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Iron, How Did They Make It? Part II
- rcshubhadeep 6y agoK. K Leuva The Asur: A study of primitive iron-smelters An excellent account on this subject focused on the life of a small population who achieved state of the art in this thousands of years ago.
- nanomonkey 6y ago(spoiler!) Answer: By burning a lot of trees.
- notadog 6y agoIf you enjoyed reading this, you should also check out the discussion of Part I from a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24517792 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24517792
- legitster 6y agoPeople knew how to make steel from coal for centuries, but it made drastically inferior steel. So why did they switch to coal? It's been explained to me that the only reason people finally switched to coal was desperation - there were no usable wood reserves left at the time in Northern Britain. And people were desperate enough for iron that they would use the bad stuff. Eventually they figured out how to adapt the chemistry to compensate for the sulfur being added, and you suddenly had cheap, plentiful metal that you could use to launch an industrial revolution. But I have to imagine, for the people at the time, how dystopian it must have all seemed. You have literally run out of trees, and the market is being flooded with cheap but low quality metal.
- dboreham 6y agoIndustrial Revolution was launched with Iron, not steel. Steel was costly and difficult to make in large quantities until the late 19th C.
- ThrustVectoring 6y agoThis is why a lot of folks talk about there being two industrial revolutions, with the boundary between them demarcated by the cheap and plentiful steel generated by the Bessemer process.
- time0ut 6y agoGreat read. If you are interested in seeing charcoal production in action (on a small scale), Primitive Technology [0] has a nice short video walking through it. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzLvqCTvOQY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzLvqCTvOQY
- moneytide1 6y agoI recently encountered a small area where there had been a brush fire (could have occurred long ago). I was able to crumble off the outer inch of blackened tree branch stubs and the charcoal seemed fairly consistent. I would have to burn it to test how thoroughly it had been cooked - good charcoal does not give off much smoke because the heat burns away most everything but the carbon. Charcoal for water filtering, cooking, and smelting is probably very abundant in the Pacific Northwest right now....
- Linell 6y agoIf you enjoy this at all, I recommend checking out the rest of this site or at least the submissions of it here on HN. There is a ton of super interesting content.
- alexpetralia 6y agoI also mentioned this last time - so this is the last time I'll do it - but Bret Devereaux's work consistently hits the front page of HN because it is excellent quality. Adjunct professors are not paid a lot (sometimes even less than minimum wage annualized). Please consider donating!
- spsd 6y agoGood read.
- jandrese 6y agoIt's an often repeated fact that steel swords and the like were quite valuable during the middle ages, but it is a revelation that the reason they are so expensive is that they required hundreds or thousands of man hours chopping trees, managing slow burning fires, carting ore and wood around, etc... Modern media always just focuses on the last step (and usually gets it completely wrong to boot) while ignoring the small army of peasants needed to produce the raw materials for that smith to work into the sword/axe/helmet/etc...
- 01100011 6y agoDoesn't history generally ignore the contributions of legions of lower class to any of man's great achievements?
- AlotOfReading 6y agoThe kind of history you see on television and in general textbooks usually does. The omission has been recognized for a long time though, hence "social histories".
- InitialLastName 6y agoThe goal of this whole series (and the last one, about bread) is to in some part rectify that demonstrating and explaining the economics of the process from a more labor-oriented perspective.
- libraryofbabel 6y agoTo expand on others’ comments, popular history may still do this, but professional academic history got over that a long time ago. The subfield that deals with the experiences of ordinary people and “bottom-to-top” complete pictures of a society is called Social History. Social History is now over 60 years old (one of the most brilliant and influential books in this tradition, E.P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class, is from 1963), and Social History has shaped the perspective of pretty much every professional historian writing in the last half century, whether they were for or against the key ideas. The intellectual debt is to (non-doctrinaire) Marxism, later supplemented with a health dose of anthropology (which led to the related field of cultural history). Basically the Social Historians more or less won, although the naive “great men great events” approach remained strong in popular history outside the academy. Social History was and is enormously influential among professional historians, probably the most influential intellectual shift in the history business in the last 100 years. (All people, everywhere, make history! A powerful message!) The author of this blog is a great practitioner of the social history tradition but it’s not a novel approach per se. That said, there should be more social history blogs! This blog regularly hits the front page of hacker news; people love this stuff!
