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Comment by mikkupikku | Hacker News Reader

> Its planks are made of Pomeranian oak from modern-day Poland, and the wood of its frame came from the Netherlands.

I'm surprised the raw materials came together over such a distance. That transporting lumber was economical back then is remarkable.

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I live in a late 18th-century rowhouse where there is large stonework for window sills/surrounds/doorways all done in a very specific pink granite that was carved from a shoreline quarry a significant distance away. Massive stones, 100kg+ each, had to be transported by horse-drawn cart, over not-easy-terrain, a distance that would have taken two horses probably 8-9 hours per trip, and enough stones that it was probably 15-20 trips. Let alone the effort that had to have been required to carve surprisingly square/cuboid shapes from solid granite without power tools. It's mindblowing to me that someone was able to afford such a home construction, let alone the time taken to do it, in ~ 1790. It isn't a particularly rare style in this neighborhood either.

Fast forward 200 years, and I was sweating at the cost just to hire someone to deliver new hardwood countertops from a place not much further away. By truck. By a single person. In a single afternoon. No horses required.

Are you anywhere near (the remains of?) a canal network? That was how bulk cargo was generally transported in the 18th century. First-mile + last-mile would be by wagon, of course, though usually pulled by oxen, not horses. Canals were economically revolutionary, for 100-150 years, until railroads largely supplanted them. They remained viable, in limited circumstances (ie, some routes for some cargos), until the mid-20th century.

Astute observation; no canal, but there is a river outflow to a bay, whereby a ship could have carried stones from the quarry, albeit a long way around a peninsula; it is possible that was a more effective way to get them close, and then use horse and cart to get them the last bit of distance.

Thinking about the logistics of such a feat at that time is wild to me for just the construction of a private residence.

And it's easy to miss them as several have been covered over or filled in, depending on where you are and how big it was.

Well, as the article says:

> Per the statement, the large vessels were made to sail north from the Netherlands, around Denmark and toward the Baltic Sea. [...] Uldum adds that shipbuilders made the cogs as large as possible to transport bulky cargo, like timber

Once you've built one cog, you've got the ideal tool to fetch Polish timber to build more!

Yea, this is like the early railroads making steel cheaper via cheaper transport of bulk ore/coal, that made cheaper railroads, that then ship more products made of steel to larger markets opened by the extended rail networks, etc.

This happened with tin all the way back in the Bronze Age, where a lot of it was shipped as ingots from industrial-scale mines / smelters in Cornwall all the way to the Mediterranean empires to mix with copper to make Bronze.

A cog-based auto-catalytic wood industry is super interesting.

Also this stuff never happens by design. Some entrepreneur notices things and the costs, make a decision, suddenly more products exist, organic trading routes appear. There is no need for computers or grand design or hyper-managerial government. The market solves the problem

In the US context that's largely true, with the government providing useful regulations after the fact (allowing national corporations, railroad right-of-way law, etc.).

The exception being guys like JP Morgan who organized industry cartels that acted as private "central planners", part of which turned into the current Federal Reserve Bank.

But for countries like China and many others in Asia with strong state capacity, industrial policy was planned top-down for the "commanding heights" of industry like: roads, rail, shipping, airlines, telecom, steel, energy, etc., and that actually worked very well, faster than private markets alone, with the benefit of existing tech and models to follow.

We are talking about a sophisticated international trading system that happened 600 years ago. Clearly you don’t need anything like that to make it happen. Let alone Ancient Rome, Greece, Assyria, Sumer…

In your above comment you said:

> There is no need for computers or grand design or hyper-managerial government.

The response above is just pointing out that although you don't need a grand design or hyper-managerial government, it can be done using that approach too.

I posit it’s actually far more efficient to just let the market do its magic. No need for absurd Chinese state intrusions

This is speculation tinged with economics dogma.

>Once you've built one cog, you've got the ideal tool to fetch Polish timber to build more!

It's cogs all the way down!

Infinite cog glitch!

Check out the History of the Germans season on the Hanseatic League [0]. The bulk goods trade was in the Baltic / Northern Europe was actually huge. The Hansa themselves traded all the way from London to Novgorod. Anyway, it's an absolutely fascinating subject and period.

[0] https://historyofthegermans.com/hanseatic-league/

They had trading posts in Scotland, the Faroes and Iceland.

You might be interested in tin transport during the bronze age then - You'll find tin mined in Cornwall in ships that sank off the coast of Turkey 3500 years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_sources_and_trade_during_a...

This is because the material characteristics were so important that there simply were no good alternatives. Just like you would use steel for one thing and aluminum for another today. There were whole libraries of wood samples that you could go and look at or even test to ensure that your structure held up. Windmills are another item where wood from multiple locations came together.

Wood ranges from one extreme to another in terms of density, hardness, ease of working, strength in various directions and so on. There are hardwoods that are so hard that you can't really work them with normal tools and there are softwoods so light that you have to handle them carefully or you'll dent them.

I’m more surprised we can tell so precisely where wood that spent 600 years under the sea came from

Is it possible the ship was rebuilt?

No the wood is also dated.

Too wet to be on tinder though.

Dendrochronology-based age verification is coming soon

Slow clap.

Also, there's a "rings" joke in here somewhere about Tinder not being for finding a marriage but I can't figure it out.

Maybe s/marriage/stable marriage/, then we can talk about growing population of multi-ringers.

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