Why would the oldest tree on earth be less than 4,400 years old (and s — Metallurgy

"There is a beautiful tale among the Australian aborigines which says that the bow and arrow were not mans invention, but an ancestor God turned himself into a bow and his wife became the bowstring, for she constantly has her hands around his neck, as the bowstring embraces the bow. So the couple came down to earth and appeared to a man, revealing themselves as bow and bowstring, and from that the man understood how to construct a bow. The bow ancestor and his wife then disappeared again into a hole in the earth. So man, like an ape, only copied, but did not invent, the bow and arrow. And so the smiths originally, or so it seems from Eliades rather plausible argument, did not feel that they had invented metallurgy; rather, they learned how to transform metals on the basis of understanding how God made the world."

"The art of tempering and casting iron developed in India long before its known appearance in Europe; , for example, erected at Delhi (ca. 380 A.D.) an iron pillar that stands untarnished today after fifteen centuries; and the quality of metal, or manner of treatment, which has preserved it from rust or decay is still a mystery to modern metallurgical science. Before the European invasion the smelting of iron in small charcoal furnaces was one of the major industries of India. The Industrial Revolution taught Europe how to carry out these processes more cheaply on a larger scale, and the Indian industry died under the competition. Only in our own time are the rich mineral resources of India being again exploited and explored."

"In the history of war and society we single out three main innovations to describe significant changes before 1800: the introduction of metal, when humans abandoned stone weapons for ones made from bronze and iron; the domestication of the horse, which gave warriors greater mobility and speed; and the introduction of gunpowder, which transformed war on land and at sea. (Since other parts of the world, such as the Americas, did not have horses until the Europeans brought them in the sixteenth century and some parts of the world, such as Australia, never developed metal weapons, not all human societies have experienced change at the same time.) In each case, of course, many other things were happening both to technology and to society. Metal weapons were only a part of the story: societies had to develop the soldiers and the infrastructures to make use of them. Horses were more formidable when the wheel enabled them to pull chariots or later on when they could carry armed warriors. The introduction of gunpowder too was accompanied by other important developments: in metallurgy, for example, so that guns did not explode when they were fired, or in the design and navigation of ships, so that they could make use of the new cannon."

"The export of into Italy was strictly forbidden; but aluminium was almost the only metal that Italy produced in quantities beyond her own needs. The importation of scrap iron and into Italy was sternly vetoed in the name of public justice. But as the Italian metallurgical industry made but little use of them, and as steel billets and were not interfered with, Italy suffered no hindrance. Thus, the measures pressed with so great a parade were not real sanctions to paralyse the aggressor, but merely such half-hearted sanctions as the aggressor would tolerate, because in fact, though onerous, they stimulated Italian war spirit. The League of Nations, therefore, proceeded to the rescue of Abyssinia on the basis that nothing must be done to hamper the invading Italian armies. These facts were not known to the British public at the time of the election. They earnestly supported the policy of the sanctions, and believed that this was a sure way of bringing the Italian assault upon Abyssinia to an end."

"Between the years 1942 and 1954, the obtained thousands of pages of technical information about the Manhattan Project. Sergei Leskov reports that this information included: calculations for the construction of the charge; calculations for the of ; information on detonation devices; information on the gaseous diffusion factory that produced U-235; information about a plutonium production report; a report on the study of secondary s; a report on the metallurgy of and plutonium; and information on the kinetics of atomic reactions. Such information would have been unfathomably important to the development of a bomb. Thus, energy could be focused along the successful lines of the American project rather than approaching the situation blindly and attacking all possible avenues. Kurchatov admitted in a memo of March 4, 1943, that certain information "came as a surprise to our physicists and chemists," such as the centrifugal method of isotope separation. The Soviets also had reached an impasse on the "problem of nuclear explosion and combustion." Stolen documents revealed that this problem could be rectified by mixing and together—a method the Soviet scientists thought was impossible. Moreover, the Soviets were provided with information on the “physical process” of the inner workings of the uranium bomb, which Kurchatov said "revised views on many problems," and, most importantly, told the Russians that an atomic bomb was a realistic possibility."

"The Egyptians built an empire and ran it with a handful of technology... the wheel, irrigation canals, the loom, the calendar, pen & ink, some cutting tools, some simple metallurgy, and the plough, the invention that triggered it all off. And yet look how complex and sophisticated their civilisation was. And how soon it happened, after that first man-made harvest. The Egyptian plough and those of the few other civilisations sprang up around the world at the same time... Gave us control over nature... And at the same time, tied us for good, to the things that we invent so that tomorrow will be better than today. The Egyptians knew that. Thats why they had gods. To make sure that their systems didnt fail."