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Take that Western Civilization
I actually wrote this up when I watched the episode last week, but I wanted to try and get all the names and dates straight, so a little bit late, but here's some more ancient cool stuff. I doubt it would surprise anyone who reads this that I am all about the Asian history, and the other night they covered, ancient Chinese tech on Without getting into a rant about how little people pay attention to how advanced early Asia was... I can just say that I'm glad that this series has devoted a few episodes to Chinese tech.
We start with a text that talks about seismographs from 2000 years ago. Zhang Heng was an inventor on the same scale as Archimedes. The seismograph was a huge bronze vessel with nine dragons. Each dragon held a small ball gingerly in its mouth. If an earthquake struck, an inverted pendulum inside the jar would fall in one direction or another. This would cause the ball to drop from one of the dragons into the mouth of a frog below. Looking at this people could tell which direction an earthquake came from and go to help the victims.
There were also ancient drilling machines called 'heaven carts' to dig for oil. Some of these still exist today. It's built from bamboo with men stepping back and forth on a...ok, I've already lost the thread of this. But they have all kinds of drill bits for different kinds of rock. Using these they could get at salt, gas and oil.
According to the show, the Song Dynasty (960 to 1279 CE) was the peak of Chinese ingenuity. An example of this is the Cast Iron Pagoda in the Shantung province. To produce iron, you have to keep a lot of iron at a liquid state for a long time. One way to raise temperature is to provide air. Today we use electrical air pumps to heat furnaces. But in the Song Dynasty they had automated bellows. It doesn't have to be high pressure; it just has to be a lot of air. They modified a water wheel with a crank and the crank would power the bellows. it works al lot like a piston. This means that they had continuous automated air power to heat their iron.
One really cool piece of tech is the Range Finder Chariot. It's a cart with a big drum in the center, and two drummer figurines. The cart would be pulled along with an army, and at every 500 feet the drummer would hit the drum. This is a lot like the odometer from the water clock episode. But instead of dropping a ball for a mile marker, it beat a drum. The gear system is exactly the same as the inside of a motorcycle according to the show. They would use the Range Finder to plan the march of an army.
China also had huge scale factories. Archeologists have recently found a mechanized trip hammer (?), they believe is
2000 years old. This also uses a waterwheel that triggered a series of hammers with lugs along the length. As it turned it would release the hammers that had 100 pounds of force. This could be used to crush rock, or hammer metal. Not only does it help to make more things, it helps to make larger things.
Another example is a huge grain mill. The grain is crushed under the weight of the millstones, which were turned by a huge gear system, which was also powered by water. The angled gears are so complicated that it could drive nine millstones. This kind of technology wasn't seen in the West for another thousand years.
Jade has always been important in China. It's an extremely hard stone, and yet there are very early very detailed carvings in China dating back thousands of years. For instace jade rings with precision spirals, could only have been made with a machine. They invented a compound machine that could cut the lines exactly evenly and perfectly each time. It would have to rotate the disc and draw a line across it at the same time. The device they've recreated is extremely cool and I'm sure I won't be able to find a picture of it. Well whaddaya know? Thank you Harvard!
And now we move on to the Terracotta army! I am still so upset that I made it all the way to Xian and was too sick to actually go to the tomb museum. The first emperor Quin Shi Huang had this tomb created in 246 BCE, and it's just phenomenal. There are over 8000 statues. And each soldier was armed with a bronze weapon. And both the weapons and the warriors were mass produced. And after 2000 years, the soldier's weapons are still bright and shiny. They're actually all coated in chromium, not found in the west until the 1930's. (We send out parts to get chromium plated where I work actually )
One of the most incredible finds is the emperor's chariot made of bronze. The chariots have 3642 separate components, cast before assembly. And everything matches. They used a cast welding to join all the pieces together. To cast weld iron is very difficult and causes flaking. You have to have very careful control over the heat. It's the best example of bronze work in the entire world.
And of course, we have the warriors themselves. They're mass produced themselves. There were 700,000 people working for over 10 years at least on the tomb. There's a company in China now that's trying to recreate the warriors using the clay roll production system available at the time. The basic warrior is built kind of like a coil pot, and takes 300 pounds of clay. So far they haven't found any kilns nearby, but there's a lot to still be excavated. (They still haven't even opened the tomb itself yet...which may be a good thing due to the lake of mercury that's rumored to be there.)
We move on to the Cosmic Engine which sounds a little like the Antiktheran mechanism, built by Su Sung, another great inventor. This was also water powered, built in 1082, and so complicated that some believe it couldn't exist. It would have calculated hour, day, month, and season. But the thing that really sets it apart is that it shows how the earth and heavens moved through space.
