[HN Gopher] Iron, How Did They Make It? Part II
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Iron, How Did They Make It? Part II
Author : parsecs
Score : 170 points
Date : 2020-09-25 16:02 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (acoup.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (acoup.blog)
| spsd wrote:
| Good read.
| kens wrote:
| I recently learned about the bizarre idea of "backyard furnaces".
| Around 1958, Mao Zedong decided the way to modernize was for
| every neighborhood to build numerous small blast furnaces and
| manufacture iron. These hundreds of thousands of furnaces needed
| constant fuel, leading to massive deforestation. Most of the iron
| was low quality or unusable, so the backyard furnaces were
| abandoned after a few years.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backyard_furnace
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60_Q-kAZbXA
| throckmortra wrote:
| Many of his ideas were ill-conceived:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign
| oflannabhra wrote:
| One of my favorite videos is a documentary of a village in Africa
| that goes through the process of producing iron tools from
| scratch, even though it is not required anymore, to pass on the
| knowledge.
|
| They find ore, construct furnaces, smelt the ore, refine the iron
| and then work it.
|
| It takes an entire village weeks to do this.
|
| https://youtu.be/RuCnZClWwpQ
| jandrese wrote:
| It's an often repeated fact that steel swords and the like were
| quite valuable during the middle ages, but it is a revelation
| that the reason they are so expensive is that they required
| hundreds or thousands of man hours chopping trees, managing slow
| burning fires, carting ore and wood around, etc... Modern media
| always just focuses on the last step (and usually gets it
| completely wrong to boot) while ignoring the small army of
| peasants needed to produce the raw materials for that smith to
| work into the sword/axe/helmet/etc...
| kbenson wrote:
| Sure, but in the same way, what about all the little things
| that go into making a pencil today? Usually, as long as there
| is a market, you can break down all those hours of gathering
| materials into the concept of "buy X at market price". It only
| starts looking unbelievably complex when you take control of
| every single stage and step, and are thus doing the equivalent
| of running multiple enterprises.
|
| That was probably more common in a feudal society, but not a
| given. I'm sure a lot of producers just bought the materials
| they needed.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Usually, as long as there is a market, you can break down
| all those hours of gathering materials into the concept of
| "buy X at market price". It only starts looking unbelievably
| complex when you take control of every single stage and step
|
| But that's not what we're talking about. A medieval sword is
| expensive because making one requires thousands of hours of
| labor. Making a modern pencil has a lot of steps, but
| requires probably less than ten seconds of labor. Pencils are
| cheap. The number of steps is not relevant to anything. The
| complexity isn't hugely relevant either, though more so than
| the number of steps.
| kbenson wrote:
| Chopping the wood, mining the graphite, drilling for the
| oil used to make the synthetic rubber for the eraser, you
| think the time and effort for all that amounts to ten
| seconds?
|
| The only reason I can come up with that you would think
| that is that you discount all these products that are
| easily delivered by the market as having no time and effort
| that goes into them. The part of the comment I was
| responding to is " _required hundreds or thousands of man
| hours chopping trees, managing slow burning fires, carting
| ore and wood around_ ". That's clearly referring to the
| whole production lifecycle of all the components, as
| otherwise you can just reduce that to the fixed cost of
| what you can pay the market to provide it for you.
|
| I didn't use a pencil as an example as a whim, but because
| this has been studied before[1], economics essays have been
| written on it[2], and people have actually gone through the
| steps to make it from scratch which has been covered
| here[3] (unfortunately the blog that was submitted seems to
| be gone), and let me tell you, the time to make a single
| pencil is not ten seconds if you could up all the time
| going into making the components that are used to create
| it.
|
| 1: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/i-pencil/
|
| 2: https://fee.org/resources/i-pencil-audio-pdf-and-html/
| (1958)
|
| 3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10631115
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| > Chopping the wood, mining the graphite, drilling for
| the oil used to make the synthetic rubber for the eraser,
| you think the time and effort for all that amounts to ten
| seconds?
|
| Looking at a single pencil, 10 seconds is well in excess
| of what is actually spent.
|
| Yes, if you are only making a single pencil, then it
| would take much, much more, but the labor savings from
| mass production is precisely what makes the modern
| society possible, and this is precisely how the situation
| today is very different from how things worked in the
| past. No-one has spent more than a few seconds in labor
| in that single pencil of yours, simply because they spent
| their thousands of hours of labor on producing very large
| quantities of varying commodities, vanishingly small
| portion of which were spent on making that single pencil.