- baxtr 6y agoSo they had to burn many trees. Stupid question: were those regions with many forests ruling other parts of the world because they had access to trees? I don’t quite remember if something like that was mentioned in Guns, Germs and Steel
- bluGill 6y agonot really. To rule over other regions you need a good leader (probably several). Good has several senses here. You need to make good plans, and you need enough followers. The first because bad plans means your army is lost. The second because without enough soldiers you will lose. Note that better ability in one leads to less need of the other. Either way, a good ruler seeing a lack of resources can go take them from those who have.
- smogcutter 6y agoI read parent’s question as looking at a bigger scale (along the lines of guns, germs & steel). Leaders come and go, and on a pretty short time frame compared to mass deforestation. The question is more, if you don’t have access to enough wood for a good iron supply chain, are you fucked in the long term? If you don’t have a competitive amount of metal to begin with, “just go take it from someone else” is a lot easier said than done. I’d be really interested to hear a well researched answer, but my guess is the answer is ambiguous. When you think of areas with little available wood, they’re mostly pretty marginal to begin with. Deserts, grasslands, etc. Places without enough water to support major agriculture and centralization. Maybe part of the reason people might stay in a marginal area is because it’s hard to get enough metal to conquer something better. But what about someone like the Mongols? They couldn’t possibly have a huge charcoal-making operation. So where’s their iron coming from? Trade? (For horses, maybe?) Plunder? But if you’re gonna kill someone and take his stuff, you need your own sword to do it with. The iron-availability ball has to get rolling somewhere else before you can really start conquering anyone. The big exception is Japan (although their problem is geology not timber), but their geographic isolation means they don’t really answer parents question about what happens to an iron-poor (or rather iron production input poor) society next door to an iron-rich one.
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- kens 6y agoI recently learned about the bizarre idea of "backyard furnaces". Around 1958, Mao Zedong decided the way to modernize was for every neighborhood to build numerous small blast furnaces and manufacture iron. These hundreds of thousands of furnaces needed constant fuel, leading to massive deforestation. Most of the iron was low quality or unusable, so the backyard furnaces were abandoned after a few years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backyard_furnace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backyard_furnace https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60_Q-kAZbXA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60_Q-kAZbXA
- throckmortra 6y agoMany of his ideas were ill-conceived: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign
- sudosysgen 6y agoMao was indeed a really bad administrator. It is said that he would have been remembered much more fondly if he died just after the success of the revolution. Pretty much half of the decisions he made led to a disaster.
- wahern 6y agoThe rise of Xi Jinping in China suggests that the memory of Mao's mistakes has long since faded, not just among the masses but also among the leadership. All the procedures and norms put into place to prevent another Mao from taking control have been systematically removed to give Xi Jinping greater power. I think the process started with Hu Jintao, who also held several key offices simultaneously, but the accumulation of power under Xi seems more transparent and deliberate and therefore more naive on the part of the leadership.
- plat12 6y agoInteresting to see that the largest input by an order of magnitude is trees. Reminds me of the infographics showing that only a small fraction of our water usage is direct (lawns, showers, ...) and most is indirect (meat, almonds, ...). In both cases, supply chains abstract over the inputs "embedded" in the outputs.
- comicjk 6y agoIn chemical engineering school I learned that water is the biggest input to most chemical plants. Even oil refineries take in more water than oil (mainly for cooling).
- plat12 6y agoFracking also uses a substantial amount of water.
- Sharlin 6y agoThe whole Central and Western Europe used to be heavily forested. The reason almost none of those forests remain is largely the iron and steel industry’s thirst for charcoal during the early modernity and the industrial revolution.
- choeger 6y agoWait a second, why exactly could they not transport charcoal? I did this plenty of times, real charcoal, mind you, which one can buy easily in Germany. I understand that it is brittle, but putting it into sacks and carrying it off should not produce any problems after 4km, right?
- outworlder 6y agoCarrying it, how? Assume uneven terrain, either human or animals. The sacks are being banged around (and are probably pretty porous). They may not necessarily have chariots, wagons or other animal powered vehicles at all or in the necessary quantity. > I did this plenty of times How much did you carry? Was it for barbecue or are you a blacksmith? How did you transport it over 4km? Did you use any roads? Any modern containers? Like the article says, iron smelting requires an enormous amount of charcoal.
