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I love this channel and have been watching it for years, but one note of caution: this isn't the same type of primitive technology our ancestors used tens to hu

I love this channel and have been watching it for years, but one note of caution: this isn't the same type of primitive technology our ancestors used tens to hundreds of thousands of years ago. I would best describe it as "technology from scratch using all available modern knowledge". In a way it's even more interesting than trying to do primitive technology as it actually was. In this example, he's using modern knowledge of ore smelting and doing it in a way with the fewest tools/processes possible. Our ancestors (250,000 to ~3000 years go) could have done this, but they didn't. Metallurgy did not appear until a few thousand years ago and iron working working even later than bronze and other types of metal working. In fact, he's not even trying that hard, as he doesn't use the stream to build a waterwheel and automate many of his processes (though he did build a water hammer once). Really makes you think what's perfectly possible physically today, but we lack the knowledge to actually do it.

kragen 4y ago
Sure, tens to hundreds of thousands of years ago nobody was working with metals at all. And the centrifugal fan he uses is a modern invention; the oldest mention of them in the literature is less than 500 years old, in De Re Metallica. It's really interesting to think about the "could have done this but didn't" stuff! Silver chloride is one of the less sensitive silver halides you can use in photography, but it works; it dates to about 2500 years ago when someone (the Lydians?) figured out you could separate silver from gold by firing it with salt. So you could have done photography 2500 years ago instead of 200 years ago. There's lots of stuff in optics that only requires a Fizeau interferometer (made of a candle flame and a razor blade, Bronze Age stuff), abrasives (Paleolithic), reflective metal (Bronze Age again; Newton's mirrors were just a high-tin bronze), abrasives, and an unreasonable amount of patience. Imhotep could have made a Dobsonian telescope and seen the moons of Jupiter 4700 years ago if he'd known that was a worthwhile thing to do. Speaking of metrology, I've heard conflicting stories about surface plates: one story that the Babylonians knew about grinding three surfaces alternately against one another to make them all flat, and another that Maudslay originated the technique only about 220 years ago. (Or, sometimes, Maudslay's apprentice Whitworth.) This is clearly a technique you could have employed in the Neolithic. Sorption pumps for fine vacuum (usually 1e-2 mbar) require a high-surface-area sorbent (zeolite or maybe even kieselguhr or ball-milled non-zeolite clay: Neolithic), probably glassblowing (Roman Republic era in Syria), sealed joints (apparently Victorians used sealing wax successfully up to HV though not UHV, and sealing wax is pine resin and beeswax: probably Paleolithic), and some way to heat up the sorbent (fire: Paleolithic). Fine vacuum is enough for thermos bottles (dewars) and CVD, among other things. Conceivably you could have just luted together an opaque vacuum apparatus from glazed earthenware (which dates from probably 3500 years ago), using sealing wax to seal the joints. But debugging the thing or manipulating anything inside of it would have been an invincible challenge. Sorption pumping works better if you can also cool the sorbent down, too; dry ice is today made by explosive decompression of carbon dioxide, similar to how puffed corn and rice can be made with a grain-puffing cannon, and regularly is by Chinese street vendors. Pure carbon dioxide is available by calcining limestone (thus the name: Neolithic) in a metal vessel (Bronze Age) that bubbles the result into water into a "gasometer", a bucket floating upside down. Compressing the carbon dioxide sufficiently probably requires the accurately cylindrical bores produced for the first time for things like the Dardanelles Gun (15th century). But possibly not; the firepiston in Madagascar is at least 1500 years old, dating back to the time of the Western Roman Empire, and I think it can achieve sufficiently high compression. Mercury has been known all over the world since antiquity, though usually as a precious metal rather than a demonic pollutant. Mercury plus glassblowing (Roman Republic, again) is enough for a Sprengel pump, which can achieve 1 mPa, high vacuum, 1000 times higher vacuum than an ordinary sorption pump (though some sorption pumps are even better than the Sprengel pump). High vacuum is sufficient to make vacuum tubes. The Pidgeon process to refine magnesium requires dolomite, ferrosilicon, and a reducing atmosphere or vacuum. You get ferrosilicon by firing iron, coke, and silica in acid refractory (such as silica). Magnesium is especially demanding of reducing atmospheres; in particular nitrogen and carbon dioxide are not good enough, so you need something like hydrogen (or, again, vacuum) to distill the magnesium out of the reaction vessel. As a structural metal magnesium isn't very useful unless you also have aluminum or zinc or manganese or silicon, which the ancients didn't; but it's a first-rate incendiary weapon and thermite reducer, permitting both the easy achievement of very high temperatures and the thermite reduction of nearly