knives & axes? You know, like humans did thousands of years ago... Not to mention the fact that other needs, like shelter/water/food would take priority -- and once you've met those needs efficiently and adequately, you'll probably already have a nice collection of tools, machines, and furnaces that will let you get started on higher technology.
I was expecting, and would be much more interested, in seeing documentation on how to build a telegraph using basic midievil technology (i.e. assuming the existence of metal tools, furnaces, and animal/water-powered machines)
I've always wanted to create an instruction manual/website/makefile on how to make a computer if you were suddenly stranded in a desert island.
Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble create the Internet.
The "wilderness of New Jersey"? I mean, the Pine Barrens are unpopulated and all, but I'm not sure I'd call it "wilderness". Are they going to build it entirely out of gangster bones and toxic waste?
If someone created such a device in those times they probably would have been promptly stoned or clubbed to death for being a witch, demon or other evil spirit.
He used a lighter to make the fire. I'm not even going to bother looking up his "functional time machine."
I really hate being referred to a video in a story. I am never interested in enough to sit through it. So how did they find copper? And a power source?
They managed to make a telegraph out of hypodermic needles and used condoms.
I'm not *that* impressed.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
http://xkcd.com/505/
Information revolution requires dirt surface, and rocks.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
There is a fascinating account of building a radio in a Japanese POW camp during WWII virtually from scratch.
So we hit upon the idea of taking some tin foil or aluminum foil from the lining of the tea chest from which the Japanese supplied with the rice rations, then by the well known equations for calculating capacity and the relationship of the surface area and spacing of the plates, we built a capacitor or, at least, I built a capacitor which according to calculations should have been about ".01 microfarad."
Well, he says in the video he's built a time machine. Can't he just send back a few shortwave radios?
Well I guess you could easily make the telegraph poles out of something you find in the wilderness.
I am anarch of all I survey.
I can communicate outside the universe by flipping a coin.
God says...
Hearken one disclaimers deceivers save majesty introduced
beholding extricate gathered ordained Milanese recognises
household penitent use bibber Revenue neglect stretched
SAINT companions gratuitously lulled att counselled distill
committing Living scarcely
"I am endeavoring, ma'am, to construct a mnemonic memory circuit, using stone knives and bearskins." -- Spock, City on the Edge of Forever
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
All I got was some site that played video ads, tried to set Flash cookies, and displayed popups. Is this a spam article?
In Jules Verne's 'Mysterious Island' he writes about how his castaways build a civilisation on a remote pacific island. One of the things they build is a telegraph from scratch. They also build paddle wheels, make guncotton, determine the latitude and longitude of their island, make a secure house out of a cave behind a waterfall, grow wheat from a single husk and a lot of other things. And as a bonus, it has the return of one of Verne's most famous characters (read it and find out who!). This is one of my favourite books, I can definately recommend it to the whole slashdot crowd.
Spinning mirrors possibly. Maybe a strobe of some sort.
True it is line of sight, but probably good enough.
One thing I would not do is smelt miles of copper wire.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Inventions happen when the two things come together:
1 - The technology develops enough to make them relatively easy to implement
2 - There is a need for the invention
The interplay between the two conditions is variable. If something becomes easy to do it will be done even if there isn't much use for it. If something is very needed, it will be done even though it is very hard to do.
Consider Babbage's 'computer'. It was close to being practical to build but nobody really felt the need for it, so it wasn't built. There wasn't enough need to justify the effort.
After gunnery had advanced to a point where gunnery tables had become sophisticated and required more computing than could easily be done by a room full of people doing the calculations, then mechanical analog computers (difference engines) were built to generate the tables. The mechanical technique had become more reliable and the need was present.
What would it have benefited the ancients to have electric communication. They had optical communication, flags, smoke signals and fires. It wasn't until we had railroads that it was advantageous to have the telegraph. Before then, there were a bunch of inventions to transmit information by electricity. The ones I have seen had one wire per letter. They would have been very expensive to implement.
