Smelting Iron in Africa (A DEMONSTRATION)

What people said

oflannabhra · 2020-09 · Strong recommendation

One of my favorite videos is a documentary of a village in Africa that goes through the process of producing iron tools from scratch, even though it is not required anymore, to pass on the knowledge. They find ore, construct furnaces, smelt the ore, refine the iron and then work it. It takes an entire village weeks to do this. [VIDEO]

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kragen · 2022-09 · Recommendation

If you're interested in traditional ironmaking, Christopher Roy filmed a documentary a few years back on the techniques used up to the beginning of the 20th century in Burkina Faso, From Iron Ore to Iron Hoe: Smelting Iron in Africa : [VIDEO] It's amazing to see how much work the traditional technique required. Though I don't know how much the techniques developed over the last 3000 years, none of the materials or manufacturing techniques exhibited in the documentary seem to require anything more than Neolithic products: leather, clay, wood, rope. (With the exception of using the cast-iron knife to carve the sluice, the same is true of Plant's video.) So it's particularly surprising to realize that the Neolithic started 12000 years ago and the Iron Age only started about 3500 years ago (the Painted Gray Ware culture in India). For 8500 years people all over the world had the tools at their disposal to make iron, but didn't know it. That's 3000 years longer than all of recorded history! It's similarly amazing to realize that from 3500 years ago until 2600-2100 years ago all iron was made by hugely inefficient processes like these rather than with blast furnaces, and that until 1000-500 years ago blast furnaces were only used in China. And it wasn't until Bessemer that they could be used to make steel. What similar opportunities are under our noses today? (More examples in [LINK] .) If you're interested in this sort of material culture unbootstrapping, you might also be interes

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guerrilla · 2020-10 · Recommendation

Oh it's my favorite time of the week again on HN! I truly love these blogs. Someone last week posted this[1] documentary which I think more people should see in connection with this series. But I'm still collecting questions, which I may take to Quora or SO at some point but I'd love to know how did we get started with (i.e. discover) this process and how does it differ from steel. Apparently we will learn about the latter in the next blog though, so I can wait on that. [1]. [VIDEO]

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