Guy makes a knife from scratch. He has to make a smelter first.

http://www.arscives.com/bladesign/tamahagane/main.htm

by RickHull • 15 years ago

278 132 15 years ago

arscives.com

polynomial• 15 years ago

Well at least he didn't have to invent the universe.

mumrah• 15 years ago

Relevant: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan#Cosmos_.281980.29

s00pcan• 15 years ago

"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe."

sixtofour3• 15 years ago

Man and God are having a pleasant discussion about the great advances Man has made in science.

God reminisces about how far Man has come since He first made Man from dirt.

Man gets a little boastful and says "Oh we can do that. Life from dirt? That's easy."

God smiles and says "Oh? I'd like to see it please."

Man says "No problem," and bends down to scoop up a handful of dirt.

God says "No no no, you go get your own dirt."

Simon_M• 15 years ago

Wow, real-life Minecraft.

mcantor• 15 years ago

For his next project, he will store a chest inside a chest!

patrickod• 15 years ago

Site was loading quite slowly for me and missing some of the pictures. The Google cache of the first part is here for those who want it http://tinyurl.com/6k2mxue

olalonde• 15 years ago

Why did you shorten the URL? http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:5znUFwf...

eli3• 15 years ago

"Charcoal has to be chopped to a specific size for the operation to run smoothly. I chopped mine during the days before the run in little chunks about a cubic inch or less."

Chopped using what?

napierzaza• 15 years ago

Looks like wood charcoal. Use your imagination.

RickHull2• 15 years ago

It's a good point, with recursion bonus!

wisty• 15 years ago

Later on, he uses a forge, anvil, grinder, flux, chemicals for polishing, etc. He's not using cave-man technology. I think he built the smelter because you can't really buy them.

ChuckMcM• 15 years ago

I agree, and he got his ore from the Ceramic store, no pick and hammer breaking down rocks from the quarry.

tomjen3• 15 years ago

An axe made of wood?

That is what I do in Minecraft, at least.

barrkel• 15 years ago

I think he's trying to make a knife from scratch, not make a knife only using stone-age technology.

eli3• 15 years ago

Hey, I get it and I think it's actually a neat project. But "from scratch" is an entirely meaningless phrase.

js2• 15 years ago

Also, http://www.thetoasterproject.org/

mikeknoop• 15 years ago

I believe this is related: http://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_thwaites_how_i_built_a_toast...

wallflower• 15 years ago

Also, the classic essay "I, Pencil"

> I am a lead pencil—the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write.*

Writing is both my vocation and my avocation; that's all I do.

You may wonder why I should write a genealogy.

http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html

rospaya• 15 years ago

Very interesting. Makes me think if there is any knowledge or technology that we lost in the process? Is there something we knew but don't know anymore?

jevinskie• 15 years ago

Amazing! I never knew you could smelt tiny amounts of ore with a common household microwave!

dstein2• 15 years ago

It's reasons like this, that I really wonder if someone from today were to time travel into the past if anything they know would be useful at all. Medieval people would probably think we're all idiots.

kabdib2• 15 years ago

Simple knowledge, such as the disease model of sickness and "microorganisms exist, keep things clean" would be useful. You could probably cobble together a water-drop microscope and demonstrate the difference between (say) clean wounds and infected ones. Fleas = plague. All that.

Knowing how to distill hard liquor would make you popular as well.

nosse• 15 years ago

Making hard liquor worth drinking is surprisingly difficult. It's lot easier if you know how to make activated carbon, but making activated carbon is difficult with equipment of that age(possible though).

hessenwolf3• 15 years ago

Just try saying 'micro-organisms' from the top of a witch-burning pyre.

harshpotatoes• 15 years ago

I think if random individuals from today were to go into the past, we would mostly look pretty stupid. However, I think if a large enough group traveled into the past, we would have enough useful knowledge to wow them/revolutionize their society.

hessenwolf3• 15 years ago

Conquer/enslave/pillage, but yes, probably the best thing about us is our development in cooperation.

hessenwolf3• 15 years ago

Conquer/enslave/pillage, but, yes, probably the best thing about us is our development in cooperation.

