 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 age, 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 a question we're exploring. Each week I try to take that 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. 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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 lead author, Louis D'Artagnan explained further when I got to talk to him last year at his lab in London. Iron is actually a much, much more common metal than copper or tin that you need for bronze. So once we'd 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 was much more widely distributed around the world. Something they 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 seawater and then something happened and that iron rusted and just dumped down onto the seafloor to build all of the iron ore deposits that we mine today. And that particular event is called the Great Oxidation Event. Oxidation started building up in the atmosphere, which rusted the iron, was oxidized and then was deposited down as iron ore. So it was very primitive cyanobacteria cells growing, photosynthesizing in the sea that created that event. So 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 seawater it oxidized the iron and oxidized iron cannot remain dissolved so it then precipitated down. 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. Several examples of early iron weapons and tools are found to be of meteoric origin. But 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 smelted metal, lead, that required nothing more than a hot fire. Then we apply this concept to copper ore and tin ore, to alloy and to bronze, using blowpipes 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 that allows a natural draft to form. Iron, however, requires an even higher temperature, with raw ore smelting into iron at around 2,300 degrees Fahrenheit. To achieve these temperatures, we need one more technology unlocked, bellows, which pumps large quantities of air to keep charcoal maximizing our temperature to just high enough to smelt iron. Most often they are made using leather, a technology we also recently unlocked. The earliest evidence of bellows are pop bellows. Ceramic bowls, they're covered with leather and can be pumped up and down to force air into the kiln. Boren got our started by building the bottom shape of the bowl with cob on top of a mound of sand. Oh, I don't know. It broke. That was like the saddest break. Then repeat for the second bellow, and make the two air tubes that transfer the air to the bloomery. To build the bloomery where the iron will be smelted, I used leftover stops of sorghum from the crops that I grew last year. One thing I learned since our earlier cob 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. Watch out. Look at that. 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. Next, we need some ore to smelt. While 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% of the iron in 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. But now, closed and only in historic landmark, I wanted to find a source of iron that could collect in 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 results of the iron industry in the area, where iron ore tailings or low grade waste were dumped. While considered a waste product, they still contain enough iron to be highly magnetic. I collected several buckets of the tailings way back in 2017, before I had any plans for the research, 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 tachanite. So with an increasing number of ballmills, I slowly ground the ore down into a fine powder. Compared to other minerals I've similarly pulverized in the ballmills, 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 was obvious that the denser iron just settled as a layer on the bottom and could 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. Alright, so we're down by the railroad tracks here, and we've been looking for a good source of a large quantity of iron ore, and we found that there's much of these little tachanite pellets. So this is processed low grade ore that's magnetically separated and processed into as equivalent of a high grade ore. It's pretty rare to find these days. This has just been falling out of train cars for who knows how long, and it's just scattered everywhere. We're just going to collect a bunch of this, so this should give us a good supply of iron ore. Only had nice long nails. 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 better results, I talked with the YouTube channel Good and Basic, who have now successfully run their own iron smelts several times now. Originally hoped to do this as an in-person collaboration for the ongoing global pandemic, had to put a pin in that, and 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 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 iron ore grade. It needs to be upwards of 50% 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, mixed with water, and then also mixed with grass. And those plant fibers kind of act like rebar. 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, you know, we use a combination of bellows and electric blowers to get the necessary airflow to get it up to the temperature. I believe the reaction happens somewhere around the neighborhood of 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit. That bright orange 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 spells have gone five-ish hours, would you say? Five or six. It's important, if you point that way, to turn the whole thing into a barbecue, it's important to have watermelon and brunt worst. 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 of the air to enter. This would be a pass. And then attach the two ears to the pot bellows to drip the air into it. We also then finished up the pot bellows by building them up a little taller and added a lip 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 enforce a large supply of air into the bellows. It works! Then everything was left to finish drying over the weekend. Got the bloomery all built up, dried it out, and lit a little fire here to burn it out and finish it off. And got the 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 going to do alternating layers of each, fill it up most of the way, light it up, and get pumping. Does anybody want to try this? Burn down now and see what we got inside. So we started around noon, now almost eight. Should be enough time for it to 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. Like it might have to break it out. There's the bloom. A lot of the stuff that came down here, I think it's slag, it's more like glass. For this part, I think it's pretty solid iron. The thing that's glowing here. Wow! So we put in like 35, at least 40 pounds of iron ore in there. All right, so after the end of an eight-hour day's smelt, we seem to have a pretty decent bloom. 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 solid chunk in there. Hopefully we 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 slag 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 no one, 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? We'll start now with 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 on your person right now, like your metal zip, maybe some coins and change in your pocket. How many different kinds of metal do you think you have on you right now? Probably at least a dozen. Like most people would say kind of three, four, 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 recognise the name of. Rare earth elements, they're platinum-groove metals, they're these kind of really exotic technological metals that we've only started using in the last 20 years because of their electronic properties for making microchips, the tiny but powerful magnet in the vibration motor or the top sensitive screen. All of these metals that the modern world depends on and already knows where they come from and they are very hard to mine in particular places around the world. So that's what's starting to dictate the geopolitics of modern trade. 10, a dozen rare earth elements that most people have never heard the name of. I mean, that's the world we're now living. Thanks again to Louis Dardanall. Be sure to check out either of his great books, The Knowledge, and his latest one, Origins.