By the time Morse came along, the telegraph itself was a trivial development. More complex devices existed. The thing that made the telegraph practical was Morse's invention of the Morse code. Now a relatively cheap device could be used to transmit information. There was the right combination of technical readiness and need.
This is a cool project and all, but I have to challenge the premise that civilization can collapse to a level where all technology is gone but detailed technical knowledge survives.
Several tens if not hundreds of thousands of people graduate from college with engineering degrees every year in the US alone. This has been going on for many decades, which means that in the US alone, there are literally millions if not tens of millions of scientists and engineers, many with decades of experience in their professional lives as well as bits and pieces of technical know-how picked up from hobbies and idle curiosity. These people don't all live within one lethal radius. They're spread out all over a big-ass country. Their tools (lathes, mills, computers, smelters, furnaces, etc) are also spread out over a big-ass country. And that's just "post-industrial" America I'm talking about. People with technical know-how and technology and machinery are spread out all over the planet.
Any end to civilization that takes out *all* technological capability would have to be a planet-wide event that would necessarily take out the geeks as well. Otherwise, if a giant meteor takes out North America, European, Chinese, Indian, and Brazilian engineers would just move in and do the rebuilding with Brazilian or Indian or Chinese or European-made equipment.
What he built is a proof of concept for a BATTERY. Not a telegraph.
He's an artist, not an engineer. Rigor is clearly not his strong point. But it's an interesting idea. And making pig iron--even a little bit--in an afternoon is a pretty good accomplishment. Copper is a lot easier, since it smelts easily and has a much lower melting point.
And it's not implausible: after all, there is evidence that better batteries were known in ancient times, and he's certainly right that a Voltaic pile can be constructed from primitive materials. He could have smelted some zinc, too.
But as others have pointed out, miles of wire is the real challenge. Could that be done under the circumstances? Sure: copper smelting was known in prehistory, and drawing copper into wires just requires hardened clay dies. But it would be a LOT of work. You'd probably have to be an inspiring leader with oodles of acolytes to carry out the grunt work. You'd need some insulated wire for the coils, but that's just an application of fabric, and not too hard.
A better idea might have been an optical telegraph, like those that were all over Europe in the early 19th century. Make lenses out of ice in clay molds and use it only in the winter, if you don't want to make glass and grind it.
He made a battery in the woods, and that's cool. I hadn't realized that copper and iron were that easy to get without digging much. And, I can see how he could get at least some distance of copper wire. However, he did not tackle sensing the voltage that's turning on and off and communicating that to the user at the other end of the wire. At least not in this video. Does anyone have an idea of how to do that?
This was years ago, and probably it was originally a BBC series since most of the scientists seemed to British, judging by their accents, but I saw it on a local PBS station in the USA. In the various episodes scientists were taken away from their high tech infrastructure and challenged to do things that normally required fairly high tech equipment, like receive radio messages or determine their latitude and longitude.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
materials found in the wilderness of New Jersey
The keyword here is New Jersey
You could probably build a nuclear reactor out of "materials found in the wilderness of New Jersey".
"wilderness of New Jersey..."
Um, what? This is a joke, right?
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
It's your specialty Sammy. Stay there...
At least as far back as ancient Greece, a few troops stationed on a hilltop ready to light a fire, or wave torches to signal "the enemy's coming".
And in Napoleonic France, a quite sophisticated optical semaphore line covered the country
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semaphore_line
Having actually smelted iron from iron ore in a living history re-enactment, I call bullshit on this entire thing (well, ok, given the metal disks, the root battery might work).
You need a *serious* air feed to the base of the smelter to get the temperatures high enough to melt the ore. A single bag bellows feeding into the top of a simple depression in the ground with almost no fuel stock just won't do it. We had two bag bellows constantly manned pumping into the base of a big stack of charcoal and only just got the temperatures high enough.
Oh, and put that kind of heat anywhere near a clay crucible that hasn't completely dried out (at least a day or so of drying using a small fire) and the whole thing will go bang in your face as the residual water in the clay turns to steam and explosively releases.