superkarn• 15 years ago

Imagine the opposite: someone from the future were to time travel back to our present time. Certain knowledge the they bring would be useful. But a lot probably won't be until necessary technology becomes available.

dstein2• 15 years ago

That's kind of the same thing -- a person from the future would probably not really be able to guide us into the future any faster. He wouldn't even be able to show us how to build a time machine because the technology necessary to build the tools to build a time machine don't exist yet.

pyre• 15 years ago

The concepts would be invaluable though. If he/she were able to give of some of the base concepts for how those things worked, we could direct all of our energy towards those concepts rather than stumbling in the dark to increase our understanding.

edkennedy• 15 years ago

An interesting look into that idea is "The Cross Time Engineer" by Leo Frankowski. The main character is an engineer, so he has extensive knowledge, but it's interesting in how that knowledge is applied to medieval times. It ended up being a series of many books.

jackfoxy• 15 years ago

Read Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. I think someone educated in science and engineering would do quite well, a dolt fully addicted to the entertainment industry, probably not so well.

sixtofour3• 15 years ago

You'd be at a disadvantage whether you traveled back or forward in time, because you haven't yet internalized the world model of the destination time. Anyone who lives in a particular time takes for granted the ways to operate in that time, and doesn't have to think a) how do I do this, or b) is this even possible. They just do, or move on.

InclinedPlane2• 15 years ago

An average person would not be overly useful, but a skilled and knowledgeable individual would have much to offer. A chemist can make nylon, gunpowder, matches, or plastic from relatively easily obtained chemicals even in ancient times, for example. There are also lots of other little tricks that are just as or more valuable. Things like germ theory, medicine, cooking, electricity, etc. In roman times it would have been possible to build telegraphs, without much difficulty, imagine how that would have changed the world.

burgerbrain2• 15 years ago

Even easier than the telegraph, but potentially even more dramatic: the phonograph.

Paper diaphragm, wax cylinder, a needle, and viola! You're a god! ;)

thesteamboat• 15 years ago

I'm curious as to what easy advances there were in cooking. Do you mean something along the lines of better heat sources or do you mean recipes?

toddh4• 15 years ago

The idea of science itself would probably be more powerful than anything an individual could accomplish. Let a 1000 flowers bloom and all that.

cletus2• 15 years ago

If you're into sci-fi I urge you to read Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep [1]. It doesn't have a lot to do with this except that it has a fairly primitive society that has high-tech dumped on it in two different camps and what eventuates is an arms race.

In the same vein is CJ Cherryh's Foreigner series [2], which tells the story of human colonists who end up lost, unable to find their way home. They instead find a habitable planet with a native population that roughly has 19th century technology and build their space station above it. The station isn't sustainable though so they end up getting stranded on the planet.

So while not time travel per se, the whole subject of vast technology differentials is a rich vein of sci-fi that I personally really enjoy.

As for someone transported to a medieval era, any person with a high school education would have what is, for the time, a highly advanced knowledge of mathematics, astronomy, physics, possibly chemistry, biology, etc to the point where they would be immensely valuable in the right hands I would think.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreigner_universe

DrCatbox2• 15 years ago

You dont need sci-fi to ponder what happens when a superior technological culture meets a less technologicaly developed culture.

Look at Europes "discovery" of the americas, and for that matter, look at how the nomads of the world react when they are even today being "discovered" by us civilized people. You could study anthropolgy if you are into this sort of thing, its not really sci-fi, this is the real deal.

btilly3• 15 years ago

In the Foreigner universe it is my understanding that the technology was not 19th century. It reached 19th century after centuries of careful technology transfer. (And then things accelerated.)

m_eiman• 15 years ago

The 1632 book series is about an American town transplanted back into Europe in 1632. Since it's a whole town they bring more than just knowledge, but it's still fairly interesting to read. In my opinion the first or maybe first two books are enjoyable, after that it turns into too many layers of "what if".

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1632_series

michaelbuckbee• 15 years ago

Helm by Steven Gould has a central premise where a colonization ship makes the choice to take more people at the expense of more technology. They land on the minimally hospitable planet with a society engineered to maximize knowledge transfer of things like germ theory and nutrition (they are taught songs as kids about it, etc.) and with comprehensive scientific information in printed form, but no advanced manufacturing capabilities.

