Chapter 10:  Industry comes to the World

 

Bronze is a very useful military metal. 

But steel is much, much harder and stronger than bronze. 

A steel sword will slice right through bronze armor.  A steel arrowhead can cut through several plates of bronze kill the solder or the horse being protected by the armor.  As soon as some countries figured out how to make steel, bronze became an obsolete technology.  We don’t see bronze weapons on the battlefield today.  We haven’t really seen them for centuries.  But steel is everywhere.  All modern weapons are made of steel. 

Steel is very, very difficult to make.  You can easily make bronze in your back yard.  You can’t make steel that way.  Even the simplest steel-making systems require dozens of workers who have specialized skills.  You need many tons of raw material to make just a few pounds of steel.  This raw material is going to have to be located and transported to the place where steel will be made.  This requires enormous amounts of work and dedicated workforces who know how to remove the materials, process them, and transport them.  they then have to be moved to facilities that are extremely large and very expensive to build.  (Smelter, foundries, steel mills, and casting plants, and finishing plants, to name a few.)  The people who do these things are going to have to do them full time.  This means that they aren’t going to be able to grow their own food or build their own homes.  It means the country with steel will have to set up an economic structure that can support all of the people necessary to produce steel weapons. 

The more weapons they make the better, from the perspective of the military.  They want as much as they can have. 

I want to explain the process of making steel, because you really need to understand its incredible difficulty in order to understand the social changes that will have to happen in systems that produce steel.  Steel is an industrial product.  It is extremely hard to make (as you will see shortly), requires a great many workers, all of whom have to be very skilled.  The society must be organized in a very special way to make this possible.  It will have to be organized around the needs of industry.  It will have to be an industrial society. 

Industrial societies dominate the world today.  Industrial systems require a great many complex structures that are not necessary in non-industrial systems. 

They need money, for example.  The people who work to make steel have to be given something they can trade for food, lodging, and other services.  They need courts and rules to protect private property rights.  People will not make the fantastic investments needed for industry unless they know their rights to the properties they build will be secure and not depend on the whims of a particular ruler.  They need massive roads and other infrastructures.  They need investment systems that allows large amounts of ‘capital’ to be raised from numerous investors and dedicated to the project. 

Industrial societies are necessarily extremely complex.  I don’t think you can really appreciate the changes that will happen next, in the historical account, without understanding how difficult it is to make steel. 

 

How To Make Steel

 

If you want to make steel, you need to start with iron.  Iron is one of the most abundant elements on the earth.  But it is not found in metal form.  It is found mixed with oxygen, as ‘iron oxide,’ also known as ‘rust.’  To get metal, you need to remove the oxygen.  The process of removing the oxygen is called ‘smelting.’

 

The term smelting is a combination of  the word ‘smoke’ and ‘melting.’  It uses smoke to get metal to melt. 
          The smoke is needed because smoke contains carbon monoxide.  You generate the carbon monoxide by building a fire.  It needs to be very, very hot.  You put the ore into the fire (this is described below).  As the ore heats, the chemical bond between the oxygen and ore gets weaker and weaker.  At some point, the bond is so weak that the carbon monoxides attraction is stronger, and the oxygen flies out of the ore and into the smoke.  At this point, the  metal instantly melts.  It will drip through the fire to the ash below.  You can wait until the ash is cool and sift through it to find the bits of metal. 
     The smelting process is the same for al metals.  But different metals ‘smelt’ at different temperatures.  The softer metals smelt at relatively low temperatures.  You can smelt them with a wood fire.  This is not true for iron

 

To smelt iron, you need an extremely hot fire.  Wood doesn’t burn hot enough for this.  Natural gas doesn’t burn hot enough.  Coal doesn’t burn hot enough.  Oil doesn’t burn hot enough.  The only natural fuel that burns hot enough to smelt iron is pure carbon.  Until very recently, when people figured out how to make ‘coke’ out of coal, the only source for pure carbon was charcoal. 

If you want to smelt iron, you need charcoal.  You will need a lot of it, as you will see.  (One of the main justifications for the exploration to the new world in the 1400s was a search for wood.  The forests in Europe had all been cut down to make charcoal, mainly to use to make steel.  The mills had all shut down for a lack of fuel.  One of the first things that Columbus did when he began conquest of Haiti was begin cutting down the forests there to make charcoal.  This was the ‘black gold’ of his day.  What was the charcoal used for?  He smelted iron to make steel.) 