And once you've got your iron from the base of the smelt, you can't just bang it with a rock to get it to a usable disk. It comes out of the smelter as a rough mass of iron flakes (called a 'bloom'). You need to very carefully forgeweld it into a whole. Hitting it with a hammer causes the bloom to fall apart immediately into an unusable mess of rust flakes. I know, I made this mistake and we had to start again.
I can't speak for smelting copper. I believe the process is similar but easier because of lower temperatures.
And charcoal doesn't come for free. There's a whole involved process for making charcoal, requiring *lots* of wood (and preferably hardwood which burns hotter but is much harder to cut down). It takes about 4 days (plus wood-chopping time, which you just can't do with just a single stone hand-axe and one person) to make charcoal from scratch, and it's a very tricky process requiring a lot of practice.
There's a reason we spent thousands of years in the bronze age before we started using iron. It's not because we didn't know about iron ores.
Business/App ideas are like arseholes: everyone's got one, they're mostly shit, but very rarely they contain a diamond
It was the Open University in the UK: http://www.open2.net/roughscience1/index.html
that were not available or could not be created at other points in time, given enough knowledge? Seems to me there isn't one. This looks like a pointless study.
All he needed was to dig deep enough to find some redstone ore...
Do you have any idea how much copper can be found in your average 1950s refrigerator thrown away in the Jersey wilderness?
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
the wilderness of New Jersey
We all know there is no such place.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I read that ages ago; I remember being most impressed by them making glass. It just seemed useful and fitting, while some other stuff felt superfluous.
Really good teen read anyways.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers - Pablo Picasso
The fact that ultimately he did use one of those tools (a lighter) is why (IMHO) this exercise failed. I understand his reasoning: He could have started the fire without the lighter, and on previous occasions he had started fires without it. But once he made that argument, he could say that he could have have built a battery, and on another occasion he did, so he used a prefab one... and you might at well just leave it as a thought experiment. The performance itself was incomplete, and all that was left was a proof of concept rather than the execution of a concept.
Your first paragraph about this being more art than it was many other things was very good, and I almost moderated you up. But I decided to reply to this paragraph instead.
This isn't the first time I've heard someone being unimpressed when someone else fails to light a fire using only plant parts. I can see where this comes from, but since I've seen attempts myself it instantly becomes different.
There are many, many problems with doing this. A basic problem is that of most friction: how do you get the most friction? By rubbing wood against wood. However, that way you very quickly bore into the wood because you're using so much force, and then the point of most friction has no oxygen. This is of course assuming nothing else breaks from the huge stresses on all parts of the device.
Smoke is reasonably easy to produce and it's even possible to burn oneself. But fire, that takes a totally disproportionate amount of skill. I wouldn't be surprised if building a hut to live in year round is an easier challenge.
So my take-away message is this: there's one disproportionately hard task involved among many others which make the point quite well too. He basically showed that if you have fire you can jump straight to the iron age. Personally I thought any kind of iron production required a sealed furnace of some sort.
determine their latitude and longitude
You only need eyes for that, assuming that you understand the shape of the earth and the position of the stars.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
It would not be possible to build such a device during the Stone Age, regardless of the materials available, because the requisite knowledge did not exist at the time. Materials without knowledge on how to use them are not going to get much - sort of like using service provided by AT&T.
Make a set of jungle drums or semaphore flags.
Have gnu, will travel.
Like the title says, thought I'd check out the parent's book recommendation: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8993
hmm.. sounds a lot like Gilligan's Island.
Of course that came afterwords so I guess there may have been some influence.
And *time*. That's the sticky wicket. You need to know the position of the stars at a particular point in *time*. If you happen to be wearing a quarts wrist watch (i.e. "Chronometer") you'd be all right. However, if you don't happen to have any of that "new-fangled" technology, then you'd be forced to build some sort of angle-measuring device and (perhaps) measure the angle between the moon and sun (which could give you an exact time for a given moon phase) and then use *THAT* time to calculate one LOP (Line Of Position) for that particular time. and then do the same thing again in a few hours. In any case certainly a non-trivial task.
then you'd be forced to build some sort of angle-measuring device and (perhaps) measure the angle between the moon and sun
Yeah thats it. A sextant can be made out of timber. Should be good enough for one agree accuracy.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I would be more impressed if he were to construct a mnemonic memory circuit using stone-knives and bear-skins.
