Subscribe via RSS
View research on deliciousHere’s the last video from this session, showing the assembly of the telegraph. Step by step, I’ve shown how a person could have made an electronic technology without the aid of industry- and thus at any point in history. Of course, no one past modern times will ever need to do this, even in the event of complete social collapse; there will be so much metal and material lying around to repurpose. Human industry has had a significant impact on the landscape, and the boundary between natural and artificial origin would be an arbitrary distinction to future techno-scavengers. As I have said earlier, it also difficult to imagine someone in pre-modern times desiring this object, since it’s electronic effect is so subtle, and a group would need to adopt it together for it to become useful.
Really, my premise of creating a place outside history falls apart if it is subjected to much scrutiny. Mineral County Montana, where I executed the project, has plentiful metal ores. Most of the ores on the surface, however, have long been removed by people. I scavenged the piles left over from hard rock, pick axe and dynamite mines. Nowhere in this area could I find flint or sharp rocks needed to begin the project (200 miles away in Idaho’s craters of the moon was the closest) so I started the process making stone tools with non-local materials. This metal rich area is an unlikely site for a prehistoric internet because it was uninhabited. The Clark fork river valley barely had an Indian trail going through it in this area. It was tall, ancient trees and rocky cliffs, with little rainfall or game animals to hunt, probably beautiful but not hospitable.
Here’s a video of the successful smelting furnace in action. This technology was unquestionably the biggest barrier in the process. Once I had a fire hot enough to smelt copper, I was able to make iron in a couple extra days. The tiny little pocket of fire is about focus, I think- focusing the energy of charcoal and air to reach a temperature not found ordinarily in nature- in fact, probably the hottest sustained spot anywhere up to the radius between me and an industrial plant, a temperature beyond the scale of anything domestic or wild, probably only found naturally in magma and lightning. Creating these yellow fires, a transformative circumstance that doesn’t exist ordinarily, gave humans a leverage: we could create materials that had different properties than the things lying around us. I would like to convey that this is a really, really, powerful feeling. It made me feel like I could do anything. Of course, in the end, I came down from this buzz somewhat, once I realized I spent 6 weeks developing a skill set that was useless outside of the game I set up for myself. There is no reason for me to continue honing my metal age metallurgy; the experiment has only been useful in offering perspective, for myself and hopefully others.
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 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…
Powered by Tumblr;
themed by Adam Lloyd;
customized by Liz Filardi.
