Over in the 1000 random people thread, @mixdenny posted
So, easier hypothetical, suppose you were sent back in a time machine to 10,000 years ago here on earth, how long would it take you to make a:
Nobody’s got nuts, so a crescent wrench is useless. Screw jack might be nice, but give me a place to stand and two logs laid crosswise so I can move the world. So being able to cut two logs is important. Stone axes aren’t that hard to make with practice, but a handsaw implies metal sheets, which involves furnaces and rolling mills and/or incredibly skilled blacksmiths - so I’d say two or three generations of dedicated craftsman being trained and guided by the failing memories of an aged time traveler and his descendants.
Nailed it. (Heh).
Handsaw is 2 generations minimum. With magical knowledge transfer from our time traveler to the grandkids.
And 2 generations more to the screwjack and 2 more again to the still useless Crescent wrench.
Actually, in Greek mythology Perdix (or Attalus in other accounts) , the nephew of Daedalus, the legendary inventor, is credited with coming up with the handsaw using the spine of a fish.
A lot of inventions were inspired by natural objects, or even use them. Stephen Jay Gould in one of his columns remarked with delight that one source from (I think) 18th century Britain observed that the literal skin of sharks was used as natural sandpaper.
As noted, there was no pressing need for a crescent wrench until you had nuts to tighten. I’d add that a metal screw jack is pretty specialized, too – if you had to raise a heavy weight you’d be better to be like Archimedes and use a long lever.
Screws depend utterly on fine tolerances and great lubrication.
Trivial in 1910, hard in 1810, and impossible in 1710.
Harking back to the OP: 10,000 years ago these things were 9,700+ years in the future. IOW, 97+% of the way to the present.
You may as well ask about pterodactyls learning to read.
Those here might be interested in this article"
A pencil seems like a simple enough object: it’s a piece of wood with a length of graphite “lead” in the middle of it and an eraser made of a rubber-like compound attached to the back with a metal (brass?) ferule. The finished product is usually covered in yellow paint (lacquer) and has some black text on it to identify its type.
But could you make one yourself? Probably not. Could anyone alive make one entirely by themselves? Where would you get the wood? How would you cut and shape it? How would you build the tools to do cut and shape it? Where would you get the graphite and how would you process it? Same for the ferrule and eraser. And the paint. And the ink to label it. You get the idea.
Kinda sums it up. To make these tools is a lot more than one skill. It takes many with many different skills to do all the bits and someone to see a way to assemble it all because it is what they need for some other task in the Big Plan..
More difficult than it would seem.
10,000 years ago was still the Stone Age, IIRC, and it wasn’t until about 5,000 years ago (?) that we hit the Bronze Age, and it’s going to take several hundred years to get to point of being able to make the materials necessary to start the process.
So, taking the estimate of two generations, then it would take 5,000 years plus 200 years and two generations.
As a time traveler, I would be useless. (As far as I know, hacksaws are planted as sprouts in hacksaw farms in rural China then brought to the market after they mature.)
However, there are YouTuber who may be able to knock a couple thousand years off. Those guys seem to know how to smelt metals and such using primitive tools.
Of course, they would have to be able to obtain tin, which appears to be the bottleneck.
I don’t know if they could order it online or if they would first have to set up a trade network or perhaps first establish a large enough civilization to allow trade.
So, first find one of these YouTubers, give them a few years to prepare; then send them back to a spot that has both copper and tin and natives that won’t kill the person.
If you insist on steel, then just add a couple thousand more years.
Pencil? Hah!
Here’s a guy who built an entire TOASTER from scratch:
To tell the truth, I think it would be pretty easy to build a pencil from scratch. You’d need to make your woodworking tools from scratch – say some edged tools by flaking and knapping flint. Then cut out your wood – once you’ve made your blades (the really hard part, I admit) you can cut off and split a section from a branch.
Then all you need is to find some rock that will work as your medium. If you’re lucky you’ll find graphite or some material that will leave a smudge. I won’t insist that it be round. If you’re really determined you might find yourself a workable ore, like copper or lead and cast a long thin ingot. That won’t be easy, but it’s doable.