| And this is exactly the key difference, because the
| woodcutters and colliers who did all those thousands of
| hours of labor to produce that charcoal did very
| emphatically not produce a large quantities of product,
| only some of which was actually spent on smelting that
| iron. _All_ of the products of their labor was consumed
| for just a relatively small amount of iron.
|
| Note that no-one is talking about complexity here. Modern
| steel manufacture is definitely more complex than it was
| in the early iron age. We are talking about marginal
| cost. And that is where all the difference is.
| kbenson wrote:
| > Yes, if you are only making a single pencil, then it
| would take much, much more, but the labor savings from
| mass production is precisely what makes the modern
| society possible
|
| Yes. And what I'm saying is that you can look at the base
| cost of inputs back then compared to now. A pencil today
| is cheap, but there are a lot of items that go into them,
| and all of those have seen a drastic drop in price as
| we've developed new techniques for harvesting those
| components.
|
| A pencil created in the same time period would have a
| vastly increased price too (obviously not as large as a
| sword). What I was originally trying to express, and it
| got kind of lost in my second comment, is that the
| original comment is right, but you can basically boil
| down the "hundreds or thousands of man hours chopping
| trees, managing slow burning fires, carting ore and wood
| around, etc" to "base component cost was exponentially
| higher".
|
| That concept was somewhat lost in my second comment, when
| I was going more into what inputs of a pencil, but didn't
| continue along with how those inputs have gotten cheaper
| over time. The cost to make one manually doesn't exactly
| show the cost of doing it before modern practices, but
| it's much closer than modern materials harvesting
| practices, so gives a better idea of what the cost would
| be back then.
|
| I wasn't trying to contradict with my first comment, but
| to expand and note there are ways of looking at this that
| scale along well and help you think along the lines of
| why things cost what they do at certain times. If you
| think of a sword as a set of inputs, and then ask
| yourself what those cost in the 1300's, you'll quickly
| come to the realization that swords were very expensive
| because all the things that went into making them were
| very expensive by the nature of harvesting and/or
| processing them.
| jtsiskin wrote:
| He is referring to marginal time for both cases.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| How much total labor time do you think goes into a single
| pencil? And if it's a non-trivial amount, then how in the
| world are pencils remotely as cheap as they actually are?
|
| Yes all those steps take work but you get a truly
| ridiculous amount of ore out of one person labor hour,
| enough for God knows how many thousands of pencils.
|
| I think you're confusing total labor volume involved in
| an entire supply chain that makes billions of pencils
| each year, and then what the person is responding to
| which is that you divide the total amount of labor spent
| by the total number of swords produced and it still ends
| up being hundreds to thousands of hours of labor _per
| sword_. This isn 't remotely true of pencils using modern
| automated factory production.
| jandrese wrote:
| If you went through the process yourself by hand each
| pencil is hilariously time consuming. But with giant
| machines mining the graphite, logging machines cutting
| down trees, trucks transporting both, going to a mill and
| then a factory to combine them, the amount of labor per
| pencil is minuscule because it gets spread out across
| millions of them. In medieval times you don't get the
| benefits of automation and mechanization, it's grunt work
| all the way down.
| kbenson wrote:
| > But with giant machines mining the graphite, logging
| machines cutting down trees, trucks transporting both,
| going to a mill and then a factory to combine them,
|
| Okay, so how much time does it take to make a steel sword
| with modern techniques and machines to do all the work
| mentioned? If we're going to compare, we have to compare
| while matching as many variables as possible. At a time
| when almost all processing was by a person doing it,
| possibly with the help of a domesticated animal, how much
| time does it take for people to but down trees, mine
| graphite (or lead), harvest rubber or process petroleum
| into synthetic rubber, and transport all those materials
| to a location so they can make them into pencils.
|
| > the amount of labor per pencil is minuscule because it
| gets spread out across millions of them.
|
| And the amount of labor per steel sword is also reduced
| because you're making tens or hundreds of them.
|
| A pencil still isn't ten seconds by this metric, _but
| that doesn 't matter_, as the point wasn't that a pencil
| is as hard or harder than a steel sword to make, but that
| if you want to look at all those inputs going into making
| a sword and count the time of people cutting down trees
| as part of it, then it makes sense to look at that part
| of it for modern processes as well.
|
| The only reason a pencil as we recognize it today (that
| is, not a twig with graphits, but the six sided with
| rubber item you imagine as the ideal of a U.S. style
| pencil) doesn't cost $5 or $10 or even more is because
| we've found ways to _vastly_ reduce the costs of
| harvesting and processing those inputs.
