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.'"
Related: POW radio (Score:5, Interesting)
There is a fascinating account [zerobeat.net] 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."
Re:Next up: a computer (Score:3, Interesting)
This might get you started [gizmodo.com]
Jules Verne wrote about this in one of his novels (Score:5, Interesting)
Inventions happen when they are timely (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
It's just a battery, not a telegraph (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [wikimedia.org] 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.
Re:Related: POW radio (Score:3, Interesting)
And now imagine that radio would have been digital back then ...
Yeah I worry about future post holocaust scenarios. All the information you need is on wikipedia but you don't have access to it anymore. Maybe there won't be many new books at all.
Don't try this at home kids (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Making Fire Is HARD (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Missing a Component (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes though range isn't good. I did it with my electronics kit, receiving with an AM radio. An oscillating relay gave me the spark. A 30 metre vertical antenna gave me 30 metres of horizontal range.
Re:Semaphore towers (Score:3, Interesting)
I was just thinking the same thing. Take a look at this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_semaphore [wikipedia.org]
In the stone age, you can have fire. So with a little animal grease or wood, you can have torches. SO far, so good, right? Now, make up a good semaphore code and easily to transmit numbers. Maybe you'd need to use three torches instead of two. Hey, with a little rope, wood you could make a mechanism to make the torches spell binary. (Up: One, Down: Zero. Perhaps you need a "ground" torch to show the zero signal).
So what happens when you can easily transmit numbers over a certain distance? Assume you have enough friends with semaphore towers. You could transmit numbers over a really long distance.
But let's not stop there. Assign each tower a unique number and certain flags for "give me your id", "acknowledge", etc. Now you got a fucking protocol.
Now invent some signs to tell the operator to give the message to a certain tower's id. Now give the operator a series of tables (you can provide them stone tablets or something) telling which towers can send a message to which towers. Congratulations, you just invented routing.
Given enough operators and towers, and train the operators to handle the protocols, and congratulations! YOU JUST INVENTED THE FUCKING INTERNET.
How's that for stone age?
Re:Making Fire Is HARD (Score:2, Interesting)
But if you want to prove it's possible to walk across country and take a bus from Pittsburgh to Toledo, you can point at other people who have walked from Pittsburgh to Toledo to prove your point. I think he proved his point even if he had to cheat, and diminished the "glory" by not having done it all from scratch himself.
Apparently even with modern tools (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Missing a Component (Score:1, Interesting)
I've heard stories of telegraphers doing this during the American Civil War. With equipment damaged and spares hard to find, armies constantly on the move and lines being severed by enemy action, the (Or so it is said) heroic telegraphers fought in their own way to maintain communication so battle orders and reports could be sent - and if their delicate detection equipment should be lost or damaged, they would keep on working even if it meant touching the wires to their tongue or sharpening them to insert beneath their skin.
Re:Disappointing Video (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Disappointing Video (Score:3, Interesting)
Such methods actually are taught in a few remaining schools in the US. Part of the curriculum is to start with nothing and end up with advanced smelting and smithing tools - which you've created. This includes smelting your own ores, creating your own your own furnace, so on and so on. From what I understand, its a dying art with fewer and fewer students every year. IIRC, one of the schools teaches it as metallurgy as part of an engineering degree.
Sorry - saw it in TV a couple years back and I don't remember much more in the way of details.
I do recall hearing someone talking about a book which walks you through pre-industrialized technology to creation of modern tooling, smelting, manufacturing, etc...or maybe it was a series of books. IIRC, the author's only requisite is limited knowledge of common ores and concrete. From there, he guides you through industrialization of the 1900s. Sorry, don't remember the name of the book(s) or the author, but I imagine with a little digging on the Internet, it can be had.
There is lots of information out there to be had which addresses this very problem. The real problem is, its simply not been widely disseminated and most people don't even know of its existence.