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

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

#11

Post by kabdib »

dstein wrote: post #9

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.

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.

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

#12

Post by RickHull »

eli wrote: post #6

"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?

It's a good point, with recursion bonus!

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

#14

Post by wisty »

eli wrote: post #6

"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?

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.

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

#16

Post by harshpotatoes »

dstein wrote: post #9

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.

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.

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

#17

Post by jaz »

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

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

#18

Post by superkarn »

dstein wrote: post #9

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.

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.

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

#19

Post by edkennedy »

dstein wrote: post #9

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.

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.

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

#20

Post by pixdamix »

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

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