Building a Telegraph Using Only Stone Age Materials 238
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.'"
Disappointing Video (Score:5, Informative)
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)
Re:Can't watch video (Score:5, Informative)
Basically, the video is just a proof of concept of how you would make a battery to use as a telegraph using only stone age materials combined with knowledge. The video ends after he uses a voltmeter to measure his "battery" made out of clay and the aforementioned iron/copper(he gets like 1V out of it or something).
Re:Disappointing Video (Score:3, Informative)
If civilization collapsed we would not bother with flint. We have lots of metal all around us.
Besides making steel is not that hard, even if he failed to start a fire using an old method.
All ads and popups. (Score:5, Informative)
All I got was some site that played video ads, tried to set Flash cookies, and displayed popups. Is this a spam article?
Re:Disappointing Video (Score:3, Informative)
I was expecting, and would be much more interested, in seeing documentation on how to build a telegraph using basic medieval technology (i.e. assuming the existence of metal tools, furnaces, and animal/water-powered machines)
Is 1684 [wikipedia.org] close enough for you?
- RG>
Reminds me of a PBS TV series called Rough Science (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Missing a Component (Score:4, Informative)
If you've got copper or iron you can make an electromagnet. The electromagnet pulls on something ferrous and makes it click against something else. That's how telegraphs worked.
The real problem would be smelting the tens or hundreds of miles of copper wire needed to make this thing even remotely useful. Not to mention building a battery big enough to put a useful signal through that much crappy copper wire.
Semaphore towers (Score:3, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org]
Re:Reminds me of a PBS TV series called Rough Scie (Score:1, Informative)
It was the Open University in the UK: http://www.open2.net/roughscience1/index.html
Project Gutenberg: Jules Verne's Mysterious Island (Score:5, Informative)
Like the title says, thought I'd check out the parent's book recommendation: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8993 [gutenberg.org]
Re:Disappointing Video (Score:2, Informative)
Knowledge (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Making Fire Is HARD (Score:3, Informative)
I realized instantly that his tools for making fire where inadequate at best.
First thing was his spindle stick was far to short, making the whole apparatus awkward to work with. Secondly, he appeared to be boring straight into the middle of the base board, which 'may' work, but you're far better off with a notch in the board and boring at the tip of the V with a small amount of very fine loose tinder placed in the notch, this allows air to reach the 'hot dust' and ignite a coal, which can then ignite the tinder, which translates to fire.
of course, all this sounds well and good on paper, and putting it into practice always requires refinement of the idea based on materials at hand and other random factors. That all said, he was not working the problem and eliminating problem areas in his fire process.
Re:Making Fire Is HARD (Score:2, Informative)
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.
I beg to differ, the bow-drill method of fire building is not difficult. Like anything it takes technique and practice. Back when I was in Scouts my troop took a particular interest in primitive fire building skills. We all made our own fire drill kits, and we regularly used them to start fires on our camping trips. We even had races to see who could start a fire the fastest. My best time was one minute, the troop record at the time was thirty seconds.
A proper firebow kit contains four parts, the baseboard, the thunderhead, the bow and the spindle. Your goal isn't to catch the baseboard on fire, rather it is to produce an ember, which is created by the friction between the spindle and the baseboard. The bow spins the spindle and the thunderhead you use to hold the spindle. Oxygen is not an issue if your baseboard is properly setup, you should have a hole that the spindle fits in and a notch cut into that hole. Typically you would have a piece of leather beneath the baseboard to catch your ember, which you then transfer to a birds nest (a ball of really fine tinder) and then you blow on it to feed the ember, then you get fire.
The fact that he failed just means he didn't use the proper technique. I haven't actually watched the video as I'm at work, but I'm confident that he must have done something wrong to have failed.
Re:Disappointing Video (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Kinda missing the point there... (Score:1, Informative)
You should've looked in a dictionary instead, because his usage of the word "holocaust" is precisely correct.
Re:Disappointing Video (Score:1, Informative)
The Foxfire Books show how people did many of these things in rural West Virginia.
http://www.foxfire.org/thefoxfirebooks.aspx