It doesn't take that much "skill" to make a fire with a bowdrill, honestly. My brother was into this kind of thing. It turns out that the choice of wood, string, and a decent bow make a _huge_ difference. E.g. I saw him get a glowing ember from his drill setup in less than a minute, and in less than 90 seconds had a handful of flames. Impressed by how easy it looked, I traipsed into the woods, found some sticks of various sizes, with no thought whatsoever to their suitability, made a rough bow, carved out a notch, got a rock and started going at it. Half a day later, I could barely get smoke. I didn't know why. He let me use his setup, and within two minutes I too had an ember.
You need a wood that grows straight, has little resin, and is somewhat dry for the drill, and a flexible but stiff wood for the bow. A soft maple is excellent. It needs to be dead and dry, not green (obviously). You want a good solid leather string that will grip the drill nicely. You want a good amount of tension in the bow, but not too much. The drill should be between 2 and 3 cm wide, around 15 to 20 cm long. For the base you want a somewhat harder wood with a little more resin. Oak is good. Gather good kindling to catch, often by peeling bark into super thin strips and making a little nest of them. The glowing ember will come from the dust of the drill being worn down and getting hot. For the top you want a rock not much bigger than the palm of your hand, so that you can get a good grip on it and put some weight to keep the whole system stable. You want to get a nice point on the drill on the rock side and if possible scratch a bit of a hole into the rock so the point from the drill fits. If you can find some lubrication of some sort for the top that helps.
After the notch in the base gets worn in and the friction part of your drill gets worn into the appropriate shape, it is not actually that hard to make a fire in less than a few minutes. I've done it.
120 characters isn't enough to explain it.
Did anyone notice the multimeter was not set to measure voltage? The images show the ohms symbol and the beeping of the continuity detector. Maybe it was bad editing, but as shown it seems he didn't know hot to measure volts properly.
Great suggestion for a read.
on a tangent... Anyone else think the idiots on Lost should have done just a portion of Mysterious Island? Or heck, even Swiss Family Robinson. After people were stolen from my camp, or a wild boar came into my camp and gored someone's leg, I'd focus on protection. Oh no, let's just sit on the beach, enjoy the waves, and not even post a guard. It's hard to suspend belief on something so obvious..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_signals
-- Spock to Edith Keeler, "The City On the Edge of Forever"
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
You don't understand. It's a Jersey thing - Jamie O’Shea
We were having a BBQ and I was having a grand old time watching these people try to start the fire. They were using coal (probably face coal, but still not easy to get going) and they had this solid, kind of waxy fire starter substance as well as a lighter. I think 7 different people failed to getting the fire started. The problem is they would light the fire starter on top of the coals. Then someone came along that knew what they were doing, they layered a paper plate with fire started, then shoved it underneath the coals and lit the paper plate.
Eventually I was going to go over and show them how to do it, but it was fascinating me too much that so many people didn't know that you want to generally start a fire from the bottom.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
Does that include Jimmy Hoffa and the barrel that he was buried in? There are lots and lots of things in the woods in New Jersey.
AT&T built a wireless 3G network with apparent stone-age materials...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
There are several telegraphs that can and have been built from the things found in the forest without the need of copper. Including this one.
Even this might count, if you are only ever going to send one message, one way.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
You don't need the fall of civilization to be reduced to the stone-age. Just get stranded on a island in your Y-fronts (granted you may get bonus items from lotsam and jetsam)
Parent meant that you can't listen to digital radio broadcast on an analog radio - as any radio built from homemade components would be utterly analog.
As for wikipedia not being available...
It is not the knowledge without, it is the knowledge within that counts.
