Slashdot Mirror
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 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?
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."
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.
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?
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".
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
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.
Like the title says, thought I'd check out the parent's book recommendation: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8993
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.