The text box below explains how to make charcoal:

 

Wood to charcoal: 
          Wood is made of hydrocarbons, which are molecules with both hydrogen and carbon.  To get pure carbon (charcoal) you need to get rid of the hydrogen.  You do this by heating the wood to a very high temperature under conditions that prevent it from catching on fire.  To prevent this, you need to make sure that no oxygen (from the air) is in contact with the wood
           If you want to do this, you need to build a kind of igloo out of clay blocks, large enough for you to sit inside.  It needs a chimney on the top at least 6 feet high and an opening at ground level big enough to crawl through with loads of wood for the fire inside.  You then pile the wood you will turn into charcoal over the igloo  to a depth of about 5 feet.  You then cover the entire thing with about a foot of dirt.  Then build a fire in the igloo.  (The air for the fire will come through the opening you walk through to carry the wood.)  Keep it very very hot for about 2 days.  You will have to work furiously this entire time to make sure there is enough wood in the igloo to keep the fire inside at the right temperature. 
          Then let it cool for a few days and remove the dirt.  You have charcoal. 
          It takes about three tons of wood to make a ton of charcoal this way.  You put a ton and a half of wood on the igloo to start.  You burn the other ton and a half.  It is very unpleasant work and requires a lot of skill.  You have to understand a lot of things to do it right, and you have to do them all well.  But all this is necessary to make steel. 

 

Once you have charcoal, you need to make the smelting furnace and the bellows.  You can make the smelter out of clay.  It needs to be a certain shape with a chimney and a hole in the bottom for the bellows.  People used to make the bellows out leather that is fastened to two large boards. 

Once you have this set up, you can start smelting iron.  You start by building  a fire in the furnace using charcoal.  It needs to be very, very hot, much hotter than it will burn by natural aspiration of oxygen.  You need a massive bellows.  You need several people who will rotate with each other to pump the bellows as rapidly as they can.  This bellows blows air (which contains oxygen that the charcoal needs to burn) through the pulverized fuel, causing it to burn more rapidly and making it hotter. 

If you watch this being done, you will see that even the strongest workers can’t last much longer than 10 minutes on the bellows at the required pace.  This means you will need to rotate people onto this task.  You will probably need at least 6 people for this; that gives them one 10 minute shift every hour. 

You also need a large number of people pouring of pulverized charcoal down the chimney and into the furnace.  As you do this, the fire gets hotter and hotter.  At a certain point, it is hot enough.  (You will need someone who has done this before to tell you when you are at this point.)  Now you can start mixing tiny bits of iron ore into charcoal.  Keep pouring the ore and fuel mixture into the chimney for about 18 hours.  You need massive amounts of fuel for this.  All this time, your helpers must be pumping the bellows furiously:  if they slow down for even a few seconds, the furnace will become too cool and all effort so far will be wasted:  you will have no iron. 

If you do this right, after 18 hours there will be iron metal in the furnace.  The metal turns into a liquid as soon as it loses its oxygen.  It then drips out of the mixture and flows to the bottom.  You will want to put a mold on the bottom to catch the iron.  The iron will harden to the shape of the mold. 

The standard mold looks like a mother pig nursing her piglets.  Because of this, the iron in this form is called ‘pig iron.’ 

If you are very skilled and good at cutting your costs, you can turn three tons of charcoal and three tons of iron ore into about 2 pounds of pig iron. 

 

Steel

 

Iron and steel are to different things.  Iron is the raw material you need to make steel.  You have to do a lot of hard work to turn iron into steel.  You can find many descriptions on the internet, but here is a quick one: 

Take the pig iron and hold it with tongs.  Put it into a very hot charcoal fire.  Leave it there until it glows white hot.  You will need a helper with a bellows blowing oxygen through the charcoal, and replenishing it constantly as it burns, to make this happen.  Once you get it white hot, take it out and hammer it into a thin sheet. 

Then put the sheet back into the fire to make it white hot again.  Then fold the sheet in half and hammer the halves into a new thin sheet, heating as necessary.  Keep doing this, over and over. 

The difference between iron and steel is carbon.  Steel has between 1% and 3% carbon.  The carbon comes from the smoke of the charcoal fire.  You need to literally beat it into the metal.  The more carbon the metal has, the harder the steel.  The 1% iron content steel is considered ‘soft’ steel.  It is still much harder than iron and has many uses, so a lot is made.  The 3% steel is very hard, suitable for tools and swords. 

There is a television show called ‘forged in fire’ where people compete to make steel knives using this method.  They have machines to do the hammering, so they can make good steel in a few days.  But if you did the hamming by hand, you would need several months to make a good knife or sword.  Back when the work was done by hand, steel swords were legacy items, handed down from generation to generation.  A good sword could cost more than a years of salary for a top officer. 

