Smelting Iron from ROCKS (Primitive Iron Age Extraction)

last year we committed to hitting the reset button turning back our clock to the beginning of humanity and slowly building our way back up to the modern age starting from the stone age working our way into the bronze age at this point we've covered many of the important inventions made during this era bronze melting and casting written language math and numbers agriculture and the wheel now in this video we work our way to the next stage the iron age everything we use comes from 8 000 generations of collective innovation and discovery but could an average person figure it all out themselves and work their way from the stone age to today that's the question we're exploring each week i try to take the next step forward in human history my name is andy and this is how to make everything be sure to subscribe and turn on notifications so you don't miss the next step in this journey in today's video we're smelting iron at some intense heats where potentially burning off some of your hair it's just part of the game you're going to lose your arm here it's almost right of passage at this point by the time the new one grows back it's time to do another iron smelt as you get older and into your 30s you start to get more and more concerned and if that hair is gonna grow back as two out of three guys will experience male pattern baldness by the time they're 35 if that's something you're concerned about then you might be interested in today's sponsor keeps offers the only two fda approved hair loss treatments out there and has more five star reviews than any of its competitors getting and using it is really simple you just visit a doctor online and get it delivered straight to your home best way to prevent baldness is to combat it while you still have hair if you're ready to take action and prevent hair loss go to keeps.com htme or click the link in the description and receive 50 off your first order that's k-e-e-p-s dot com slash h-t-m-e some of the earliest evidence of the smelting of iron dates to the middle of the bronze age around 2000 bce in central anatolia but large-scale adoption of iron and the full transition into the iron age wouldn't occur until around 1200 bce in one of our last videos we provided one theory on the cause of the transition from bronze to iron with expensive wars in the mediterranean destabilizing major civilizations and disrupting the crucial trade route of tin and copper ore both metals especially tin are relatively rare on the earth and need to be traded over vast distances this made bronze expensive and dependent on trade the primary initial advantage of iron over bronze the field this transition was that his ore was much more plentiful a lit author lewis dartnell explained further when i got to talk to him last year at his lab in london lion is actually a much much more common metal than copper or tin you need for bronze so once we've worked out how to smelt iron out of iron ore we weren't so limited by the metal that we could use it wasn't just the elites and warriors it was basically society as a whole could then use iron tools because iron ore is much more widely distributed around the world something i talk about in my new book origins all of that iron that we have mined throughout human history comes from a particular quirky period in our planet's history when literally the entire planet rusted there was a lot of iron dissolved in the sea water and then something happened and that iron rusted and just dumped down onto the sea floor to build all of the iron ore deposits that we mined today and that particular event is called the great oxidation event oxygen started building up in the atmosphere which rusted the iron and was oxidized and then was deposited down as i know so it was very primitive uh cyanobacteria cells growing photosynthesizing in the sea that created that event before that the iron was just like in the water it was dissolved in the water but as soon as a little bit of oxygen started building up in the atmosphere and the sea water it oxidized the iron and oxidized iron cannot remain dissolved so it then precipitated down basically those then form the iron ore deposits around the world that we've been mining for thousands of years again it's because of iron's propensity to oxidize when exposed to air the native iron is incredibly rare unlike native copper which we previously were able to explore and mine in the upper peninsula of michigan the earliest use of iron however was from native metal iron but not from this planet why space sword several examples of early iron weapons and tools are found to be of meteoric in origin this offered too small of a source to make any significant impact the actual smelting of iron itself was a major roadblock that prevented any mass adoption of iron but it's a discovery that didn't come out of nowhere so let's trace the path we followed to be able to achieve this next milestone starting at the birth of humanity the first step was learning how to master stone tools allowing more complex tools to be made and eventually learning how to process raw clay into ceramics one of the most crucial discoveries made by humans then source the first form of metal used by humans native copper and learn the properties of metals and how to shape and use them next we learn the concept of smelting where you can turn plentiful ores into the raw metal using what was likely the first melted metal lead that required nothing more than a hot fire then we apply this concept to copper ore and tin ore to alloy into bronze using blow pipes to raise the heat of the fire to the necessary temperature then we also experimented with a draft kiln allowing the temperatures to be maximized even further with a cob tower allowing natural draft to form iron however requires an even higher temperature with raw ore smelting into iron at around 2300 degrees fahrenheit to achieve these temperatures we need one more technology unlocked bellows which pumps large quantities of air to heat charcoal maximizing our temperature to just high enough to smelt iron most often they are made using leather the technology we also recently unlocked the earliest evidence