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Tangentially related to this, one of my hobbies is to explore old long abandoned ghost towns and mining camps in the Southwest US. It is really impressive how w
by rurp 5y ago
Tangentially related to this, one of my hobbies is to explore old long abandoned ghost towns and mining camps in the Southwest US. It is really impressive how well many of these structures have held up in harsh climates. One of my favorite parts is seeing how repairs were improvised in the wilderness using whatever supplies happened to be available.
The standard approach to trash back then was to throw it in a pile nearby. Picking through those dumps can be really fascinating and a surprising amount of items are still in good shape. A simple heuristic for how old a glass bottle is is how thick it is. A modern beer bottle looks paper thin compared to one a century old.
Looking at old structures and tools really makes vivid how disposable many modern items are.
- emodendroket 5y agoIsn't the Southwest uniquely not harsh? The biggest enemy of most man-made structures is water.
- jorts 5y agoThe sun is brutal on anything that isn’t metal.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y agoor rock ... or dirt ... or glass ...
- yencabulator 5y agoAnd most of the rock in the Southwest US is sandstone which will fall apart if you look at it funny.
- trompetenaccoun 5y agoDepends on the material I'd say. Large temperature swings like common in the desert certainly don't help. Wind/sand abrasion could also be an issue. But in general you're right, desert climates can be good for preserving things. The only thing better would probably be a permanent ice cover.
- hosh 5y agoIf they are under cover away from UV and heat, they can be well preserved. Modern material tend to degrade in Phoenix sun, and 110° and sometimes 120° summer days. Arizona will also get monsoons and flash floods.
- silisili 5y agoSame thought. Where I grew up...if water didn't kill it, tornados would. The only barns that stood the test of time were made from the now nearly extinct chestnut. They turn grey and get knotty and twisty as they age but are nearly indestructible. Everything else rots away in the humidity. One rather interesting memory...I remember my father rebuilding an old barnish structure with railroad ties for the frame. Apparently they soak those suckers in tar...out in the sun each day they'd start sweating some black tar stuff again that's nearly impossible to get off your hands. Those haven't aged a day in 20ish years. Makes me curious why more structural wood isn't treated this way.
- geeio 5y agoPressure treated wood is kinda like that (it uses something other than tar). [1]: https://www.homedepot.com/c/ab/types-of-pressure-treated-wood/9ba683603be9fa5395fab9052c50759 https://www.homedepot.com/c/ab/types-of-pressure-treated-woo...
- jacquesm 5y agoMostly because it is quite polluting if it gets into the groundwater or in your well.
- silisili 5y agoSo I had some experience similar to this with an awful substance called cosmoline. Russians used it to store old guns, and they did the same thing really by sweating some chemical every time they heat up. After some reading and thinking, I decided just to bake the thing at 250. It sweated tons of that awful red jelly out, then never again. Don't get me wrong, I'm definitely not for polluting the groundwater, but seems it can be mitigated with proper heat treating prior.
- jacquesm 5y agoThat probably won't work for railroad ties because they are usually in/on the ground and without that tar the bugs would eat them in a few years.
- Cody_C 5y agoThis does even change vintage car prices, certain places out west (Arizona, Utah etc) vintage cars typically are less rare (and therefore cost less generally.) Whereas snow, the salt used to treat roads and rain will wreak havoc on the frames and bodies in other areas.
- poo-yie 5y agoSimilarly, I have a hobby of restoring vintage and antique tools. Same observation regarding how disposable many modern items are.
- virtue3 5y agoAs someone that does swing dancing and with quite a lot of people into vintage stuff there has been this talk of "survivor" bias whenever we talk about how stuff was made better back then. Naturally the cheap stuff didn't tend to even remotely make it this far. Curious what your opinion is as I haven't heard much about tools etc.
- samstave 5y agoJust a thought: There are a couple factors that would result in a longer lasting tool of Yore... There were no plastics and other ephemeral materials, and so tool handles were wood, leather or metal. There was no 'mass production at global scale' - effectively every tool was hand made, or made by machines that were made by hand to make the tools -- and all of which were done without aid of computational mathematical prowess-by-proxy... So, smaller batches of potentially longer lasting product because everything was continually being crafted by hand and observed by human eye...
- ido 5y agoIn terms of building I remember hearing how in the distant past (anything before the last 200 years or so) the buildings that survived to this day have just used way too much materials in a way that would seen as wasteful today (e.g. double as much stone as was needed because they couldn't calculate it as precisely as we can today). Would you be willing to pay double for your new home to make it last 300 years instead of 100?