all other metals. Copper and iron with any random kind of electrolyte makes a (rather poor) battery; this permits you to electroplate. The Baghdad Battery surely isn't such a battery, but it demonstrates that the materials available to build one were available starting in the Iron Age. Electroplating is potentially useful for corrosion resistance, but to electroplate copper onto iron you apparently need an intermediate metal like nickel or chromium to get an adherent coating, and to electroplate gold or silver you probably need cyanide or more exotic materials. Alternate possible uses for low-voltage expensive electricity include molten-salt electrolysis and the production of hydrogen from water. Copper rectifiers and photovoltaic panels pretty much just require heating up a sheet of copper, I think? Similarly copper wires for a generator only require wire drawing (Chalcolithic I think, at least 2nd Dynasty Egypt) and something like shellac (Mahabharata-age India, though rare in Europe until 500 years ago), though many 19th-century electrical machines were instead insulated with silk cloth. Vapor-compression air conditioners probably need pretty advanced sealing and machining techniques, but desiccant-driven air conditioners can operate entirely at atmospheric pressure. The desiccants are pretty corrosive, but beeswax-painted metal or salt-glazed ceramic pipes are probably fine for magnesium chloride ("bitterns" from making sea salt, Japanese "nigari"), and you can pump it around with a geyser pump. I think the geyser pump is still under patent, but it can be made of unglazed earthenware or carved out of bamboo (both Neolithic) and driven by either a bellows (Neolithic) or a trompe (Renaissance). Some years ago I figured out a way to use textile thread (and, say, tree branches) to make logic gates; I posted that to kragen-tol. So you probably could have done digital logic with Neolithic materials science, though only at kHz clock rates. And of course you could have hand-filed clockwork gears out of sheet copper as early as the Chalcolithic, instead of waiting until the Hellenistic period.
- mlsu 4y ago
  This is great. At a fundamental level, it's entropy and energy. You need to expend some energy (1000/2000/5000/6 billion years of energy!) to organize your knowledge well enough to get that bit of entropy that tells you that you can shape the leaves this way to make a fan, or you can put copper and iron together to make a battery. In a similar vein: we could have come up with StableDiffusion with just parchment, if ten of us had just written down the weights one at a time, 5 kilobytes per day, for several decades. Of course, what do we write down? That takes energy.
  - kragen 4y ago
    You'd still need calculators to run it on with sub-year response times. 100 teraflops times three minutes would 18 quadrillion multiplications of 8-digit numbers. At one minute per multiply you'd need 30 billion person-years of calculation to generate one image. The training process was indeed slower still, but maybe that is because we are doing it inefficiently, as we did our biological evolution.
- javajosh 4y ago
  What an incredible comment, thanks kragen! Good sources for anyone wanting to right realistic alternative history stories. Although I can't help but think that most people, ancient or otherwise, would me most interested in applications. The foundations, like atomic theory, or chemistry, require...something else. Curiosity? A culture that lauds discovery and motivates scientists at least in part with vanity? Greed? A desire for more, to conquer ones enemies? Science is very good at making better weaponry and more indirectly, for reducing scarcity for all, making larger populations, and so larger armies.
  - kragen 4y ago
    Thank you! Me, I'm more interested in building alternate futures than writing stories about alternate histories. It's just more difficult! If you want to understand what cultural or political factors have prevented innovation, maybe a good place to start is the cultures that are currently failing at innovation. I mean, on an absolute scale, that's all of them, but some are failing harder than others: the PRC is failing harder than Taiwan, the US is failing harder than the PRC, Brazil is failing harder than the US, Nigeria is failing harder than Brazil, and Malawi is failing harder than Nigeria. Maybe an especially good place to start would be the stories of people who have succeeded at innovation despite finding themselves in the most unfavorable conditions, like William Kamkwamba's application of windmills in Malawi. He wrote a book about it: The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. Any STEM graduate school research program in the US or Europe is full of people who are advancing foundational knowledge, but moved there from cultures that are doing very poorly at advancing foundational knowledge. It might be worthwhile to talk to them. Of course, the situation 100, 1000, or 10'000 years ago was not the same as the situation in Malawi today. On one hand, the people who invented fossil-fueled mass production, movable type, and gunpowder 1000 years ago in China didn't have to compete economically against cheaper and technically superior imports from the modern US, the way Malawians do today; on the other, they couldn't import knowledge and tools from the US, and they didn't know that the things they were attempting were even possible.