of bellows are pop ellos ceramic bowls they're covered with leather and can be pumped up and down to force air into the kiln lauren got our started by building the bottom shape of the bowl with cob on top of a mound of sand [Music] okay it broke that was like the saddest break god lit all right well what now oh that sucks [Music] then repeat for the second bellow and make the two year tubes that transfer the air to the bloomery to build the bloomery where the iron will be smelted i use leftover stocks of sorghum from the crops that i grew last year one thing i learned since our earlier cobb kiln is that we should be using a much higher quantity of grass in our cob this with the form made it a lot easier to build a really nice tall tower for the bloomery while those dry and before we get into iron production let's first finish off the bronze age by casting the last set of tools we'll need to help us transition into iron thanks to the help of grig the sword casting guy we were able to cast a variety of bronze hammers crucial tools for working any metal but especially iron all right see how we did cross your fingers nice yes indeed and look at that oh that looks great that's awesome yeah oh that's pretty then lastly and most importantly some tongs so crucial are tongs to a blacksmith that you often need a set of tongs to make another pair of tongs there's actually a jewish myth that one of the last things god created before resting on the seventh day was the first pair of tongs [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] is next we need some ore to smelt well sourcing copper for us was a few states drive away and tin ore an entire ocean away my home state of minnesota is the largest producer of iron ore in the united states during world war ii over 75 percent of the iron and the war effort came from minnesota but now most of this high grade ore has been exhausted previously i got to tour one of the oldest mines sudan iron mine where this original high grade ore was mined we are half a mile into the earth right now one of the deepest points of minnesota but now closed and only a historic landmark i wanted to find a source of iron i could collect and large supply fortunately iron ore is so plentiful here it's often just thrown away along the north shore i discovered black beach the unique black shores are actually the result of the iron industry in the area where iron ore tailings or low-grade waste were dumped while considered a waste product they still contained enough iron to be highly magnetic i collected several buckets of the tailings way back in 2017 before i had any plans for the reset and i tried to apply the modern mining process to these tailings to make something usable most mining today in minnesota is with the remaining low-grade iron ore which is pulverized and then magnetically separated to concentrate that ore and then formed into small pellets called taconite so with an increasing number of ball mills i slowly ground the ore down into a fine powder compared to other minerals i've similarly pulverized in the ball mills the iron ore was a whole lot slower to grind so i proceeded to let them run in the background for many months as they ground i separated the finer particles oh crap i had assumed i would need to use magnets to separate the final ore but letting the solution settle and dry it was obvious that the denser iron just settled as a layer on the bottom and can be easily separated by hand with the slow speed to grind them the yield was pretty low and needing a large supply of ore for our smelt we came across another discarded source just a few blocks away from us to help us supplement our supply all right so we're down by the railroad tracks here and we're looking for a good source of a large quantity of iron ore and we found that there's a bunch of these little taconite pellets so this is processed low-grade ore that's magnetically separated and processed into the equivalent of a high grade oil it's pretty rare to find these days this has just been falling out train cars for who knows how long it's just scattered everywhere she's going to collect a bunch of this this should give us a good supply of iron ore only had nice long nails [Music] a large supply of ore in hand we should be ready to get the smelt going i previously tried to do an iron smelt many years ago without great results as i mostly went in blind so hoping for a better results i talked to the youtube channel good and basic who have now successfully run their own iron smelt several times now originally hoped to do this as an in-person collaboration both the ongoing global pandemic had to put a pin in that we just did a video call instead flip the camera around too we are actually running a smelt right now oh there's the camera there you are so you're running looking to run a smelt soon in order to do the old-fashioned style of iron smelt that you're looking to do you need extremely high uh iron ore grade it needs to be upwards of 50 percent iron the furnace design that we've been using this is all mud the soil around here is actually very very clay rich it's literally mud pulled out from the ground uh mixed with water and then also mixed with grass and those plant fibers kind of act like rebar um they reinforce it and help hold it together it's actually much stronger than it looks you would probably need a truck to push this thing over the reason why we build it up to eight feet is to get a natural draft going probably the smallest we've ever done on is three feet or four feet the catch there is that um you know we use a combination of bellows and electric blowers to get the necessary airflow to get up to temperature i believe the reaction happens somewhere around the neighborhood of 2200 degrees fahrenheit that bright orange is is a good temperature indicator the hottest spot is just above this doorway so if i bump this loose you'll see some of the temperature of the hot spot the ratio that you put them in at is 50 50. so you want the same weight of charcoal and the same weight of ore going in every time you add a new layer you just layer them in at the top and then wait for it to burn down for us i'd say most of our smells have gone five-ish