- choeger 6y agoIt doesn't really matter how I carried it (using a car most of the time and occasionally a bicycle), but that the author claimed it would have been too brittle to do so. I understand the limitations of medieval logistics. What I do not understand is the difference in transporting charcoal compared to, e.g., lumber.
- setr 6y agoI would imagine a horse-led wagon on wooden wheels with no suspension mechanisms over under-paved dirt paths would be dramatically more bumpy than a car on presumably paved road/dirt.
- DanBC 6y agoIt crumbles into dust and tiny fragments which makes it much harder to use.
- legitster 6y agoI think the author over emphasized the brittleness. At the scale you would need the stuff, it would be much harder and more expensive to move than it is worth. For the same reason that even today things like gravel and sand are almost always locally sourced. Remember that in the medieval period, even sacks were relatively valuable things.
- oflannabhra 6y agoOne of my favorite videos is a documentary of a village in Africa that goes through the process of producing iron tools from scratch, even though it is not required anymore, to pass on the knowledge. They find ore, construct furnaces, smelt the ore, refine the iron and then work it. It takes an entire village weeks to do this. https://youtu.be/RuCnZClWwpQ https://youtu.be/RuCnZClWwpQ
- asab 6y agoI watched the whole thing. 2 things stood out to me. - It really illustrated the point made in the article of how labor is really what makes it difficult to accomplish. Weeks of effort sourcing materials, constructing furnaces, bellows, and refining. When it came to extracting ore, they just dug a hole nearby. - If the Wealden group (the attempt cited in the article https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsywnQJMJEk&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsywnQJMJEk&feature=youtu.be) had watched this documentary, they might have had less furnace cracking and less trouble forming a bloom. I didn't see them add flux for example
- squibbles 6y agoFor those that may not have noticed, the article provides a link to a good document by Kennth Hodges with a list of prices for medieval items. http://medieval.ucdavis.edu/120D/Money.html http://medieval.ucdavis.edu/120D/Money.html If a fourteenth century charcoal burner was 3 pence a day (3d), then his daily wage could buy: - 6 chickens - half a goose - one shoe (half a pair) - 2 gallons of medium ale - about a gallon of very cheap wine - 1 spade and shovel
- mrec 6y agoAnd about half a cheap sword, which puts the current top comment ("steel swords and the like were quite valuable") in perspective. Iron and its upstream inputs were expensive, yes, but labour costs kicked in too for fiddly things like chainmail (100s or 1200d, and it definitely doesn't contain 200 times as much iron as the sword, more on the order of 10) and clothing. I'm hoping/assuming Bret will get to pre-industrial textiles in this series; the amount of labour involved was phenomenal even if the physical inputs were cheaper.
- stan_rogers 6y agoAnd imagine what is was like before the treadle loom (where the operator had to do the weaving for every single weft thread, rather than just throwing a shuttle) and the spinning wheel (instead using a distaff spindle).
- doublejay1999 6y agowhat more could a man desire ?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- stefan_ 6y agoWhy could they not figure out how to coke coal? Google suggests all you need is a wood fire and what you get out would look, feel much the same as charcoal.
- guerrilla 6y agoI'm really loving this series and checking out everybody else's links but what I'd really love to know is how did we discover metalworking and iron in the first place. How did it all start?
- tt433 6y agoA dash of luck! Really no way to know, and anyone who tells you they know probably doesn't. It's still fun to guess. Consider a fire pit lined with rocks. Perhaps an observant fire watcher begins to notice the rocks seem to change over time and separate, or a toolmaker decides to use one type of stone with a particularly good edge and a low luster. The discovery of bronze fascinates me more than iron, especially since its usage generally predates iron. Bronze needed someone to not only understand that metals were embedded in stone, but that by alloying them, you could achieve properties that the constituent parts didn't have to begin with. Add on that complex trade routes that distributed tin to distant shores and you've got yourself a fine puzzle for ancient historians to ponder.
- Kosirich 6y agoGreat read. The guy should publish a book at one point, I would gladly buy it.
- smckk 6y agoThe Siwu of the Ewe peoples of Ghana and Togo also have an interesting history of making and working with iron.[0] [0] https://www.jstor.org/stable/40645453?seq=1 https://www.jstor.org/stable/40645453?seq=1