Here you can see the voltage generated when the switch is closed, outputing to a voltmeter. .36 volts isn’t much, but it proves the concept. I was getting .7 earlier, but it drops as the potato slices dry out. To get a more useful voltage I would simply need to rinse, lather, and repeat, so to speak. Smelt more copper, forge more iron, and make the pile taller. Of course, at some point I would come to a crucial understanding: one person cannot build an electronic communication network by themselves, because you need at least two people to communicate. I have a switch, but no one to receive a signal, no cooperation to build a wire network to connect them, no one to learn a system of signals with. Even if one paleolithic person was bestowed with the knowledge I gathered over the past months, they would need to convince a group to participate. I suspect this is as great a barrier as anything. Even Morse’s telegraph in 1850 was mocked in congress as a conjuring trick.

I’ll be posting the video of the second session’s activities sometime this week, as well as some more documentation and musings. I’ll be thinking of what to do with my alternate industrial legacy, hopefully I can show it somehow. Thanks to everyone who followed and offered support along the way. Thanks especially to Elizabeth Wanda Filardi for coming out on the first session, creating all the video and media and calming me down my inner caveman. Big thanks to Eyebeam for supporting the project through their honorary residency, and the Johnson Creek Ranch for hosting it and feeding me good, non-paleolithic food.

…and here it is. The Immaculate Telegraph! This crude little beast is a powered electrical momentary switch, or telegraph key. It was built with no modern tools or materials, effectively proving the premise I believed all along: that electric communication could have been built at any point in history- if the information, desire, and free time to build it was available. I’m terribly proud of this thing. As I flew back to New York, I felt that I was carrying a miraculous object, an electrical object unlike anything else in the world, because the entire lineage of tools that led to it is preserved and recorded. Of course, as I looked through the massive heat ripples of the idling jet engine exhaust, I saw the smallness of my little charcoal furnace, and was truly amazed again at the energy scale of our society. So many engines, so much utilized power roaring smoothly and continuously.

Here are the discs that form the voltaic pile, the most simple electric battery. One of the iron discs is not pictured, as is it set into the clay cup that will hold the pile. The copper could be pounded flat while cold with a stone, while the iron needed to be orange hot to pound. I dropped the bits into the furnace-operating in it’s third role as a forge- and then set them on an anvil stone and pounded them with a rock like a blacksmith. Alternating iron, potato, copper, gives a voltage that increases with each stack. Finishing these iron bits gives me the last material I need to create a working, powered telegraph key…

My mom grew this potato in her garden. It will be the electrolyte between the copper and iron in the battery. Contrary to the popular misconception, potato and lemon batteries are not powered by the vegetables; the dissimilar metals used for the electrodes contain the potential difference, and the potato acts as a medium.

sure enough, I got this iron bloom yesterday evening. A bloomery furnace doesn’t actually melt the iron, so it must be repeatedly reheated and beaten to remove impurities. That’s what I’m working on today.