What was most interesting to me were the people who denied that they had ever come from earth, that all the fantastical technologies of the past didn't exist, etc.

hyperbovine• 15 years ago

Well, if you had had a couple years' worth of graduate-level math and physics courses, you would be an intellectual demigod. The introductory sequences in analysis / algebra / geometry / mechanics / electrodynamics / relativity are a distillation of what the best minds in history spent the past 500 years figuring out. When I have no other motivation to study these topics, I just remember that Newton, Euler, Gauss, et al. would have /killed/ to get a look at my textbook :-)

(Hopefully you'd remember the proofs!)

alanfalcon• 15 years ago

This is why I own this shirt. http://www.topatoco.com/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_C...

HeyLaughingBoy2• 15 years ago

Which someone? The average city dweller? Probably. A farmer? Not at all. What they do hasn't really changed; just gotten much, much more efficient.

Same goes for a civil engineer; would be very useful in medieval times. Software engineer not so much!

Tsagadai• 15 years ago

I think you are dramatically underestimating the knowledge of modern farmers. Here are some areas that have changed: irrigation has changed radically in the last 40 years, fertilizers, companion planting, industrialized processes, storage and safer practices. Most farmers would make more difference than an engineer would make because in the past the majority of people were farmers. Don't forget that the main reason for migration to cities has been changes in agriculture (less labour needed, lower costs, globalisation).

dedward3• 15 years ago

That would very much depend on the situation and the people involved of course.

Someone with a deep and practical (practical being the important part here) knowledge of chemistry at the right place and right time? Could be extremely useful - he should have a leg up on the local alchemist.

A doctor, again with a good practical edge. Just being aware of bacteria and it's dangers, and using cleaner techniques would have changed everything. Discover antibiotics? Pure magic.

Joe average? Computer programmer? Probably fall into the "idiot" category unless you're good at killing people or politics.

johtso• 15 years ago

Here's a cached version of the page: http://web.archive.org/web/20081012031044/http://www.arscive...

jaz• 15 years ago

This reminds me of the Heritage School [1], which teaches people skills such as blacksmithing, knifemaking, working with Damascus steel, and woodworking. I think it's great these skills haven't completely died out.

[1] http://www.bc3.edu/heritage-school/about-heritage-school.asp

pixdamix• 15 years ago

It reminds me of a Marcin Jakubowski talk at Ted about "Open-Source blueprints for civilizations"[1]

From TED: Using wikis and digital fabrication tools, TED Fellow Marcin Jakubowski is open-sourcing the blueprints for 50 farm machines, allowing anyone to build their own tractor or harvester from scratch. And that's only the first step in a project to write an instruction set for an entire self-sustaining village (starting cost: $10,000).

[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/marcin_jakubowski.html

BenSS• 15 years ago

I was thinking of the Global Villege construction set too, they've come a long way (good summary vid) http://vimeo.com/16106427

tsuraan• 15 years ago

The project's site is http://openfarmtech.org . I don't think they have their full 50 machines, but what they do have looks pretty interesting.

chrisjsmith• 15 years ago

Back in the past, we just made knives with what we had. Sticks, couple of nettle stems and a few minutes flintknapping and you had a perfectly good blade. I've actually done it myself.

Metal is way higher tech than is required to survive.

sixtofour3• 15 years ago

Some pictures are missing from the site and Google cache.

You can see the pictures if you "view image" on the blank pictures. Hard reloading seems to pull some in too.

crocowhile• 15 years ago

The link here has all the pictures: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2644988

pbhjpbhj• 15 years ago

It was running slow for me so I used nyud.net mirror and it seemed to speed things up and pick up the missing images:

http://www.arscives.com.nyud.net/bladesign/tamahagane/main.h...

flexd2• 15 years ago

This is amazing (still) but hasn't it been on here before? I remember reading through it ages ago.

flexd2• 15 years ago

I might be wrong (search turns up nothing), I have seen this before though and thought it came from here (since this is usually where I find my quality reading material).