Su Sung wrote all of the instructions for his invention in a book, through which we are able to recreate the Cosmic Engine. The cosmic engine was five stories tall, and each floor had a window through which you could see mannequins holding tablets showing the hour. Inside the building there as a globe that was also powered by the same mechanism, showing the heavens.
We start with a text that talks about seismographs from 2000 years ago. Zhang Heng was an inventor on the same scale as Archimedes. The seismograph was a huge bronze vessel with nine dragons. Each dragon held a small ball gingerly in its mouth. If an earthquake struck, an inverted pendulum inside the jar would fall in one direction or another. This would cause the ball to drop from one of the dragons into the mouth of a frog below. Looking at this people could tell which direction an earthquake came from and go to help the victims.
There were also ancient drilling machines called 'heaven carts' to dig for oil. Some of these still exist today. It's built from bamboo with men stepping back and forth on a...ok, I've already lost the thread of this. But they have all kinds of drill bits for different kinds of rock. Using these they could get at salt, gas and oil.
According to the show, the Song Dynasty (960 to 1279 CE) was the peak of Chinese ingenuity. An example of this is the Cast Iron Pagoda in the Shantung province. To produce iron, you have to keep a lot of iron at a liquid state for a long time. One way to raise temperature is to provide air. Today we use electrical air pumps to heat furnaces. But in the Song Dynasty they had automated bellows. It doesn't have to be high pressure; it just has to be a lot of air. They modified a water wheel with a crank and the crank would power the bellows. it works al lot like a piston. This means that they had continuous automated air power to heat their iron.
One really cool piece of tech is the Range Finder Chariot. It's a cart with a big drum in the center, and two drummer figurines. The cart would be pulled along with an army, and at every 500 feet the drummer would hit the drum. This is a lot like the odometer from the water clock episode. But instead of dropping a ball for a mile marker, it beat a drum. The gear system is exactly the same as the inside of a motorcycle according to the show. They would use the Range Finder to plan the march of an army.
China also had huge scale factories. Archeologists have recently found a mechanized trip hammer (?), they believe is
2000 years old. This also uses a waterwheel that triggered a series of hammers with lugs along the length. As it turned it would release the hammers that had 100 pounds of force. This could be used to crush rock, or hammer metal. Not only does it help to make more things, it helps to make larger things.
Another example is a huge grain mill. The grain is crushed under the weight of the millstones, which were turned by a huge gear system, which was also powered by water. The angled gears are so complicated that it could drive nine millstones. This kind of technology wasn't seen in the West for another thousand years.
Jade has always been important in China. It's an extremely hard stone, and yet there are very early very detailed carvings in China dating back thousands of years. For instace jade rings with precision spirals, could only have been made with a machine. They invented a compound machine that could cut the lines exactly evenly and perfectly each time. It would have to rotate the disc and draw a line across it at the same time. The device they've recreated is extremely cool and I'm sure I won't be able to find a picture of it. Well whaddaya know? Thank you Harvard!
And now we move on to the Terracotta army! I am still so upset that I made it all the way to Xian and was too sick to actually go to the tomb museum. The first emperor Quin Shi Huang had this tomb created in 246 BCE, and it's just phenomenal. There are over 8000 statues. And each soldier was armed with a bronze weapon. And both the weapons and the warriors were mass produced. And after 2000 years, the soldier's weapons are still bright and shiny. They're actually all coated in chromium, not found in the west until the 1930's. (We send out parts to get chromium plated where I work actually )
One of the most incredible finds is the emperor's chariot made of bronze. The chariots have 3642 separate components, cast before assembly. And everything matches. They used a cast welding to join all the pieces together. To cast weld iron is very difficult and causes flaking. You have to have very careful control over the heat. It's the best example of bronze work in the entire world.
And of course, we have the warriors themselves. They're mass produced themselves. There were 700,000 people working for over 10 years at least on the tomb. There's a company in China now that's trying to recreate the warriors using the clay roll production system available at the time. The basic warrior is built kind of like a coil pot, and takes 300 pounds of clay. So far they haven't found any kilns nearby, but there's a lot to still be excavated. (They still haven't even opened the tomb itself yet...which may be a good thing due to the lake of mercury that's rumored to be there.)
We move on to the Cosmic Engine which sounds a little like the Antiktheran mechanism, built by Su Sung, another great inventor. This was also water powered, built in 1082, and so complicated that some believe it couldn't exist. It would have calculated hour, day, month, and season. But the thing that really sets it apart is that it shows how the earth and heavens moved through space.
Su Sung wrote all of the instructions for his invention in a book, through which we are able to recreate the Cosmic Engine. The cosmic engine was five stories tall, and each floor had a window through which you could see mannequins holding tablets showing the hour. Inside the building there as a globe that was also powered by the same mechanism, showing the heavens.