I won’t insist on an eraser, or yellow lacquer.
Here’s a discussion on the topic:
But there’s the problem with what the question really is. If all you want to do is make a mark on something grab a piece of charcoal from last night’s fire and have at it.
We can be reductionist on lots of things. Making a modern pencil is surprisingly difficult if you tried 10,000 years ago. Yet they cost pennies each to make today.
Would it even be possible?
I do not think so.
I think the point is it seems such a simple thing. Costs pennies to make today. Yet, it is not easy.
I think that’s being a little too dismissive. I picked 10,000 years specifically because it was before metals were being used by mankind. Being the Dope, I was trying to head off things like, ‘go to nearest village and barter for metal’.
And the part about the crescent wrench wasn’t to turn bolts, it was about reaching a level of technology.
If you studied up about mining, smelting, etc you should have a very good running start at it. Advances in metalurgia was slow the first time around because unknown discoveries had to be stumbled upon. But if you had foreknowledge the journey would be much shorter.
At least to my way of thinking.
Which is the point I made above.
And, very few modern people could actually do this, even with studying from books.
Making bronze involved involves obtaining temperatures hotter than wood fires, so you need to make charcoal. You probably need a kiln to keep the heat in and you need billows. The person would have to know how to do all this.
You have to know where the ore is and how to extract it. You are going to be SOL if you aren’t in an area with both tin and copper.
As I said, there are people who do this sort of thing and they may only need to learn some more. Maybe a few who could do it all now.
Making a bronze saw for cutting wood would be possible. Hacksaws are finer and require more skill to make, and I have no idea if bronze would work.
The screw press was being used by the Romans in the first century AD for olive oil production.
Wikipedia says screws were used in Mesopotamia before 600 BC.
Wooden screws (screws made from wood) are a world of difference than metal screws, which @LSLGuy is talking about.
If your problem is that you could make a functional pencil, but noit a good-looking one, then the problem was mis-stated, esecially in that article. It turns out that practically everyone knows how to make a pencil – but that it’s an awful lot of work to produce a modern polished item from scratch, which I don’t think anyone would argue with. It’s infinitely easier if yo have even a priitive industrial bbase to start from (that knife blade again). It doesn’t even need to be that “modern” – Leonardo da Vinci made his own pencils from what was available to him.
Thank you.
But yes, I wasn’t very clear there. So good pimp and good save.
Whatever the definition of “pencil” is, I suspect it falls between “chunk of charcoal” and “painted yellow with eraser”. You can buy plenty of plain wooden pencils without erasers that are very identifiable pencils. Adding an eraser, metal ferrule, paint, etc increases the complexity but I wouldn’t say it makes it more of a pencil unless we’re specifying “No. 2 office pencil” or similar. I’d say “slender wooden rod containing a marking material intended to be held in the hand for writing or drawing” hits the mark well enough. (Looking at dictionary definitions after the fact bears this out)
Meanwhile, you need to do the things necessary to keep yourself alive; finding food, clothing and housing. Meanwhile everyone else in the village is wondering what the crazy person is up to.
People were hand filing metal screws centuries before that. Mid 1700s was when screw cutting lathes to automate the process started to be built, but painstaking work with a file (easy to make once you have metal) can be and was done. (Screws were standard hardware in guns long before 1710).
There are hobbyists who smelt metal from ore, someone like that could bootstrap iron production and probably knows enough blacksmithing to go from iron to steel. Knowing what kind of rocks to heat and how hot to get them is the tricky part, easier to go straight to iron and skip copper and bronze (for which the ore is more rare).
Charcoal and bellows are easy, have done both by hand. Admittedly with steel tools and purchased leather. But I have brain tanned leather, done some (very little) stone tool wood working.
If I spend 6-12 months before the trip learning how to recognize iron ore and somebody else kept me fed and sheltered (a big ask) I think I could have a hacksaw within a year or two and screw/nut within a few years of that. As long as there was a good source of ore near wherever the time machine dropped me off.