41–50 of 68 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Famous" and "interesting" are two different things.
eh my brain swapped interesting for famous. to make up for that comment here is an interesting tidbit . The word chemistry/alchemy comes from ancient word for Egypt - Khmet, because they were such experts at metal.
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=alchemy&allowed_in_...
Check out the documentary Secrets of the Viking Sword. Goes into great depth concerning the materials and methods used in creating the Ulfberht blades. Don't remember meteorites being mentioned though. Maybe they simply didn't mention it in this documentary.
Egypt was fuel-starved. Its only arable region is along the banks of the Nile river, a band at best a few kilometers wide, which to this day remains the population center of the country. Wood came either from up-river (rarely), or from other points in the Mediterranean. I'm weak on the specifics, but the ancient references to the Pines of Lebanon bear on this.
Meteoric iron is valuable because it is molecularly pure iron. It's essentially supernova ash -- what's left after the final stages of stellar fusion result in least-nuclear-potential atoms, iron and nickel. It's molecularly pure because it hasn't rusted -- in space, no one can hear you rust, either.
Iron on Earth is rusted in large part due to the early stages of biological evolution in which the great oxygenation event occurred, and with it the great rusting -- oxidation of what was, at the time, pure molecular iron lying on Earth's surface, with the now newly-available oxygen. Semlting is a de-oxidation process.
Many of the great iron ore fields are also the result of biological activity -- early-stage microbial life using iron (I am not sure of how specifically) in its own metabolic processes, and depositing large stratified bands of iron as a result. These ores are 1-3 billion years old. As with other resources, they're among those humans have been tearing through, literally, at an amazing clip over the past 200 years.
Iron smelting prior to the age of coal was performed using charcoal. Charcoal kilns -- you can find pictures online -- are large beehive-shaped stone structures which were stacked full of wood and lit afire. The wood was pyrolised but not combusted, pushing out the impurities. This is close in chemical properties to coal which is, in essence, wood subject to somewhat longer pyrolisation processes, as well as geological formation.
And the modern switch from charcoal to coal (originally sea-coal, opportunistically harvested chunks broken from open seams along the English seashore) occurred as what had been a heavily-forested Britain was exhausting its own renewable wood resource and turned instead to coal. An activity which already by the late 1700s was recognised as unsustainable (John Williams, A Natural History of the Mineral Kingdom, 1789).
Discussed at greater length in William Stanley Jevons' The Coal Question:
https://archive.org/stream/coalquestioninqu00jevo#page/14/mo...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have always thought -- without any evidence -- of it as an American Thing. Like Farenheit temperatures. As a kid I learned on TV about a pharaoh named Tutenkhamon, and at some point became aware of some Egyptian named "King Tut", who must surely be the same dude. Though come to think of it, now that we have this interweb thingy, it's worth checking...
> The discoveries in the tomb were prominent news in the 1920s. Tutankhamen came to be called by a modern neologism, "King Tut". Ancient Egyptian references became common in popular culture, including Tin Pan Alley songs; the most popular of the latter was "Old King Tut" by Harry Von Tilzer from 1923, which was recorded by such prominent artists of the time as Jones & Hare and Sophie Tucker. https://en.wikipedia.org/…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting I didnt know that at all. Your "proper iron was more valuable" comment reminds me of about a little different period from a documentary that I watched that talked about the time around 700BC where Umayyad empires used silver coins while gold and copper coins were used in Egypt/Syria.
700CE rather than BC.
Check out the documentary Secrets of the Viking Sword. Goes into great depth concerning the materials and methods used in creating the Ulfberht blades. Don't remember meteorites being mentioned though. Maybe they simply didn't mention it in this documentary.
apparently the Vikings got the steel for their swords from as far away as Central Asia and India. and that steel was critical to the superior performance of those blades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_sword https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crucible_steel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_York_meteorite
"For centuries, Inuit living near the meteorites used them as a source of metal for tools and harpoons. The Inuit would work the metal using cold forging—that is, by stamping and hammering it."