- bluGill 5y agoWhen answering that question, note how much effort is needed to retrofit to modern needs. Electric, running water, closets, all things modern humans demand that you would need to retrofit.
- HPsquared 5y agoA lot of the old glass bottles were designed to be used again and again.
- ajsnigrutin 5y agoAren't modern bottles designed for that too? Atleast here, you return them to the store, get some money back, and they wash and refill them
- lillecarl 5y agoIn Sweden we sort them by colored or translucent, they'll be smashed and reheated to be made into brand new bottles. Haven't seen used bottles in quite awhile, not sure if it's good or bad.
- dragontamer 5y agoThat's how its normally done in the USA as well. Brown, Green, and Transparent glass gets sorted, smashed, and melted back down into new bottles.
- emodendroket 5y agoI was collecting some bottles and after trying 5 grocery stores who all told me they don't accept bottle returns (happy to collect the "deposit fee" though!) I gave up and threw them away in the regular recycling bin.
- llampx 5y agoIn Germany you must accept returns and give back the deposit if you sell bottles or cans that have the deposit attached.
- emodendroket 5y agoWhat a concept, maybe our legislators could do something useful for a change and make similar rules.
- throwaway0a5e 5y agoI don't see how you can call the climate "harsh" with a straight face since it never rarely get moist enough for long enough for water and bacteria to do much to wood and masonry. There's a reason you pretty much never see 100yr old unmaintained wood and masonry structures in New England, midwest, the PNW, etc.
- lizknope 5y agoYeah, the water is far worse than the sunlight. Airlines and the military parks aircraft in the desert for storage because with a little bit of prep work at the beginning the aircraft will stay in good shape. Constant rain would be far worse.
- pengaru 5y agoThe thing is desert structures still have to deal with water ingress. It does rain, and when it rains it's often a blowy monsoon of doom, assaulting desiccated wood structures which more often than not have developed some leaks from the year-round wind/sandstorm/thermal/UV abuse and complacency promoted by deceptively always-dry conditions. And when lumber that has been dry and 120F+ for half a year abruptly gets soaked in water, its dimensions quickly change in non-uniform ways; it twists, bends, splits, and softens. If any of this moistened wood juice finds its way down into the ground, subterranean termites discover the food source in a veritable food desert. I think you can guess what follows.
- emodendroket 5y agoEvery climate brings its own challenges, of course, but it still seems true that that's better than dealing with constant precipitation, freezing, and so on.
- pengaru 5y agoIf we're talking about the PNW, it doesn't take a genius to look around and see nature alone manages to build towering long-lasting structures in that environment. Some of those redwood trees are older than the oldest buildings in the entire nation. The desert's evolved long-lasting structures are shrub-sized and endure by retreating underground. Otherwise there's rocks.
- trompetenaccoun 5y agoAre there really sites undisturbed enough for you to see how they did repairs or disposed of their trash? That sounds amazing. SW-America is definitely on my bucket list and I love ghost towns. In Western Europe it's hard to find any abandoned place older than a couple of years that's preserved well. I guess it's because the next city is never very far and there's always uncultured idiots whose idea of fun it is to vandalize places for no reason.
- yencabulator 5y agoTo put a different perspective on that: The remaining Native American ruins in the Southwest are roughly the same age as European castles.
- finiteseries 5y agoYou’re in for a treat, it’s within a timescale of 200 years or so, but definitely. The climate, terrain, distances, ownership, and uselessness of most of the land involved really encourage preservation, albeit rotted out and rusting.
- trompetenaccoun 5y agoRotted out and rusting is beautiful, I love it. Next best thing to getting a time machine and going back :)
- rurp 5y agoIt's incredible what's been left behind and still in decent shape. As you've found, any place with a lot of human traffic tends to get destroyed by vandals but fortunately the SW deserts are massive and hold a shocking amount of old mining roads that lead to well preserved locations. A spot that requires a modest amount of effort to reach tends to filter out the idiots. Another favorite site I didn't mention are the old mining structures. Image search for something like "old mining headframe" to see the sort of thing I'm talking about. There are a lot of those structures still standing from many decades ago.
- rbobby 5y ago> A modern beer bottle looks paper thin compared to one a century old. I wonder if that is due to how much smoother transportation is now.
- ncmncm 5y agoAlso the glass was more brittle.
- flipbrad 5y agoIt may also be down to better sugar/carb content and fermentation control, and/or better temperature control during storage. If yeast remains active in the bottle, the CO2 buildup causes overly high internal pressure, as could high temperature - so either the top blows off or the bottle becomes a glass grenade.