Stone knives, bearskins, and some ore? [Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος]

A book I'd like to see:

How to build a radio transmitter completely from scratch, starting with how to chip flint to make the stone knife to skin an animal to make leather to use for seals in the pump you'll build in order to evacuate the vacuum tubes you'll blow from glass that started off as sand; and how to figure out where to dig for copper ore, tips on constructing tools with which to remove it from the ground, and how to smelt it and draw the copper into wire.

Does this book already exist? It'd be a fun read, no? (Okay, so maybe being able to construct a functioning time machine starting with raw materials in their natural forms would make even more sense in terms of situations in which you might actually need such a book, but ...)

I wonder whether there are any steps which would absolutely require more than one person -- drawing the wire, perhaps? And would any iron or steel need to be involved, or could the entire project be accomplished with only wood, leather, sinew, quartz, flint, copper, zinc, and water? (Obviously some steps would be easier with steel tools, but then we'd have to mine and smelt the iron ore, add coke, etc.)

"I am endeavoring, Madam, to construct a mnemonic memory circuit using stone knives and bearskins."

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I'd buy that book, I think. The trouble is that once you'd built the thing you'd need a licence to test it.

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Would you then have to make paper and pencil to apply for the license?

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Hmm. I don't suppose the FCC would take an application on a clay tablet, would it? Okay, we need to include an appendix containing instructions for making paper.

There'd be a companion volume explaining how to start a government so you could create a bureaucracy so you could have a licensing authority. I guess we'd start with Hobbes...

Uh ... I think that if we make it possible to dial down the power to 0.25 W and stick to CB channel 14, we don't need a license. But to test it at useful "please rescue me from this island" power levels, you're right. I think I'd be willing to deal with the license application after dealing with all that hands-on stuff though.

That would be a cool book.. I do love the things that break stuff down to the basics, and most people don't even think about "how do you get a vacuum tube" because you just go and buy one. Well, yeah, but if you couldn't?

... except that most of my favouritest valves are not even being manufactured any more ...

"If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe."
---Carl Sagan (1934 - 1996)

I like that one!

%wince% True, true (and I'll have to use that as a QotD later). That's why I snuck in the phrase "raw materials in their natural forms" -- it gives me enough wiggle room (by choosing a definition of "natural") to avoid having to create the universe first, but not enough leeway to make it too easy. ;-)

You probably would have liked Rough Science, a PBS TV show in which several scientists were placed on an island, and made to construct assorted devices out of (mostly) whatever they could find on the island. They were allowed _some_ basic tools, including wire, so it's not quite as from the ground up as you are thinking of. Nonetheless, cool stuff.

I liked it immensely. What was the greatest fun was second-guessing the people on the island and listing the reasons why their this or that solution will not work -- and being right. The steam turbine, for instance, should have been obviously impossible to the engineers there.

It sounds like I'd enjoy it. I hadn't heard of it before. It doesn't seem to be on the PBS station I can tune in, but I'll try to remember to keep an eye out in case it shows up. (If anyone's got a VHS tape or DVD I could borrow, I'd be interested in seeing it.)

Play "Settlers of the Stone Age"

Catch me sometime when I'm in a mood conducive to sitting down to play a game (happens too seldom).

But I think it'd be cool to actually do this, sort of like the SCAdian smith who made a knife starting with iron ore (I don't think he dug the ore himself, but IIRC he did smelt it), but mixing "tech levels".

I wonder how long it would take.

Give me a waterwheel and I'll draw the wire on my own.

Iron and steel are not strictly necessary for the finished product, but making decent pliers out of anything else is a bit iffy.

If you don't need any fancy modulation, spark gap transmitter doesn't require the vacuum tubes. Those things are really filigree-level silversmithing inside, and getting the vacuum hard enough is going to be toughish.

Mechanical logic circuits have been suggested. I seem to recall a Scientific American article where at least gates were made of ropes and pulleys. There was another where nozzled streams of water were arranged to perform logic actions.

Some folks built logic gates out of Tinkertoys. I don't think they had to add any string, but I'm not certain. They later reproduced their device using Giant Tinkertoys for an audience.

My first computer (when I was very small) was mechanical, a DigiComp I. It was a 3- or 4-bit machine that could add, subtract, count by ones or twos (up or down) ... I don't remember whether it could multiply. It was plastic sliders and metal rods, and was operated by pushing and pulling one tab that served as what I now think of as the clock pin. All but one of the people I know who had one wish they could find another. IIRC, the one exception still has his.