hours would you say five or six it's important to point that way to turn the whole thing into a barbecue it's important to have watermelon and bruntwurst and it turns out that there's actually a chemical reaction taking place the carbon in the fire and then also carbon monoxide is stripping oxygen atoms off of the ore you want to keep the carbon in close contact with the ore because it's not just supplying heat it's not just the fire it's actually the chemicals that are needed to strip the oxygen off of the ore thanks to the help of good and basic now have some great suggestions for my attempt be sure to check out their channel where they have been trying a variety of different iron smelting techniques as well as a bunch of other great content now ready to do our smelt we moved our partially dried bloomery and bellows to the side of the smelt first up we cut open the hole at the bottom the air to [Music] with a enter good paths [Music] and then attach the two gears to the pot bellows to direct the air into it we also then finished up the pot pillows by building them up a little taller and added a lift to the end of them where we'll tie the leather onto it once the leather is attached it creates a mostly airtight seal and by pulling and pushing the height up and down you can force a large supply of air into the bellows yay [Laughter] it works [Music] then everything was left to finish drying over the weekend [Music] whoa you turned olivia got the blue marine all built up dried it out and a little fire here to burn it out and finish it off and uh got bellows set up testing them out got them working so now we're going to load it up got about a pound of charcoal and a pound of ground ore just gonna do alternating layers of each fill it up most of the way light it up and get pumping [Music] does anybody want to try this all right [Music] good job [Music] burn down now and see what we got inside so we started around noon now almost eight should be enough time for it to uh have smelted assuming we got to the right temperature which seems like we were having a hard time getting the bloom out to actually tell a lot of it clogged kind of right along here on the ankle of the boot i can might have to break it out there's bloom well the stuff that came down here i think this leg looks more like glass this part i think is pretty solid iron the thing that's glowing here wow so we put in like three five four at least 40 pounds of iron ore in there all right so after the end of an eight hour day smelt we seem to have a pretty decent bloom and start breaking this guy up and see which iron we have at the end looks pretty promising it's got a fair amount of slag on the outside but i think once we get inside it seems to be pretty pretty solid chunk in there hopefully you can make something out of it move on into the iron age i made this it's pretty hot still at this point we've now officially made iron and brought ourselves into the iron age to actually start turning it into something the next steps are breaking it up and starting to work the iron inside the bloom right now it's still mixed with a fair amount of slag and by working this leg out and folding the iron into itself we'll eventually create a workable piece of iron but that'll be in an upcoming video with this new metal we have now officially entered the iron age and one of the last metals of antiquity so far before the reset and since we've now sourced six metals copper tin gold silver and iron at this period in antiquity there were seven metals that were known with mercury being the only one we haven't covered yet but how many more metals are there out there that we actually use day to day well lewis star now had an interesting closing thought on that so the other fascinating thing that i came across when i was researching writing origins is just how many metals we use nowadays so how many different kinds of metal do you think andy you've got like on your person right now like your metal zip maybe some coins some change in your pocket how many different kinds of metal do you think you you have on you right now well at least it doesn't like most people take on a 3-4 but actually if you've got a smartphone or indeed many other kinds of electronics or device in your pocket you've got probably near a 30 and the vast majority of those metals you probably won't even recognize the name of rare earth elements they're platinum groove metals are these kind of really exotic technological metals that we've only started using the last 20 years because of their electronic properties for making uh microchips a tiny but powerful magnet in the vibration motor or the touch sensitive screen all of these metals though the modern world depends on and normally knows where they come from and they're they are very hard to mine in particular places around the world that is that's what's starting to dictate uh the geopolitics of modern trade ten dozen rare earth elements that most people have never heard the name of i mean that that's the world we now live in wow thanks again to louis darnold be sure to check out either of his great books the knowledge and his latest one origins if you enjoyed this video be sure to subscribe and check out other content we have covering a wide variety of topics also if you've enjoyed these series consider supporting us on patreon we are largely a fan funded channel and depend on the support of our viewers in order to keep our series going thanks for watching

Channel: How To Make Everything

Views: 1,829,036

Keywords: HTME, DIY, Learn, History, Science, Technology, how to make everything, iron, iron from scratch, iron homemade, iron age, smelting, smelting metal, smelting iron, primitive, primitive technology, primitive iron making, make iron, how to make iron, smelt iron, brow tidy ox, iron ore, steel, ore, making iron, making steel from iron ore, furnace, survival, maker, metal smelting, blacksmith, forge, iron from rocks, metallurgy, iron from sand, rock to iron, iron from rock, dirt into iron

Id: AUn6LzakHsM

Length: 19min 35sec (1175 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 13 2020

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[u/Nightowl_1736]

Just watched it, cool