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Comment by fredophile | Hacker News Reader

My impression is that the big road block to unlocking something like the industrial revolution is the precision of your tools. During the industrial revolution there were big advances in metal tools. Maudslay's development of a metal lathe that could be used to make metal tools was a huge step forward. I think if you can reach this point of development you should be able to make continued progress using non-fossil fuel power sources.

Are there other natural materials that could be used instead of metal to achieve this level of precision? I'm pretty skeptical on this.

Are there energy sources, other than coal, that could be used to develop early metallurgy to the point where someone could re-invent Maudslay's lathe? I suspect that there are and given enough time someone would find one. It might take longer to reach this point but I believe we could get there.

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Indeed, precision was key: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNRnrn5DE58

Charcoal is technically an unlimited renewable resource.

Unlimited only if you don't take time into account. A big reason for the switch from charcoal to coal in steelmaking was running out of trees to make charcoal from.

Not really an issue. Knowledge steadily accumulates over time.

The key foundations of human intelligence and ingenuity will always remains regardless of whether or not fossil fuels exist for us to exploit. Non-renewable resources only served to speed up our industrialization.

> Knowledge steadily accumulates over time.

No, it doesn't. Only knowledge that people consider to have value will be retained over time. Many things are lost to history, for example.. nobody knows how to make cobblestone. (Or so I'm told)

I've never heard that about cobblestone, but Roman concrete and "Damascus" steel are other examples.

Granted, we've recently (mostly) rediscovered how to make those, but it shows knowledge accumulation isn't monotonic.

There’s an important distinction here between losing the knowledge of how X people made Y, and losing the knowledge of how to do Y. For instance, the secret of Greek fire was lost to history, but I’m pretty sure napalm does the job just fine these days.

As for Roman concrete, the Romans were blessed with some really nice volcanic ash, but we can build things out of concrete that the Romans never could thanks to rebar alone.

>nobody knows how to make cobblestone.

Can you expand on that? I didn't think cobblestones were made? Don't you just pick suitable stones?

In the United States, cobblestones were manufactured large blocks that were impermeable and very durable. Streets were paved with them.

I think it sounds like a Sett:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sett_(paving)

(which is often called a cobblestone)

Edit: Still being laid in Edinburgh...

Here in the Midwest, far away from the granite blocks imported by ships there were companies that made additively "cobblestones", with their names on them, in my walkway there are such stones made in Attica, Indiana. The knowledge of how those were made, is apparently lost. Those things are tough like you wouldn't believe.

Ah, interesting and definitely not a Sett.

I had assumed you meant that the stone had been manufactured into a block, but this is clearly something else.

Some kind of special concrete formulation do you think?

The formula kept as a trade secret, then lost when the company closed or got bought or something I suppose?

Rather unfortunate, alas.

Edited

There are masonry techniques that are considered lost arts is probably what he's referring to, including types of load bearing cobblestone construction.

An example that comes to mind is a brick townhouse nearby that was struck by a car and part of a structural brick rounded wall collapsed. It remained that way for many years because the owner simply couldn't find a mason that knew how to rebuild it.

There are certainly many periods of knowledge regression in history. Following the decline of the Roman Empire, many technologies were lost for centuries. In some cases the knowledge was preserved within one geographic area but lost to another.

Even modern technology can be lost. Look inside any company with a lackluster documentation culture to see this in action on a small scale.

Even NASA had to spent considerable time re-discovering how the Saturn 5 was put together.

Edit - I think I meant this as a reply to the GP, but I'll leave it here.

This one strikes painfully close to home! I grew up on an old colonial street in a major Latin American city. Beautiful street "paved" with cobblestones.

Somehow the cobblestones managed to look both randomly placed and have some "lines" that gave it a very orderly look. The cobblestones were placed in some substrate that allowed moss to grow between them.

At some point about 10 years ago, the city decided to tear up a giant trench in the middle of the street to replace some sewage. When they were done, they covered the trench with concrete and then re-placed the stones they had removed onto the concrete.

It looks nothing like it used to. Just messy. I think that if someone who didn't grow up there were to see it, they would think it was a perfectly charming street, but really it lost so, so much.

I asked around and apparently nobody knows how to lay cobblestones anymore. There was a certain art to how they were placed and the substrate selected: dirt, then sand (what kind? how coarse?) then stones, then something else. This ensured that they would never wash away even in the torrential rains we get here every year.

Placing cobblestones seems like an easy thing to do. Just rocks on dirt, right? But how do you ensure they never move, they never wash away, they don't get covered in dirt or greenery.

The craziest thing is that the street had remained basically pristine for what was probably 100+ years, but the new stones on concrete are already falling out.

> apparently nobody knows how to lay cobblestones anymore

This is regional. I went to a talk on cobblestone streets in New York. There are entire books dedicated to the craft, and new scholarship on it ongoing. (It pertains closely to the question of prefabricated infrastructure.)

Make - as in mold and fire in a kiln... with ingredients upknown.

One of the scariest things I ever read was the true story of how the British Navy discovered and then lost the knowledge of how to cure scurvy.

IIRC, they found that limes (or lemons) would prevent scurvy on long voyages; then the ships got faster AND the switched to a citrus fruit lemons (or limes) that didn't have enough vitamin C to prevent scurvy, but they didn't realize it because the faster voyages didn't allow enough time for scurvy to develop; then on some longer voyages sailors did develop scurvy despite eating the citrus fruit, so the Navy erroneously concluded that citrus fruit didn't cure scurvy after all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scurvy#19th_century

I was told that gold and silver smithing, for jewelry, has lost techniques since the 1700s. There are well-known pieces of jewelry from that era that are not reproducible now.

There was a government project on how to design a 10,000 year sculpture indicating that this is a nuclear wasteland. No telling how to cut across language cultural barrier in case of a great reset.

It won't go away baring climate shift but you're limited to 2 watts per square meter of forest cover, though, and that's forest you'll be tempted to turn into agricultural land.

You can make coal from biomass, mainly wood (I'm not sure if some other plants could be used), but I guess it is antieconomical if you need lots of coal for high furnaces to make iron and/or steel.

it was economical in the middle ages for hundreds of years! But, having decent steel for your knights' armaments was also an existential concern for most power centers, a more peaceful society might deal with different economics.

Large areas were also deforested to provide the charcoal. Roughly 100kg wood to produce 1kg iron.

The Ruhr valley area was denuded already in Roman times due to this.

Yup. It's pretty interesting the places that managed their woodlands responsibly over a long time - Japan and England both had pretty sophisticated approaches to not running out of this resource over the long term.

Still in the UK, the moorlands you generally see were once woodlands - apparently that's why they have the distinctive terrain you now see. That's not in the era of written history mind and was for farming rather than iron.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmoor#Pre-history

For the demand of middle ages. Which wouldn't be nearly enough to even low level of industrialisation. For weapons and individual components and tools yes. But we can forget railways, ships, complex concrete structures. Basically most things large scale.

What is the use of a precision tool without the metallurgy to go with them?

You can get pretty far along metallurgy with burning wood and charcoal.

I think there might be some confusion here. Let me restate my argument to see if it clears things up.

I believe that if you can achieve precision tools you can use those tools to meet societies ongoing energy needs using renewable energy sources. This means that if you have non-fossil fuel energy sources available to advance metallurgy and toolmaking to the point you can make precision tools then you can reboot civilization without fossil fuels. I also think it is very likely that humans could do this but it might take longer than it did with fossil fuels.

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