It was a lovely distraction for a little while, but I was soon back to asking my father how one got from vacuum tubes, relays, and levers, to COBOL and the BatComputer. He could explain valves, binary, octal, and IBM punch-card encoding, and he could program COBOL and SOAP, but he couldn't explain the stuff in between.

I didn't think I needed steel components in the radio, but I wasn't sure whether I'd need steel tools or machines to make some of the parts.

Now I'm trying to imagine bronze or brass pliers ... Hmm.

I was also trying to figure out how to power the thing -- whether to build a battery (which means at least two types of metal, right?) or a dynamo. With a crank/pedal/waterwheel-operated dynamo, would we need any metal other than copper, except for making tools out of?

For that matter, could we get away with using a metal easier to work with and/or easier to refine?

Good point about the waterwheel instead of a second pair of hands; I should've thought of that.

I feel wet cells as the power source might be easier to attain than a generator. There are several different designs, some based on two metals, others on a metal and carbon, and then the electrolyte, sometimes alcalic, sometimes acidic. Wet cells will wear out and need replacing, but their manufacture doesn't need quite as much mechanical prowess and infrastructure as a generator.

For ~~good~~ decent generator, ferromagnetic metal is unavoidable. I don't, however, know the properties of natural magnets sufficiently well to give a definitive ruling on this. For a self-excited generator, only a small permanent magnet field is required. But the windings should really be supported by magnetically permeable metal.

For the electrical circuitry, almost any conductive material will do. It is only a matter of losses. Tin, brass, bronze, lead, silver, gold...

I was thinking of the vacuum. That's going to be your stumbling stone. In a vacuum tube there is a hard vacuum; even the industrial manufacturers don't get it good enough. Instead, after having exhausted their mechanical pumps, diffusion and ion traps, they seal the envelope and fire a small getter charge to trap the residual gases into solid compounds. But to get to that point, they're using technolgy that is pretty challenging to replicate.

I think I am still advocating the spark gap transmitter.

Two votes for spark gap. Generator electricity with a water wheel - so you'll need basic woodworking tools, draw the wire, insulate it with some kind of goo (some kind of petrochemical?), build an air gap capacitor (so you'll need some kind of metal there too) and let her rip!

Because if I want to get off of that *&%@ island I want to make a LOT of noise.

-m

I do like how you think.

Look for anything written by Dave Gingery. That will be about as close as you'll come to the book you're looking for.

I recall one of Robert Heinlein's books (Was it "Rocket Ship Gallileo"?) where our heroes are stranded on the moon and need to build a transmitter to signal for help.
They need to build tubes. Vacuum isn't a problem. In fact, they don't even bother
with (glass) envelopes, but just build the tubes far enough apart and/or pile rocks between them.

"Look for anything written by Dave Gingery."

Will do. Thanks for the suggestion.

"they don't even bother with (glass) envelopes, but just build the tubes far enough apart and/or pile rocks between them."

#blink# The distance between tubes is so that the emissions from one cathode won't interfere with the neighbouring tubes? (Inverse square law and all that...) I was thinking of doing this someplace with atmosphere, but yeah, that's a cool trick for the moon.

I think some of the farspace (Pioneer? V-ger?) probes had their power amplifier tubes made in a like manner. The envelope was there for the meachnical protection, stability, and mounting, but there was a hole left for the hard vacuum of translunar space to bring the tube to unearthly level of performance.

I seem to remember reading an SF book wherein it was mentioned that there was something akin to a sport where the winner was the one who could get to the highest level of technology in time x. There was also mention of there being exhaustive literature on the subject.

I'd love to see such a thing come to pass. I'd especially love to see a series of books that provided a detailed, step by step account of how to get from stone age level tech to roughly modern day tech. Printed in such a way to last a long time, so when civilization collapses, they can be found and things can be rebuilt.

Maybe we should start a wiki on the topic? With the eventual goal of having it be printed out into a book. We could start with something (relatively) simple to start (like the radio
project) and move on from there. I've been wanting an excuse to play with mediawiki anyway.

You really wouldn't need to worry about the flint for a knife. You could use the sand to produce glass, which will fracture just like flint or any other mmaterial high in silica. I've made several knives of each material, and there is no noticable difference either way.

Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Stone knives, bearskins, and some ore?

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Rough Science

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Mechanical Digital Computing

Steel

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stone knife... naw..

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January