Christopher Roy
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 7 months, 2015–2024
1:44:44 · 4M views · Sep 20, 2014
A 105-minute film of a West African smith family in Burkina Faso smelting iron from ore, from making charcoal and building the kiln to forging tools. It is a cultural recreation filmed for the camera, not current practice.
Recommended as an amazing documentary of traditional ironmaking, often used as a baseline for the labor required.
8 comments from Hacker News
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. this video
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 : this 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
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]. this video
They seem to do a similar thing with Youtube. I have both Youtube watch history and Youtube search history off. The other day I watched a very amazing video about iron smelting in Africa. Now, each time a open a Youtube link, that specific iron smelting video appears as "recommended for me". So, it is obvious that Google remembers which videos I have watched and openly advertises them again to me. By the way, the video itself is super interesting: this video
a nail rusted into a lump of hematite is still a lump of very rich ore, and the hazard and labor involved in fishing it out of a pile of rotted wood is not disproportionate to the hazard and labor involved in reducing it back to iron, either by artisanal manual processes or by mass-production processes. artisanal manual processes require tens of person-days per kilogram of iron. see christopher roy's documentary this video your point about entropy is confused; it's reminiscent of the creationist argument that evolution is impossible because it produces more ordered structures from less ordered ones. yes, human activities do increase entropy, mostly in the form of slightly increasing the amount of infrared radiation into space from earth, but less so than other biological activities they displace. this is almost completely irrelevant to the question of whether landfills are richer or poorer ore deposits than banded iron formations or karst bauxite deposits, because the contribution of that term to the system's total entropy change is insignificantly small, and can therefore easily be positive or negative