No need to get all downvotey, I wish I had the authors abilities.

daeken• 15 years ago

I don't know if it's been here in the past, but it was linked in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2644863 a couple days ago.

RomP2• 15 years ago

Also, this reaction by Seth Godin some time ago to this guy's project: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/10/what-youre-u...

RomP2• 15 years ago

I sometimes wonder how long would it take for the civilization to re-create the current level of technology, if all the material artifacts disappear one day: books, computers, robots, factories, even hammers. If all that remains is the current level of knowledge in the heads of 7bln people, how long would it take from the stone age to Core i7, heart transplants and Boeing 787s? And how much different the world would be if we had to re-create this from scratch without the legacy of previous technological generations?

toddh4• 15 years ago

A question I've had about this is where are the ready supplies of materials that could be used in the recreation? Could we spread across the hills and still find iron and copper deposits? Aren't these all played out by now? We would need to shift to another economic base from new materials I think rather than recreate what we had before, because that's gone.

btilly3• 15 years ago

According to http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2010/11/building-a-telegrap... the materials still exist, at least in sufficient amounts to build a simple telegraph.

kragen5• 15 years ago

Well, if the artifacts actually disappeared, yes. But if they just got buried somewhere until they rusted into unusability, we could dig up the rust and smelt it.

DrCatbox2• 15 years ago

Technology is also a sociological concept, it is in the minds of the people, it is not merely the products such as blades and core i7s. All those products of technology are the result of a specific culture, it is the result of specific societies and the interaction and relationships that people have with each other. For technology to happen a society requires permanent hierarchical organization (enslavement where the earliest examples) and strict divison of labor. Resources are merely a by-factor, which a society can workaround, when you dont have X to do Y, you make Z from A and do Y.

Its an interesting question, if you removed the artifacts, and kept the same organizations and relationships, my guess is that would mean almost no change. Instead of doing calculations with computers you would do computations with computers. (The first computers where human). If you removed the books and tax-software, still the tax people would walk around collecting their taxes and "inventing" bookkeeping. And we, fellow programmers, would still ponder of nice mind tricks and think of their solutions then apply them in society.

rmc3• 15 years ago

I'd say the biggest problem would be the lack of modern argicultural chemicals and fertiliser. Without them we can't feed 7 billion people. There'd be famine quickly and within a gereration the population would be down to middle ages levels

shazow• 15 years ago

I wonder the same. I like to imagine the current population being transposed to an alternate Earth where humans never existed.

I guess the first most important step is for everyone to start documenting everything they know of science, creating a kind of ad-hoc paper Wikipedia (once we make paper, of course). If the current generations die before their knowledge is recorded or passed down, we're going to be held back hundreds of unnecessary years.

I imagine with some excellent leadership and coordination, we could be back to computers, complex medicine, and aircrafts within a century. Maybe even decades, if the culture shock doesn't trigger famine, disease, wars, and depression.

viraptor• 15 years ago

And provided a good number of people who can organise / lead the reconstruction, so it doesn't just get sidetracked and forgotten. Reminds me of the story from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, where the wheel could not be invented, because marketing people couldn't agree on the colour...

Havoc• 15 years ago

I suspect progress would be really fast. Even if you can't find someone who has the right knowledge to do X, simply know that X can be done would make all the difference.

jrussino• 15 years ago

This reminds me of the "Metalworking Shop From Scrap" book series: http://www.lindsaybks.com/dgjp/djgbk/series/

WalterBright• 15 years ago

I'd like to see someone make a knife without using any modern technology precursors whatsoever. That means starting from using ones hands and what is available from nature in its natural form.

I think it'd be quite an accomplishment.

gaustin3• 15 years ago

People already do this. Some only go so far as stone blades, or allow modern tools for certain steps. Others bootstrap the whole process from stone-age to steel.

