You wouldn't need coal. If you can make a fire, charcoal is easily produced from wood.
Making forges and blast furnaces isn't too difficult. To build one, pile up dirt or clay walls to form a bathtub like structure. Make sure you have holes at the base so air from your bellows can make it though. Construct a fire in the tub and pile on alternating layers of charcoal and iron ore. Keep pumping on the bellows for the next few days until the the charcoal burns up. Your iron ore should now have turned into pieces of high carbon steel, perfect for making any tool from ploughs to blades.
You might be able to find iron ore as dark colored sand in stream beds. I don't know where you would find copper or zinc.
Once you have steel, everything follows. If society knows about existence of a technology, reproducing it shouldn't be difficult. The hardest part about progress is inventing brand new things.
If you are interested in learning how to make machine tools from very simple materials, look up the Gingery series on making a complete metalshop from scrap:
I've built the gingery furnace, an poured aluminum twice. It's hot and scary. I've made arrowheads out of old glass bottles using a broken antler.
I think you're underestimating how spectacularly hard it is to make anything without tools. Go into the woods naked, and show me how to make a bellows.
I'm pretty sure i could do it, if i could keep my glasses, and my shoes and a knife and a bunch of food. I think i could run down a deer, if all the other people i'd be in competition with didn't kill me after i was 10 miles into the run.
I don't think steel matters very much. Sanitation, clean water, lots of food.
"If society knows about existence of a technology, reproducing it shouldn't be difficult. The hardest part about progress is inventing brand new things."
I disagree. Once upon a time, people drove cars on the moon. Should be a n easy thing to reproduce eh? heck, we've got 40 years of technology on them. The hardest part about progress is convincing other people to do what you want them to do.
The gingery books are FANTASTIC. i'd highly recommend them to ... everyone.
I guess I meant that coming up with new ideas is hard. Invention is hard.
In the hypothetical case that everything is gone tomorrow, the ideas still exist. All we need to do is implement them.
I'll explain it in CS terms. What would happen if all copies of the quicksort algorithm were destroyed overnight? Someone would spend a few hours and write another one because he/she knows about the algorithm. It would take about an hour.
Consider the further case that no one on earth knew that the quicksort algorithm even existed. How long would it take to be duplicated? Months? Years?
How did someone get the idea to smelt metal? It took thousands of years. Now that we know that smelting exists, all that is left is finding a way to do it. Many people in modern society will have the knowledge to rebuild technology. I would argue that expanding technology is much harder than rebuilding technology.
As to pouring molten metal, sure it is scary at first, just like driving a car. After much practice, like most things, it ceases being scary.
> I'll explain it in CS terms. What would happen if all copies of the quicksort algorithm were destroyed overnight? Someone would spend a few hours and write another one because he/she knows about the algorithm. It would take about an hour.
That's like saying you just woke up in a Blacksmith's shop, with the anvil and fire ready. That's the last mile, which isn't the hard part. Compare it to destroying all traces of CPUs and computer hardware/software. Okay, now go fabricate a processor.
What I mean to say is that once you know about an invention, reproducing it is much less difficult than actually inventing it. Do you disagree?
In high school, I was obsessed with metalworking and built several forges. I played around with melting metal and forging blades. I created charcoal. I read everything I could get my hands on about blacksmithing. I read a lot of fiction books about rebuilding post-apocalyptic societies.
I understand where you are going. If we lost it all tomorrow, it would be quite hard to reproduce tools, machinery, high precision equipment, etc. to get back to where we are. For new inventions, you need both to do all the building of the machinery that builds that machine that will build the new invention, but you also need the novel new idea that is the invention to be made. 2 hard (and quite different) problems to solve, instead of just the first (which, as mentioned, is ridiculously hard in and of itself).
i'm also interested in how-to-make-stuff-from-chemistry series (candle, soap, pulp, paper, ink, oil, nylon, plastic, etc) preferrably from the same author(s)
not necessarily from scratch (burn tree to get ash etc)
You wouldn't need coal. If you can make a fire, charcoal is easily produced from wood.
Making forges and blast furnaces isn't too difficult. To build one, pile up dirt or clay walls to form a bathtub like structure. Make sure you have holes at the base so air from your bellows can make it though. Construct a fire in the tub and pile on alternating layers of charcoal and iron ore. Keep pumping on the bellows for the next few days until the the charcoal burns up. Your iron ore should now have turned into pieces of high carbon steel, perfect for making any tool from ploughs to blades.
You might be able to find iron ore as dark colored sand in stream beds. I don't know where you would find copper or zinc.
Once you have steel, everything follows. If society knows about existence of a technology, reproducing it shouldn't be difficult. The hardest part about progress is inventing brand new things.
If you are interested in learning how to make machine tools from very simple materials, look up the Gingery series on making a complete metalshop from scrap:
http://www.lindsaybks.com/dgjp/djgbk/series/index.html