Iron, How Did They Make It? Part I, Mining

You'll probably enjoy the rest of the author's blog then. He really does his best to focus on systems, modes of production, and modes of organization. This is has been the standard for modern historians for quite a long time, but most pop history is still stuck in a "Great people, great ideas, great battles" framing. The author of this blog complains about this too at some point (I think somewhere in his Sparta series).

This is true for most topics. The way that math is taught, the way that history is taught- all separate the vast and deeply interconnected miracles of human ingenuity and achievement and discretize them into asynchronous packets of information to be tested on. How could you learn about Arabic numerals and Roman numerals without learning about how they slowly spread across Europe and revolutionized business? One without the other is boring. Every human invention is connected.

Some suggested things to look up, caveat that you may already know about a few of these-

- John Taylor Gatto and his myriad essays about the state and education (especially "The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher" as a Gatto primer)

- Buckminster Fuller's "Everything I Know" lecture series (transcripts are up somewhere)

- Anything Richard Feynman wrote

University-level history is much more like this, at least these days, than "important people doing important things," perhaps partly thanks to the influential Annales school [1], although that probably varies by country. Lots of economic and social structures, plus lots of documents, mostly court documents, that tell the lives of ordinary people. I took a class just on the everyday "things" of people in early-modern Europe -- what they ate and how, what they wore etc.

What ultimately killed it for me was that after a few short years, when you get to the research level, the work becomes so hyper-focused, like shipbuilding in 17th century Spain or weddings in late-medieval Germany, that you don't have the chance to look at the bigger picture until you're an established professor and I didn't have the patience for it.

But I was happy to put the skills I had learned into a personal project a few years ago, and composed an anthology of primary sources on the history of logic, algebra and computation, that I published -- in a rather crudely edited form -- as a series of blog posts: https://pron.github.io/computation-logic-algebra (although intellectual history is often about "important people").

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annales_school

I've long felt that the greatest exploration of history every created in entertainment form was the 20-year long show called Modern Marvels[0] on the History Channel. It was the History Channels very first show and since it's beginnings in 1995, Modern Marvels has treated us to 44 minute long explorations of the history of things (infrastructure, buildings, devices, earthworks, vehicles) with a format that avoids the boring and useless. All "5 Ws" are addressed each episode, but instead of focusing on "when" and "who" and "where", it focuses on:

- "What?" What is this thing? What is it's purpose? How does it do what it does? What can we learn from it?

- "Why?" Why was it built? Why did we drive to build something so important? Why should I care?

Only after we understand what it is and why it is, do we start to look at who built it, when they built it, etc (though they sneak in some who and when to contextualize the why quite often (which is great!)). Take for example this exploration of the United States Library of Congress:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZuXepy0DdY

What a sublime show. And it has such a fantastic narrator and opening theme as well!

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Marvels

> I don't dislike history, but the way it is taught, as a list of important people doing important things on important dates.

You might find interest in recent Howard Zinn thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24510079

As a huge history fan that is beyond sad to me. History has more crazy story then Game of Thrones, is insanely complex and multifaceted dominated by changing climate, invisible hand of markets, spontaneous mass movements, total accidents, insane coincidences, raging passions and people doing great or evil things.

Shared feeling. I once ran into a early 20th researcher that rebuild history through causal analysis rather than event listing. I failed to note his name or the name of his field.. but it felt exciting.

A great many of his posts are like that! I recommend all of them.

I mean, as the person in the video says, 1-2 people doing the work of 10 from just using a scythe vs a sickle.

I had no idea how effective a scythe actually was, thank you for that!

That would a lathe. The queen of machines. More specifically a screw-cutting lathe .

Could add a link but you will have more fun digging your own rabbit hole.

An as a rule of thumb, if you fall into this hobby, you are allowed one per decade old you are before it it has a hording disorder smell.

This is an interesting little website showcasing this kind of "tech tree" idea :) - https://simplifier.neocities.org/

For metal specifically this technology will be vital:

https://www.bostonmetal.com/

They figured out how to refine iron out of iron ore without all the usual steps.

We don't have coal on Mars. Everything need to be driven by electrochemistry.

Check out:

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pYNzxorJs0

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pg5M5WjGx5M

I'll bite at bending the meaning of 'machine'.

The Human / Operator; an advanced product of millions, or was it billions, of years of evolution which is self replicating (in the right pairs at least).

I give up, what is it?

Recently caught a similar one from Alec (Mr. Connectify) of https://www.youtube.com/c/TechnologyConnections who described a mechanical component as "circular, like most arguments on the internet".

It is now corrected.

Bronze is not that bad. Several reproduction efforts have used bronze axes, at first like you they assume that you need to worry, but by the end they realize bronze isn't that delicate and works just fine. Don't get me wrong, iron is better in every way, but bronze isn't as bad as people think.

That's because unlike Jared Diamond, Bret Devereaux is a professional historian who understands what he is talking about, and is careful to note his sources and what areas we don't know much about.

You are in luck: https://acoup.blog/feed/

This is the 3rd article on this blog I've read recently from beginning to end, and thoroughly enjoyed.

I also just subscribed to his Patreon - it's worth supporting this quality of work.

Not if you install the right modpacks!