I've never done it. It's incredibly time consuming but satisfying, from the first hand accounts I've read. You can cut hours or days off of your work time by using modern tools for some of the most seemingly trivial steps.

hugh3• 15 years ago

I sharpened a stick. Isn't that the next best thing?

kragen5• 15 years ago

Who are these people? Do they stop at steel? What should I be Googling?

irragal• 15 years ago

You must tell us more. Who are these real life Minecraft players? I just registered this account to write this.

gaustin3• 15 years ago

Just to follow-up. If you search for Tai Goo and Tim Lively you will get a lot of information, pictures, videos and such about making blades from found material. Some of the processes are pretty crude--making glue from pine sap and deer feces.

bronson• 15 years ago

You might want to check out Nova's Secrets of the Samurai Sword. It's a great episode. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/samurai/

On Netflix: http://www.netflix.com/Movie/Secrets-of-the-Samurai-Sword-No...

Horrible quality, even worse comments, but this is also it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13WAb6ugPng

wazoox• 15 years ago

Fictional but a great read : in Jules Verne's Mysterious Island the heroes precisely have to make their tools, clothes, etc from scratch, up to a house, a telegraph and a boat :) a hacker's dream.

lucasjung• 15 years ago

I'd like to see this taken one step further: a wiki that provides step-by-step directions for building anything from components. Links to the components and tools required would provide step-by-step directions for building them from more basic components, recursively until you're making things from absolute scratch by hand.

A wiki like this would let you jump into the process at any level, assembling something from pre-fabricated components, building it from absolute scratch, or anything in-between. I'd be curious to see how fast someone could use directions like this to start from the stone age and get to a microchip.

jws• 15 years ago

Bought his ore? Terry Pratchett dug his own ore from his estate when he smelted the iron for his sword, though he used a blacksmith after getting to the iron bar stage.

http://www.news.com.au/technology/terry-pratchett-creates-a-...

(Being a knight no longer conveys the right to carry a sword, it is a violation of the knife laws, so he keeps the sword hidden. Such days.)

dmm2• 15 years ago

> Being a knight no longer conveys the right to carry a sword

Come to America. Open/concealed carry is legal for every sane and non-felonious adult in many areas, gentleman and commoner alike.

anamax• 15 years ago

Be careful - some knives, such as switchblades and dirks/double-edged knives, are illegal/restricted in a lot of places.

ramchip2• 15 years ago

I remember a cooperative online game, with a mostly text-only interface, in which you could build smelters and tools and climb gradually the tech tree. It was very detailed and interesting but I lost track of its name and URL. Does it ring a bell for anybody?

lzm• 15 years ago

Dwarf Fortress, perhaps?

teamonkey• 15 years ago

That's probably what he means, but the same is true for the more-accessible Minecraft.

IsaacL• 15 years ago

Sounds like my own game, Shintolin (http://www.shintolin.co.uk). It was a mostly text-based multiplayer game set in the stone age, where players started from scratch but could gradually develop the tools to build a village and farm. I planned to have a whole technology progression through bronze and iron age technology, but I stopped working on it a while ago (it still has a few players though). Don't know if it's the one you're talking about.

ramchip2• 15 years ago

That's not it, but thanks for the input. It's interesting that you've released the source.

jholman2• 15 years ago

A Tale In The Desert ( atitd.com ) is a subscription graphical MMO which has some limited properties in common with what you describe.

It's cooperative, it's not graphically sophisticated, and collaboratively climbing a (relatively shallow) tech tree is the main goal of the game.

dfranke• 15 years ago

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

DeanCollinsLCC• 15 years ago

wow!!! makes my weekend of doing stuff around the house look weak.

zeteo• 15 years ago

A really interesting melange. This is a Spanish guy, using Japanese metalworking techniques, and Imperial measurement units... (They use metric in Japan and Spain, don't they?)

For the purists: using modern technologies is OK, as long as you're fully aware of the alternative. There's no enlightenment in using a stone tool for days to achieve what a powered tool does in minutes.

rumblestrut• 15 years ago

Man, I take a lot of things for granted.

dedward3• 15 years ago

I may have missed something - My one curiosity would be if his decision to not fold, but just straight mash the bits of steel together was not skipping a crucial step - folding to ensuring uniformity. Would that not make the sword have weak spots here and there?

dandrews• 15 years ago

He folded five times.

Guy makes a knife from scratch. He has to make a smelter first.

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