kragen 4y ago

Sure, tens to hundreds of thousands of years ago nobody was working with metals at all. And the centrifugal fan he uses is a modern invention; the oldest mention of them in the literature is less than 500 years old, in De Re Metallica. It's really interesting to think about the "could have done this but didn't" stuff! Silver chloride is one of the less sensitive silver halides you can use in photography, but it works; it dates to about 2500 years ago when someone (the Lydians?) figured out you could separate silver from gold by firing it with salt. So you could have done photography 2500 years ago instead of 200 years ago. There's lots of stuff in optics that only requires a Fizeau interferometer (made of a candle flame and a razor blade, Bronze Age stuff), abrasives (Paleolithic), reflective metal (Bronze Age again; Newton's mirrors were just a high-tin bronze), abrasives, and an unreasonable amount of patience. Imhotep could have made a Dobsonian telescope and seen the moons of Jupiter 4700 years ago if he'd known that was a worthwhile thing to do. Speaking of metrology, I've heard conflicting stories about surface plates: one story that the Babylonians knew about grinding three surfaces alternately against one another to make them all flat, and another that Maudslay originated the technique only about 220 years ago. (Or, sometimes, Maudslay's apprentice Whitworth.) This is clearly a technique you could have employed in the Neolithic. Sorption pumps for fine vacuum (usually 1e-2 mbar) require a high-surface-area sorbent (zeolite or maybe even kieselguhr or ball-milled non-zeolite clay: Neolithic), probably glassblowing (Roman Republic era in Syria), sealed joints (apparently Victorians used sealing wax successfully up to HV though not UHV, and sealing wax is pine resin and beeswax: probably Paleolithic), and some way to heat up the sorbent (fire: Paleolithic). Fine vacuum is enough for thermos bottles (dewars) and CVD, among other things. Conceivably you could have just luted together an opaque vacuum apparatus from glazed earthenware (which dates from probably 3500 years ago), using sealing wax to seal the joints. But debugging the thing or manipulating anything inside of it would have been an invincible challenge. Sorption pumping works better if you can also cool the sorbent down, too; dry ice is today made by explosive decompression of carbon dioxide, similar to how puffed corn and rice can be made with a grain-puffing cannon, and regularly is by Chinese street vendors. Pure carbon dioxide is available by calcining limestone (thus the name: Neolithic) in a metal vessel (Bronze Age) that bubbles the result into water into a "gasometer", a bucket floating upside down. Compressing the carbon dioxide sufficiently probably requires the accurately cylindrical bores produced for the first time for things like the Dardanelles Gun (15th century). But possibly not; the firepiston in Madagascar is at least 1500 years old, dating back to the time of the Western Roman Empire, and I think it can achieve sufficiently high compression. Mercury has been known all over the world since antiquity, though usually as a precious metal rather than a demonic pollutant. Mercury plus glassblowing (Roman Republic, again) is enough for a Sprengel pump, which can achieve 1 mPa, high vacuum, 1000 times higher vacuum than an ordinary sorption pump (though some sorption pumps are even better than the Sprengel pump). High vacuum is sufficient to make vacuum tubes. The Pidgeon process to refine magnesium requires dolomite, ferrosilicon, and a reducing atmosphere or vacuum. You get ferrosilicon by firing iron, coke, and silica in acid refractory (such as silica). Magnesium is especially demanding of reducing atmospheres; in particular nitrogen and carbon dioxide are not good enough, so you need something like hydrogen (or, again, vacuum) to distill the magnesium out of the reaction vessel. As a structural metal magnesium isn't very useful unless you also have aluminum or zinc or manganese or silicon, which the ancients didn't; but it's a first-rate incendiary weapon and thermite reducer, permitting both the easy achievement of very high temperatures and the thermite reduction of nearly all other metals. Copper and iron with any random kind of electrolyte makes a (rather poor) battery; this permits you to electroplate. The Baghdad Battery surely isn't such a battery, but it demonstrates that the materials available to build one were available starting in the Iron Age. Electroplating is potentially useful for corrosion resistance, but to electroplate copper onto iron you apparently need an intermediate metal like nickel or chromium to get an adherent coating, and to electroplate gold or silver you probably need cyanide or more exotic materials. Alternate possible uses for