Most libraries are just as useful as wikipedia if you know WHAT you are looking for.
And just like with wikipedia, you don't have to know everything about a certain topic to be able to find texts on it - just a couple of keywords.
Sure, searching through dozens of books will page by page is slower than googling but hey - we are talking about being dumped back to early 19th century at least.
Oh and... you keep using that word... I do not think it means what you think it means.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Someone troll rated me on this one? Seriously? Someone must deeply love New Jersey . . . is that you, Kevin Smith?
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
Some people have years worth of powdered food, others have 1000's of rounds of ammo, powder, and reloading stock.
The smart ones have a set of books.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxfire_(magazine)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anarchist_Cookbook
And many, many more. Choose your favorites.
and with only tools and materials found in the wilderness of New Jersey
I'm pretty sure that stone age human beings didn't have access to the level of technological refinement available in the garbage that litters New Jersey.
Verne failed to predict the Harlem Globetrotters, so I fail to see the parallel.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I know it's hard to find and there are often zombies and spiders near by, but he should just have mined some redstone and used it instead.
While on the topic of fiction, another author presented a scenario where the collapse of civilization was one-way - there was no way for a stone-age to discover metal again. See "Ring World".
Couldn't they have just stapled the message to Snooki's forehead and told her there was free booze at the destination?
This video is a big let down: all he's doing is showing that it's possible to smelt iron & copper and construct an organic battery. This is not news...
Yep. Quick summary: "How to build a telegraph using stone age materials: first, invent the iron age. Then, build a telegraph using iron age materials."
And he fails step 1; he doesn't have the chops to invent the iron age (which requires fire...)
Actually, once you have fire, pig iron is remarkably easy to smelt, requiring only iron ore, charcoal, and clay. But you first have to be able to recognize iron ore. You can smelt chunks of basalt all you want; it's not gonna turn into iron.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Want to make a telegraph in new jersey with a primitive tool?
This sounds like a job for The Situation.
Send a message line of site at the speed of light. All you need is a smoky fire and a big wet blanket.
Tell us the truth, you can't see video because you only use lynx on CLI !!!
Queue the following:
"I'm endeavoring, Ma'am, to construct a mnemonic memory circuit using stone-knives and bear-skins."
or
"I know! You'll need to make a weapon. Look around- can you construct some sort of rudimentary lathe?"
Well, that really wasn't a fair situation. They lived on an artificial world made of might-as-well-be neutronium. There weren't any ores or easy metals to be had. Cocky-ass Protectors.
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
Yes, we could have used electricity at almost any point in time. We could have made telegraphs, but most likely, we would have realized just how hot things became during experiments and put the knowledge to a more immediate need and use.
If I traveled back in time to the age where fire was still novel and needed some form of mass communication, I would quickly rule out electricity as a tenable solution.
I might use a system of vines, smoke signals or other more practical solutions, just as our ancestors did.
The spin on TFA was bad, but that doesn't make it uninteresting. The ramifications of our ancestors discovering things earlier, or in a different order does make for entertaining thought. Try not to focus on things like:
- He used a lighter .. the list goes on
- He had plenty to eat, so he had time to experiment (he was not addressing an immediate need)
- He may have been cold, but wasn't trying to solve that problem (sort of redundant, but worth mentioning)
- He was not distracted by other marvels that we see as commonplace, such as other uses for clay and fire
Still, while the video might be silly, the thinking behind it is worth a cup of coffee and consideration.
Russell Johnson (aka The Professor) could have made it from coconuts and wood.
Sure enough, the cow costume was hanging up next to the superhero outfit and sailors uniform. (S,Spud)
Captain Nemo?
I agree with those who say this is a let down because the real challenge is making wire and doing metal work not batteries. In fact, with enough wire, organic batteries, a magnetic piece of metal, some sheet metal, he could have made a spark coil and antenna - a primitive Marconi transmitter - and used a piece of coal or pyrites and fine wire "cat's whisker" as a detector at the other end - a simple receiver and headphone-like contraption. = RADIO. The first radios were that simple.