Steel is a fantastic product.  It now holds together skyscrapers that are thousands of feet high; it forms the hulls of submarines that travel thousands of feet below the ocean, it is provides the casings for bombs and rockets.  As of the 21^st century, nearly all military weapons are made of steel; for most military uses, nothing superior has been found in spite of 4,000 years of searching

In 2000, archeologists found the oldest steel weapon to be discovered to date at the Kaman-Kalehöyük archeological site in Turkey.  Here is an excerpt from the press release:

 

A piece of ironware excavated from a Turkish archaeological site is about 4,000 years old, making it the world’s oldest steel, Japanese archaeologists said on Thursday.  Archaeologists from the Middle Eastern Culture Center in Japan excavated the 5-centimetre piece at the Kaman-Kalehoyuk archaeological site in Turkey, about 100 kilometers southeast of Ankara, in 2000.  The ironware piece is believed to be a part of a knife from a stratum about 4,000 years old, or 2100-1950 BC, according to them
          An analysis at the Iwate Prefectural Museum in Morioka showed that the ironware piece was about 200 years older than one that was excavated from the same site in 1994 and was believed to be the oldest steel so far made in 20th-18th centuries BC.  The ironware is highly likely to have been produced near the Kaman-Kalehoyuk site as a 2-cm-diameter slag and two iron-containing stones have also been excavated, Kyodo news agency quoted the archaeologists as saying. 

 

Industrial Evolution   

 

Before the steel age began, states didn’t have to be very big or well organized.  Most of  early states were built around cities like Faiyum.  They were basically rich farmlands surrounded by a convoluted collection of paths that go around the mud huts where people live and operate little kiosks that sell the things they can’t make themselves. 

 

Qqq Faiyum valley 3

 

Enormous changes will be needed to build industry.  To support heavy industry, you absolutely need a centralized and highly organized economy.  This would not be a simple task for the people who lived 4,000 years ago.  They had never seen and industrial society.  They didn’t know how one worked.  They would have to figure it out themselves, basically with trial and error.  They would need a lot of things that we take for granted now and think we understand (because we use them every day) but aren’t really intuitive or easy to figure. 

Consider the thing we call ‘money.’  The early city states didn’t really need money.  In Faiyum, people produced mostly rice.  If you aren’t a rice farmer but keep chickens for their eggs, you can trade your eggs for rice, both to feed your chickens and meet your own needs.  Others may fish or make hats out of rice straw and trade these items for things that they need.  The government can collect taxes in rice, which can then be used to feed the troops.  Barter can meet the needs of the pre-industrial system.  But it is hard to imagine putting together the resources needed to build and operate an industrial system without money.  Even today, no one seems to have attempted it; I can’t imagine anyone trying and succeeding 4,000 years ago. 

This seems simple enough at first.  If you need money, create it.  Governments print it and then tell people ‘this is money’ and they start using it, right? 

But if you had never seen money and some people who had gained positions of leadership told you these little pieces of paper were able to buy anything in the country, you would probably laugh.  Even today, economists argue about what money is, how it works, and why people continue to accept it.  There must be some reason.  If you wanted to build a steel mill 4,000 years ago, you would have to figure out how to make money and how to get people to accept it. 

The industrial state will also need infrastructure.  You need a lot of charcoal to make steel.  You can’t have people strapping piles of twigs to their horses and then traveling from the forests (which get farther away as the closer trees are removed) to the charcoal plant, and expect to keep a large steel mill operating.  You need roads that are big enough for heavy wagons.  They have to be good roads:  if the wagons can’t make it through, the steel production stops. 

You will need a lot of workers.  These people will have to devote their lives to dangerous, extremely unpleasant, and very difficult work.  This work must be done right so they must be well educated and they must be able to remain motivated and keep working year after year, as many hours as you can get them to work.  They need to be motivated as children just to get them to take the time to go to school and learn the skills.  The schools must exist and have funding. 

At first, these states won’t be very good at these things.  Even today, 4,000 years into the industrial period, states seem to be struggling to figure out the next step.  But they have to try.  They were born into a system where people have fantastically strong genetic and cultural tendencies to identify them with a group of people, in this case a state, and to use the resources of that group to fight other groups to gain territory for their group. 

This may not make much sense but it is reality:  we can all see the fanatical people who operate current states doing everything they can to fan hatred and fear to make their people fight harder.  Once people understand how to make steel, they know their enemies can have it and may use it to destroy them.  They need more than the enemies. 

They may not know exactly how to organize an industrial economy to make it happen.  But they have to try to figure it out

 