low-voltage expensive electricity include molten-salt electrolysis and the production of hydrogen from water. Copper rectifiers and photovoltaic panels pretty much just require heating up a sheet of copper, I think? Similarly copper wires for a generator only require wire drawing (Chalcolithic I think, at least 2nd Dynasty Egypt) and something like shellac (Mahabharata-age India, though rare in Europe until 500 years ago), though many 19th-century electrical machines were instead insulated with silk cloth. Vapor-compression air conditioners probably need pretty advanced sealing and machining techniques, but desiccant-driven air conditioners can operate entirely at atmospheric pressure. The desiccants are pretty corrosive, but beeswax-painted metal or salt-glazed ceramic pipes are probably fine for magnesium chloride ("bitterns" from making sea salt, Japanese "nigari"), and you can pump it around with a geyser pump. I think the geyser pump is still under patent, but it can be made of unglazed earthenware or carved out of bamboo (both Neolithic) and driven by either a bellows (Neolithic) or a trompe (Renaissance). Some years ago I figured out a way to use textile thread (and, say, tree branches) to make logic gates; I posted that to kragen-tol. So you probably could have done digital logic with Neolithic materials science, though only at kHz clock rates. And of course you could have hand-filed clockwork gears out of sheet copper as early as the Chalcolithic, instead of waiting until the Hellenistic period.

mlsu 4y ago
This is great. At a fundamental level, it's entropy and energy. You need to expend some energy (1000/2000/5000/6 billion years of energy!) to organize your knowledge well enough to get that bit of entropy that tells you that you can shape the leaves this way to make a fan, or you can put copper and iron together to make a battery. In a similar vein: we could have come up with StableDiffusion with just parchment, if ten of us had just written down the weights one at a time, 5 kilobytes per day, for several decades. Of course, what do we write down? That takes energy.
- kragen 4y ago
  You'd still need calculators to run it on with sub-year response times. 100 teraflops times three minutes would 18 quadrillion multiplications of 8-digit numbers. At one minute per multiply you'd need 30 billion person-years of calculation to generate one image. The training process was indeed slower still, but maybe that is because we are doing it inefficiently, as we did our biological evolution.
javajosh 4y ago
What an incredible comment, thanks kragen! Good sources for anyone wanting to right realistic alternative history stories. Although I can't help but think that most people, ancient or otherwise, would me most interested in applications. The foundations, like atomic theory, or chemistry, require...something else. Curiosity? A culture that lauds discovery and motivates scientists at least in part with vanity? Greed? A desire for more, to conquer ones enemies? Science is very good at making better weaponry and more indirectly, for reducing scarcity for all, making larger populations, and so larger armies.
- kragen 4y ago
  Thank you! Me, I'm more interested in building alternate futures than writing stories about alternate histories. It's just more difficult! If you want to understand what cultural or political factors have prevented innovation, maybe a good place to start is the cultures that are currently failing at innovation. I mean, on an absolute scale, that's all of them, but some are failing harder than others: the PRC is failing harder than Taiwan, the US is failing harder than the PRC, Brazil is failing harder than the US, Nigeria is failing harder than Brazil, and Malawi is failing harder than Nigeria. Maybe an especially good place to start would be the stories of people who have succeeded at innovation despite finding themselves in the most unfavorable conditions, like William Kamkwamba's application of windmills in Malawi. He wrote a book about it: The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. Any STEM graduate school research program in the US or Europe is full of people who are advancing foundational knowledge, but moved there from cultures that are doing very poorly at advancing foundational knowledge. It might be worthwhile to talk to them. Of course, the situation 100, 1000, or 10'000 years ago was not the same as the situation in Malawi today. On one hand, the people who invented fossil-fueled mass production, movable type, and gunpowder 1000 years ago in China didn't have to compete economically against cheaper and technically superior imports from the modern US, the way Malawians do today; on the other, they couldn't import knowledge and tools from the US, and they didn't know that the things they were attempting were even possible.