|
| The point of my original comment wasn't to say the person
| I was responding to was wrong (they were entirely correct
| about the reason for the cost is time and effort), but to
| expand on their comment and note that the complexity can
| also be abstracted away the same as it was back then. A
| sword is cheaper today than it was then for the same
| reason a pencil is cheaper today than it would have been
| then, the input components are vastly cheaper because
| we've found ways to harvest and process them more
| efficiently.
| zeveb wrote:
| > It only starts looking unbelievably complex when you take
| control of every single stage and step, and are this doing
| the equivalent of running multiple enterprises.
|
| Yup, and that's a good part of the problem with central
| planning and autarky. There is just _too much_ going on for
| any one decision-maker to effectively handle.
|
| There is a lesson there for large companies, I think. OTOH,
| go too far with decentralisation and you have Google's 8 or 9
| different messaging systems ...
| Retric wrote:
| That's not really the issue with planning. Tracking the
| inputs to a process is fairly simple, it's the output
| that's really the issue. Diminishing returns makes it
| really difficult to how when to stop. Large companies often
| waste increasing amounts of money on internal processes
| because there is no mechanism to moderate the behavior.
|
| Markets can be summed up as discovering the value of the
| Nth of each and every little thing. And strangely enough
| you can use them with central planning. NYC could set the
| number of Taxi medallions based on their market price.
| legitster wrote:
| I remember an article on HN once about medieval clothes. The
| reason people only usually owned one or two complete sets was
| that a single shirt could be the equivalent of thousands of
| dollars worth of labor in today's money.
| 01100011 wrote:
| Doesn't history generally ignore the contributions of legions
| of lower class to any of man's great achievements?
| InitialLastName wrote:
| The goal of this whole series (and the last one, about bread)
| is to in some part rectify that demonstrating and explaining
| the economics of the process from a more labor-oriented
| perspective.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| The kind of history you see on television and in general
| textbooks usually does. The omission has been recognized for
| a long time though, hence "social histories".
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| I am loving the series and yeah this does kind of sum it up.
| Based on the numbers given in this installment it seems like it
| would take a couple of months for one person to cut enough
| wood, and collect enough ore, to create a sword. (assuming they
| had access to the natural resources, and they had the
| physicality to do the labor, and the skill in smithing to craft
| the sword. Big assumption that)
|
| Using comparative economics, you could ask what would you have
| to sell something for to cover all of your expenses for two
| months? (food, housing, everything) Noting that if you're doing
| that much manual labor you are probably eating like an athlete
| in training (i.e. a LOT).
|
| Pretty sobering.
| notadog wrote:
| If you enjoyed reading this, you should also check out the
| discussion of Part I from a week ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24517792
| legitster wrote:
| People knew how to make steel from coal for centuries, but it
| made drastically inferior steel.
|
| So why did they switch to coal? It's been explained to me that
| the only reason people finally switched to coal was desperation -
| there were no usable wood reserves left at the time in Northern
| Britain. And people were desperate enough for iron that they
| would use the bad stuff.
|
| _Eventually_ they figured out how to adapt the chemistry to
| compensate for the sulfur being added, and you suddenly had
| cheap, plentiful metal that you could use to launch an industrial
| revolution.
|
| But I have to imagine, for the people at the time, how dystopian
| it must have all seemed. You have literally run out of trees, and
| the market is being flooded with cheap but low quality metal.
| rcshubhadeep wrote:
| K. K Leuva The Asur: A study of primitive iron-smelters
|
| An excellent account on this subject focused on the life of a
| small population who achieved state of the art in this thousands
| of years ago.
| nanomonkey wrote:
| (spoiler!) Answer: By burning _a lot_ of trees.
| time0ut wrote:
| Great read. If you are interested in seeing charcoal production
| in action (on a small scale), Primitive Technology [0] has a nice
| short video walking through it.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzLvqCTvOQY
| moneytide1 wrote:
| I recently encountered a small area where there had been a
| brush fire (could have occurred long ago). I was able to
| crumble off the outer inch of blackened tree branch stubs and
| the charcoal seemed fairly consistent. I would have to burn it
| to test how thoroughly it had been cooked - good charcoal does
| not give off much smoke because the heat burns away most
| everything but the carbon.
|
| Charcoal for water filtering, cooking, and smelting is probably
| very abundant in the Pacific Northwest right now....