It may seem that this particular discussion is being presented in the wrong time period.  You may be thinking:    ‘Aren’t industrial economies very recent things?  Didn’t all important industrial innovations take place in the last 200 years?  How could this be relevant to a discussion of events 4,000 years ago?’
         As we will see shortly, this isn’t true. 
         There are people that think we can never have sound societies if industry exists and want to ‘disappear’ it (to use George Orwell’s term for ‘make it appear it never existed’).  Many people have tried to wipe out industry, at various times, and then rewrite the history books to make it appear it never existed.  We will look at look at two of these events in the next few chapters.  The most notable was started by Emperor Constantine in the year 322 AD.  At the time, the European area was well into the industrial age with numerous large industrial facilities producing enormous amounts of both steel and cement.  (You can read about the steel in works of Homer written in circa 880 BC, in Herodotus "History" circa 446 BC and in Aristotle’s ‘Physics’ circa 350BC.  You can see the cement work with your own eyes in Europe where massive edifies built of concrete built 2000-3500 years ago are pretty much everywhere.)
          Although many such attempts have been made, the most successful was that of Emperor Constantine, which started in the year 322 AD.  All books were burned, all schools closed, all corporations shut down with their assets turned over to the church, a new book that Constantine ordered written, called ‘The Bible,’ was composed in Latin and only vetted priests were allowed to learn to read Latin.  The result was a ‘dark age’ that lasted more than a thousand years and resulted in a decline estimated to be 50% of the population.  (Without technology, only primitive techniques could be used and production collapsed.)   We will look at the events that led to this and the reason it happened in later chapters.  
         Yes, most of what we know now about running an industrial economy is new. 
          But we aren’t learning it the first time, we are relearning this information. 
          If you watch the news, you will see that many people want to try the same thing Constantine tried again.  They want to send us back to the dark age (again).  We have been here before and we are making the exact same mistakes we made before. 

 

 

The Principle of Group Augmentation

 

The purpose of this book is to reconstruct the past events that put the human race onto the path we are now on.  This path leads to ever increasing problems that will take us, if we stay on this path long enough, in our extinction.  If we want to find a way to get onto a path that leads somewhere else, we have to understand the forces that put us on this path.  We also have to understand the forces that are pushing us forward toward the end. 

One of these forces is the evolutionary force called ‘group augmentation.’  

Evolution works by competition.  Animals compete as individuals.  The fittest individuals survive these competitions and pass their genes on to future generations. 

Groups also compete.  The fittest groups (where ‘fittest’ means ‘best at getting the group what it needs’) survive.  Group augmentation works by dividing the animals into individual groups and pitting the groups against each other in battles for territory.  (‘states’ are different competing groups).  Group augmentation works wherever the ability of a large group of individuals to work together matters.  It works on bees, ants, and other eusocial species.  Our ability to act together as states, and the larger collections we call ‘nations’ matters:  the states that are best at conquering and holding territory get the highest quality territory.  They can eat when people from states that don’t work as well are defeated and lose the land that once fed them. 

Bees and ants and other eusocial animals without the ability to think and plan on a conscious level have no choice but to continue to compete.  If they competition gets to a point where it threatens to wipe out their entire species, they can’t stop competing:  they don’t have the ability to take this into consideration. 

We are different.  If we find ourselves under the influence of forces that threaten to wipe us out, we can organize a plan to get out from under that influence.  This is possible.  Other books in the Possible Societies series explain how to do this. 

But before we can take any plan to make changes seriously, we need to recognize that these forces really do exist.  We have to understand that we are on a path through time.  We have to understand how we lived in the past, going as far back as possible.  We need to understand that there is a process that causes animals to change and evolve according to certain rules.  We need to understand that this same process works for us.  We need to understand that this process is not necessarily benevolent.  It may not move us where we want to go.  If it is moving somewhere we don’t want to go, we need to understand what we must to do to break away from the path it has put us on and get us onto another path

Until about 570 BC, there is no historical evidence that anyone made any serious attempt to bring the idea of intelligent design into analysis of society.  This should not be surprising:  we don’t have much real evidence of the thoughts of anyone that goes back more than 2,600 years, because very few written documents remain of the earlier period.  The next chapter resumes the history in 570 BC. 

Bear in mind that when we get to this period, we are not starting with cave men who hit girls over the head with clubs and drag them into caves for sex.  We are starting at a time when people know how to make both steel and concrete (the most important outputs of heavy industry) and have been making these things for centuries.  It is very, very hard to find an efficient way to organize industrial states to make them good at war.  They don’t have it all figured out as of 570 BC.  (We don’t really have it figured out now, as you can tell by watching the news.)  But they have been trying various different things for a long time.  Evolution has been operating this entire time.  States better at organizing themselves for war have advantages in war.  States that are not good at this get conquered.  They are taken over by better states, who then move their organizational structures (the ones that were better at making them better at war) to the conquered areas.  Over long periods of time, society has been evolving in ways that gradually eliminate any features that may make the states weak, passive, concessionary, liberal, or non-confrontational.  Evolution reinforces any characteristics that make the states more cohesive (those that promote patriotism and nationalism), more aggressive, more willing to sacrifice. 

Many people could see that these things are not working to promote what we might call a ‘sound society’ (one that can advance the interests of the human race as whole over the long term).  By the year 570 BC, many people could clearly see that the competitive, territorial, aggressive societies that were in place at the time could not meet the long term needs of the human race as a whole.  We needed something else.  Many people tried to figure out what else was possible.