Step 2: Making an Ax from Jamie O'Shea on Vimeo.
Jamie O'Shea's Immaculate Telegraphy project:
Could humans at any point in history, given the right information, construct an electronic communication network? To test this hypothesis, Substitute Materials will attempt to build a functional electric battery and telegraph switch from materials found in the wilderness, using no modern tools except information from the internet. The telegraph will be a first step towards an ahistorical internet.Currently, Jamie is working on making an ax to cut wood to make tools to make a smelting furnace. Above, a basket that Jamie made to hold things he collects.Full-scale construction of the artifacts is currently underway in Mineral county, Montana.
I wish him luck!
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Cavepunk?
I suggest they review some Gilligan's Island episodes...
"I was at a speaking engagement for MIT...and I said...the Professor has all sorts of degrees, including one from this very institution [MIT]! And that's WHY I can make a radio out of a coconut, and NOT fix a hole in a boat!" - Russell Johnson, who played the Professor. (via Wikipedia)
"Ahistorical internet," I love it.
Next: can we build a working flint knife out of nothing but motherboards, PVC pipe, and Velcro?
Gondor calls for aid! .... . .-.. .--. / ... .- ..- .-. --- -. / .. ... / --. --- .. -. --. / - --- / -.- .. -.-. -.- / --- ..- .-. / .- ... ... . ...
ever seen:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRzQRq_eF2o
?
If he gets this to work, it will give him the right to tell SCA people to suck it for the rest of his life.
And where do they think the materials of the actual internet came from, if not nature? The answer is obviously "yes," because it was already done, in the late 20th century.
Didn't the Professor on Gilligan's Island already do this with coconuts?
This sounds like something from "A Deepness in the Sky". Full of awesome.
The Feral Internet?
the coconuts were only chargers.
and the first internet was the penny post.
more details.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rough_Science
Primitive tool construction is kind of fun and really humbling, when you realize that the average paleolithic hunter-gatherer was probably constructing much better tools by about age 5.
Seems plausible, just needs more people. It looks like a huge project in the raw man hours. I think he could get something going if he had a dozen people working with him. Maybe a couple years. Solo? A good decade at least.
FAIL:
Had to order Flint on the internet.
Obligatory Terry Pratchett Discworld Reference
Maybe he/they could use available tools at first to prove the concept, then work back from there to show how it can be done with scratch tools.
Anyone know why he's wearing a suit?
They shouldn't have any trouble finding a dead beaver to run Linux on.
Doesn't seem so hard if he already had the needed skills. From the video it seems he doesn't, there are plenty of other stones which can be used for an axehead. Knowledge is key.
Really, for a person with the right skills the biggest barriers might be man's laws. Some useful items might be animal skins and such, and presumably hunting a deer most places is banned outright to those only wishing to use tools that they have made by hand from vegetable sources. Similarly, many places one can not just go and mine a bit of copper or tin.
Also, given the extreme difficulty such a project would face in drawing miles and miles of low resistance wire, then insulating it, to make use of such a device- it might be more practical to make a pair of radios instead.
To smelt copper and iron to make a generator?
Good luck with that.
The suit and tie are a nice touch. I did geo field work with a guy whose jeans at the end of the day always were clean and held their crease (he ironed them), while the rest of us looked like we'd been rolling in mud, which we sorta had.
Messing about with flint requires a first-aider on standby.
Smelting copper isn't difficult if you find the native form; iron is way harder. It's all about the melting points.
I think he wants to smelt metal to make the wire. The telegraph system will be battery powered.
This looks like a cool project. Any chance of an update when they finish or hit the next bid milestone?
I used to hang around with a bunch of archaeologists (why yes, I was the coolest kid in my high school) and learned to build a clay kiln, make charcoal, make a simple leather bellows and use them all together to smelt iron ore and cast it into an axehead. That's fantastic if I ever get caught in a time vortex, except to this day I don't have the faintest clue where I should go looking for iron ore. The folks I learned from found it in big blue buckets marked "axos quarrys".
The same problem applies to a lot of modern knowledge: in theory any of us know enough about natural sciences to revolutionise a pre-industrial society. The trouble is that woefully few of those agrarian communities had a decent laboratory supply store.
The "rough science" programme that Takuan linked to was a similar idea. A bunch of scientists on an island were given challenges to build something different every week. They had modern tools, but everything for the challenges had to be made from scratch, from stuff they could find on the island. It was a pretty cool programme - during a fireworks-themed programme they managed to give a great explanation of how gunpowder works while grinding charcoal for carbon and heating bat excrement in a bucket to use as a source of nitrites. It's well worth looking for a copy.
If you ever have a chance to send your kids to something like the Young Archaeologists Club you should give it a try. Lots of digging in mud, playing with ancient technology and finding out first hand that flint is both difficult to knap and astonishingly sharp (I still have a tiny scar). I even learned a decent chunk of history along the way.
Would be neat if it wasn't done in Art Project style. Not to make light of the accomplishments, but it would be nice to see some "thinking outside the box" rather than trying to recreate 20/21st century technology with prehistoric materials. How about creating synapses out of salt water soaked rope wrapped in fat cured leather? Even the semaphore system is fairly achievable with ancient technology. I would rather see this than somebody figuring out how to make cat5 cables out of bubblegum and paperclips.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ou7JtOHFnSg&feature=related
@1 best new Interwires word: Cavepunk.
Much luv.
I had a similar idea recently, presented as a situation:
You have crash landed on an earth-like but deserted planet. Your ship is utterly destroyed, and all you have is your pocket Sum Of All Human Knowledge device* (which inexplicably does not have a radio.)
How long does it take you to build a radio to call for help?
* maybe even an AI that can show you, step by step, the most efficient way of what needs doing.
Sounds like a real-life version of http://www.wurmonline.com/ ...
I can't believe no one has quoted this yet:
"I am endeavoring, Madam, to construct a mnemonic memory circuit using stone knives and bearskins." -- Mr. Spock to Edith Keeler
"Rough Science" is recommended family viewing for anyone who wants their progeny to survive beyond the economapocalpse
In Jules Verne's "Mysterious Island" five POWs from the US civil war, escaping by balloon land on an island, and build (amongst many other things) an electric telegraph, mining their own copper and drawing the wires.
At the time I read this, I didn't think they could do this in the time. It will be interesting to see whether they can.
I don't see anything insurmountable.
These guys are looneys. And I respect looneys.
http://www.cyphertext.net/~gfish/smelting.html
RFC 1149
A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers
http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1149.txt
I know I'm leaving a comment late, but I just thought of this:
@ Snarky Kyderdog (#15):
I think ordering raw materials over the Internet is kosher, because it's analagous to tribes trading stuff. So long as he doesn't receive something that couldn't be created by an iron age tribe, I think he's ok.
But could they make an RSS feed for their blog, given materials available today ?