| squibbles wrote:
| For those that may not have noticed, the article provides a link
| to a good document by Kennth Hodges with a list of prices for
| medieval items. http://medieval.ucdavis.edu/120D/Money.html
|
| If a fourteenth century charcoal burner was 3 pence a day (3d),
| then his daily wage could buy:
|
| - 6 chickens
|
| - half a goose
|
| - one shoe (half a pair)
|
| - 2 gallons of medium ale
|
| - about a gallon of very cheap wine
|
| - 1 spade and shovel
| plat12 wrote:
| Interesting to see that the largest input by an order of
| magnitude is trees.
|
| Reminds me of the infographics showing that only a small fraction
| of our water usage is direct (lawns, showers, ...) and most is
| indirect (meat, almonds, ...). In both cases, supply chains
| abstract over the inputs "embedded" in the outputs.
| comicjk wrote:
| In chemical engineering school I learned that water is the
| biggest input to most chemical plants. Even oil refineries take
| in more water than oil (mainly for cooling).
| plat12 wrote:
| Fracking also uses a substantial amount of water.
| baxtr wrote:
| So they had to burn many trees. Stupid question: were those
| regions with many forests ruling other parts of the world because
| they had access to trees? I don't quite remember if something
| like that was mentioned in Guns, Germs and Steel
| bluGill wrote:
| not really. To rule over other regions you need a good leader
| (probably several). Good has several senses here. You need to
| make good plans, and you need enough followers. The first
| because bad plans means your army is lost. The second because
| without enough soldiers you will lose. Note that better ability
| in one leads to less need of the other.
|
| Either way, a good ruler seeing a lack of resources can go take
| them from those who have.
| hristov wrote:
| Not sure. That would be an interesting thing to study. There
| are definitely civilizations that died or declined because they
| cut off most of their trees. Indonesia, Athens and even the
| Dutch are examples of those. But that is mostly attributed to
| the inability to built ships.
| Linell wrote:
| If you enjoy this at all, I recommend checking out the rest of
| this site or at least the submissions of it here on HN. There is
| a ton of super interesting content.
| alexpetralia wrote:
| I also mentioned this last time - so this is the last time I'll
| do it - but Bret Devereaux's work consistently hits the front
| page of HN because it is excellent quality. Adjunct professors
| are not paid a lot (sometimes even less than minimum wage
| annualized). Please consider donating!
| choeger wrote:
| Wait a second, why exactly could they not transport charcoal? I
| did this plenty of times, real charcoal, mind you, which one can
| buy easily in Germany. I understand that it is brittle, but
| putting it into sacks and carrying it off should not produce any
| problems after 4km, right?
| outworlder wrote:
| Carrying it, how? Assume uneven terrain, either human or
| animals. The sacks are being banged around (and are probably
| pretty porous).
|
| They may not necessarily have chariots, wagons or other animal
| powered vehicles at all or in the necessary quantity.
|
| > I did this plenty of times
|
| How much did you carry? Was it for barbecue or are you a
| blacksmith? How did you transport it over 4km? Did you use any
| roads? Any modern containers?
|
| Like the article says, iron smelting requires an enormous
| amount of charcoal.
| legitster wrote:
| I think the author over emphasized the brittleness. At the
| scale you would need the stuff, it would be much harder and
| more expensive to move than it is worth. For the same reason
| that even today things like gravel and sand are almost always
| locally sourced.
|
| Remember that in the medieval period, even sacks were
| relatively valuable things.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| Also, prior to the invention of the steam engine, you
| couldn't move goods overland with any sort of efficiency. You
| needed, at a minimum, canals. The author of the blog has
| covered this in great detail in previous posts and it comes
| out to something like you can't have an overland supply chain
| longer than a week in pre-modern times because the draft
| animals will eat more than they carry in food in a week. A
| 5-day supply chain is already carrying more in food than it
| is other goods. And you can't just rely on pasturage because
| (a) it's often not available (and highly depends on season),
| (b) your draft animals would need to spend hours each day
| foraging to get enough food, which is hours they aren't
| spending moving, and thus (c) the trip takes longer and you
| need to bring more food for the _humans_ accompanying it.
|
| So, yeah, you could probably have carried charcoal from one
| town to the next, but you aren't gonna see long supply chains
| of charcoal, same way you didn't see long supply chains of
| anything else. That's why the biggest cities in the period
| were so small by modern standards, and were all along
| rivers/oceans; you literally couldn't supply more than a
| medium-sized city by land because it was impossible to get
| enough food into the city.
| DanBC wrote:
| It crumbles into dust and tiny fragments which makes it much
| harder to use.
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